It's a very interesting profile/historical review of this great scientist and his work, but if you were curious about the actual headline, the lede was buried almost at the end.
I wonder if someday we will find a way to "separate" trash on atomar level (i.e. put arbitrary stuff in on one side, get raw atoms on the other side)...
At the moment recycling technology can already grind stuff into small particles and float it in salts of different densities to separate it. That doesn't go to atomic level of course...
I think it's a fundamental outcome of the laws of entropy that separating always takes a lot more energy than mixing, so if you've mixed it, you've lost the game already.
that's an excellent idea.
Right now Nissan will replace the battery in your Leaf. But they _require_ the old one since its value is built into the cost of the replacement.
One probably can't get a resersible process, but just adding up the energy to break all the trash can be wrong by several orders of magnitude.
7% extra efficiency per year means electric cars will have twice the capacity in 10 years...and then double up again in 10 more years...and so on. That's a far greater rate of improvement than for gasoline-powered cars, even if we're impatient and we want our $10,000 500 mile on a charge EVs now.
> But the path he has chosen involves one of the toughest problems in battery science, which is how to make an anode out of pure lithium or sodium metal. If it can be done, the resulting battery would have 60% more energy than current lithium-ion cells.
I don't know how "real" its technology is, but SolidEnergy promises a 50 percent increase in energy density using an "ultra-thin metal anode". The company promises commercialization for phones in 2016 and for EVs in 2017.
He's got an amazing track record.
> but SolidEnergy promises a 50 percent increase in energy density using an "ultra-thin metal anode". The company promises commercialization for phones in 2016 and for EVs in 2017.
The problem with battery tech is that it is a bit like solar: every year there are 10's of announcements like that, usually not from parties that have had such breakthroughs in the past. As is noted in the article since better battery tech is such an absolutely incredible breakthrough there is no shortage of those that would use this to their benefit absent any actual science.
So for battery and solar breakthroughs my personal hurdle is 'show me', until then I will happily wait by the sidelines (not as if it would matter in anyway if I didn't). But I'll give this particular scientist a break and I'll say that I will be much less surprised if he's going to the the one to nail the next substantial increase in battery efficiency. I hope the result will be as safe to use as Li-Ion or LiPo. We're getting to the point where chemistry of explosives and chemistry of batteries is quite comparable and that's one reason why this is such a hard problem. Making a better stable battery is the hard challenge. And LiPo is pushing it there, those are not batteries I'd want on my person or in a spot where they can cause a lot of damage when they go.
An example of the dangers of extrapolating.
CPU speeds kept going up - until they didn't.
Battery tech is not going to keep going up 7% each year. Although perhaps his 60% improvement will show exactly at the right time to effectively be 7% better than the previous year.
What people often do to hide this fact is talk about energy density, Wh/L, where growth can continue for longer, at the expense of making batteries heavier.
I get that he is angry, but I worry that his anger may rob us of what he could do.
Yes we would. All these things existed without Li-ion. The power/space budget would be more constrained but it was perfectly achievable. What wouldn't work is senselessly burning cycles running managed code in a VM with heaps of battery sucking DRAM. People today have no concept of how much computing power is wasted as excess heat because of modern software development practices.
Or of how many new ideas are created because generous power/space ratios give us the luxury to develop quickly using abstractions higher than highly-optimized references and pointers. You can take a hit on optimal energy efficiency if it results in a larger ecosystem with more possibilities.
The real challenge is to get both.
We were lead down a collective rabbit hole by rabid VM and JIT enthusiasts. Notice the absence of those extolling the benefits of JIT compilation today. People used to claim that at some point Java would consistently outperform C due to the greater number of optimisations available to a JIT compiler. They've all become silent because it's quite obviously a load of baloney.
The irony is that we had the answer all the time, but nobody wanted to believe it.
Back in the day, languages like Haskell, early C++, early Objective-C and Scheme compiled to C. Compiling to C was great! No need to spend man-centuries building an optimising cross-compiler to compete with GCC (and fail), no need to screw around with GIMPLE.
In 2015, compiling to a mid-level language is back in style. Except we don't call it C, we call it LLVM-IR. If you squint it's the exact same thing we were doing 15+ years ago.
LLVM-based languages that look like Rust and Swift will eventually dominate, because they are universal. You can use Rust for the lowest level embedded programming. You can use Swift for the highest level architecture astronautics.
What is depressing is that we could have built them 15 years ago but we were too busy fannying around with a dead-end technology.
So they would never have been tablets or laptops. They would have stayed as e-readers and PDAs and so forth.
I like the fact that Kindles have e-ink and are single purpose. When I read on a backlit screen, it tires my eyes and its easy to get distracted from your book with SMS etc. E-ink is perfect for me, for distraction-free reading.
At 29, I'm (probably prematurely) worried about cognitive decline. I only started challenging really myself last year.
(2.) You may look up a chart that plots dementia against age. Prevalence of dementia increases at an accelerating rate as you get older.
- When people get older (say around 30-40), they realize that they can no longer memorize stuff quite as good as in their twenties
- They start to write notes a lot more in order to make sure they don't forget stuff
- Now they get even worse at memorizing stuff, because they challenge their memory a lot less
Do you do a lot with your mind during the day? Take up wood working, knitting, or sewing as a hobby. Work with your hands.
Do a lot with your hands during the day? Do something that engages your mind more. Take up art, writing, etc.
Take dance lessons. If you are not a dancer already, learning to dance and then doing it has a lot of health benefits, social benefits (see below) and makes your mind work in different ways.
I highly recommend trying square dancing (as corny as it may sound). Square dancing is very intricate and requires careful attention to called queues in order to maintain a steady stream of dance transitions. It is the fastest way to get into "flow" that I have ever experienced and have heard of number of other writers and technical types that rely on flow express the same sentiment.
Learn, teach, and play more board games. Modern board games have a vast array of different mechanics and strategies in them offering lots of different problem spaces for your brain to tackle. There is also a good social aspect to them that is inter-generational (we have board game nights with ten year old kids regularly playing with retirees) and some decline in cognitive ability is linked to the lack of social engagement people experience as they age.
There is no University of Austin, it's the University of Texas at Austin, or "UT Austin" - same as there is no "University of Berkeley", but instead, "Cal". ;)
"Austin, not Boston"
http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/m...
His recollections are very detailed, and you can clearly see what a genius John Goodenough is. Many early computing and defense industry interviews have a similar feel as this one -- so wonderful to read and be inspired by material like this.
Maybe some form of corporate patronage, like Facebook and Stripe did in this story, and giving the inventor a generous slice of the returns from the invention (I can imagine several downsides to this too, of course):
> Although Goodenough will not spell out his precise new idea, he thinks he is on to something