  Soon after the discovery of the first high temperature superconductor by
Georg Bednorz and Alex Mueller in 1986 the late Sir Nevill Mott answering his
own question "Is there an explanation?" [Nature v 327 (1987) 185] expressed a
view that the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of small bipolarons, predicted
by us in 1981, could be the one. Several authors then contemplated BEC of real
space tightly bound pairs, but with a purely electronic mechanism of pairing
rather than with the electron-phonon interaction (EPI). However, a number of
other researchers criticized the bipolaron (or any real-space pairing) scenario
as incompatible with some angle-resolved photoemission spectra (ARPES), with
experimentally determined effective masses of carriers and unconventional
symmetry of the superconducting order parameter in cuprates. Since then the
controversial issue of whether the electron-phonon interaction (EPI) is crucial
for high-temperature superconductivity or weak and inessential has been one of
the most challenging problems of contemporary condensed matter physics. Here I
outline some developments in the bipolaron theory suggesting that the true
origin of high-temperature superconductivity is found in a proper combination
of strong electron-electron correlations with a significant finite-range
(Froehlich) EPI, and that the theory is fully compatible with the key
experiments.
