Twenty years of talking past each other: The theory of high Tc

In 1988, the outline of an essentially correct theory of the high Tc cuprates was published by two groups, Zhang et al. in Zurich and Kotliar et al. in the US, based on earlier suggestions. The rather startling experimental predictions:1.that the gap would be real d-wave with nodes;2.that the gap would greatly increase with underdoping;3.that Tc would exhibit a dome terminating linearly around x = 30%;were so bizarre that these papers gathered little attention from others, including myself and at least 8 other Nobel prize-winners, and as they came to be substantiated one by one nobody much noticed that fact until the method was revived a dozen years later by Paramekanti et al. and Sorella et al. I will discuss some recent achievements and generalizations of these methods.