Scientific contests, like
footraces, are often won for the wrong reasons. The fight over the theory
of superconductivity was one of the longest and bitterest in the history
of science, primarily because the cental issue was conceptual. The theory
was eventually accepted on the basis of the 'spectroscopic' detail it accounted
for---the heat capacity, the heat transport coefficient, the energy gap,
the relationship of this gap to the superconducting transition temperature.
. .thus they say that superconductivity is an instability of the electron
sea. They say that the attractive force between electrons causing this to
happen is mediated by atomic motion. They say that the superconducting state
has an energy gap related in a simple way to the transition temperature.
And so forth and so forth. . .in fact none of these are essential. . .the
Meissner and the Josephson effects are what actually justify the soul of
the theory, not all those details.