An interpreter gets distracted by every rustle in the hall, and a one-hour meeting stretches into two. That is roughly how disorder in a crystal slows down electrons: tiny inhomogeneities make them zigzag, and resistance goes up.
In a PdTe crystal cooled to 5 kelvin (about minus 268 degrees Celsius), a magnetic field was switched on. The resistance rose by 112%. At first it grew as the square of the field, but after 2-3 tesla it started to increase along a straight line. Such behavior is often taken as a sign of exotic physics, but here everything turned out to be simpler.
The same disorder also explained another effect: when the field was rotated in the crystal plane, a transverse voltage appeared. It grew more slowly than expected for the exotic explanation and matched exactly the classical picture, where electrons scatter differently depending on the field direction.
An interpreter who gets distracted by rustles still manages to interpret, just more slowly. So does PdTe: the unusual behavior turned out to be a consequence of ordinary disorder, not topology.
The magnetic field required to reach the quantum limit in PdTe is estimated at 2.49 kilotesla, which is hundreds of times stronger than the field of the most powerful steady-state magnet in the world.