Superconductors hold the promise for a more stable and efficient electrical grid, but new isotropic, high-temperature superconductors are needed in order to reduce cable manufacturing costs. The effort to understand high-temperature superconductivity, especially in the layered cuprates, provides guidance to the search for new superconductors. Neutron scattering has long provided an important probe of the collective excitations that are involved in the pairing mechanism. For the cuprates, neutron and x-ray diffraction techniques also provide information on competing types of order, such as charge and spin stripes, that appear to be closely connected to the superconductivity. Recently, inelastic x-ray scattering has become competitive for studying phonons and may soon provide valuable information on electronic excitations. Examples of how these techniques contribute to our understanding of superconductivity are presented
