
The man who brought us the lithium-ion battery has an idea for a new one - mocy
http://qz.com/338767/the-man-who-brought-us-the-lithium-ion-battery-at-57-has-an-idea-for-a-new-one-at-92/
======
ylem
I remember looking at his work when I was a grad. student. Some of it was
amazing. For example, I remember once he set up an apparatus to grow crystals
using chemical vapor transport. To know when it was finished, he sealed wires
to inside the quartz tube (as an open circuit) and connected them to a battery
and a light bulb. When the crystal (which was conducting) grew large enough
between the leads, the light bulb would turn on. It was elegant and simple.
(Usually this type of synthesis occurs in a furnace where you can't tell the
progress and just have to guess and take it out). We still refer to the
"Goodenough-Kannamori" rules of thumb when we're trying to use heuristics to
guess how an oxide will order magnetically. He's had a truly impressive
career...

~~~
aceperry
Hopefully his career will continue and he comes up with a new breakthrough
battery.

------
anigbrowl
tl;dr _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. That would instantly catapult electric cars into a new
head-to-head race with combustion. Over the years, numerous scientists have
tried and failed—it was lithium metal, for instance, that kept setting Stan
Whittingham’s lab on fire at Exxon in the 1970s._

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.

~~~
Apofis
Yeah, the headline was almost an afterthought. I guess he isn't really talking
and they needed something to give people a reason to click and read. Gave me
enough reason to read about him though, and I definitely don't regret it.

------
mschuster91
What I'm worried about is the waste of lithium and other battery/accumulator
metals. In theory, people should turn electronic devices and batteries to
recycling facilities, but a large part of the population ignores the rules and
throws their gadgets into the trash when broken...

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)...

~~~
Gravityloss
One solution is to collect a payment when you buy a new gadget, then you get
it back when you return it for recycling.

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.

~~~
deanclatworthy
We do this in Finland for bottles and cans. Giving people the financial
incentive to recycle has two effects: \- For those who want to keep their
money they take it back \- If they don't care enough, they leave it somewhere
and there are many "recyclers" who are happy to pick up your cans and bottles
and get the money for them.

~~~
IanDrake
Yeah, we do that in most US states too. At our dump (disposal area) there is a
station to donate your bottles and cans to local charities and schools.

------
higherpurpose
> _But Goodenough is equally dismissive of such tinkering and its measly 7% or
> 8% a year in added efficiency._

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.

[http://www.solidenergysystems.com/technology.html](http://www.solidenergysystems.com/technology.html)

~~~
ars
> 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.

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.

~~~
mikeyouse
CPU speeds stopped increasing because the market stopped focusing on CPU speed
(coincidentally to this discussion, the change was largely to reduce power
demands). Transistor count has kept plugging right along;

[http://i.imgur.com/FvVrnn4.png](http://i.imgur.com/FvVrnn4.png)

~~~
yongjik
I think it's the other way? That is, market stopped focusing on CPU speed
because they hit the wall and clock speed could no longer be used as a
differentiating factor.

~~~
ajuc
Yes, market would be more than happy to have 100GHz CPUs by now, it would make
scaling everything much easier.

------
breckinloggins
A note for those who go looking for the technical details: there aren't many
here. According to the article, Dr. Goodenough is being tight-lipped about his
work.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I expect a note in the margin of one of his journals, discovered posthumously,
"What a simple and elegant anode, the margin is too small to contain it."

I get that he is angry, but I worry that his anger may rob us of what he could
do.

~~~
kbenson
At the same time, he knows the power of copious notes proving the origination
of the idea, so hopefully it won't be that bad.

------
kevin_thibedeau
> Without it, we would not have smartphones, tablets or laptops, including the
> device you are reading at this very moment.

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.

~~~
floatrock
> 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.

~~~
alextgordon
But high level languages do not require VMs. Time for a rant.

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.

~~~
mkup
Also code produced by LLVM-based languages can be linked with low-level
modules written in pure C/C++, or even assembly, if necessary. So one may
quickly prototype and then slowly rewrite the software for performance, module
by module. No such thing is possible for JIT-based languages or platforms.

~~~
phyllostachys
As an embedded engineer, you and parent have put into words something that
I've known but haven't been able to articulate.

I think I encountered the sentiment (on HN) before that because CPU and memory
speeds have become so far out of whack and that increasing CPU speeds have
power limits that engineers will start having to worry about optimization more
and more. I suppose the difference is that before, we didn't have the boat-
loads of memory that we have now (in a system).

In other words, yay for LLVM IR!

------
cko
Kind of off-topic, and I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking this, but is it
common to have clarity of mind at age 92? Is it mostly genetic or is it more
like "keep challenging your mind and get enough sleep"? Anyone have good
links?

At 29, I'm (probably prematurely) worried about cognitive decline. I only
started challenging really myself last year.

~~~
ManuelKiessling
I think one thing you can do is try to avoid a typical fallacy. My brother
gave me a great example:

\- 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

~~~
morlockhq
There is some brain plasticity research that seems to indicate that the more
you challenge your brain with new activities and problem sets, the more
resilient it is against decline in old age.

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.

------
justizin
> "Goodenough in his lab at the University of Austin."

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". ;)

~~~
drzaiusapelord
University of Austin sounds like a Portlandia-like parody of hippies and alt-
culture types putting up classes in old abandoned buildings and alleyways and
living in fear of being found out by UT security.

~~~
justizin
You could always throw back to "Road Trip" with Tom Greene:

    
    
      "Austin, not Boston"
    

;)

------
jamespitts
The QZ article gets much of its information from this March, 2001 oral history
interview:

[http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/m...](http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/materials/public/Goodenough/Goodenough_interview.htm)

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.

------
JDiculous
Wish society would incentivize more smart people to tackle these important
problems rather than go into finance, management consulting, working at the
next hot tech startup, etc.

~~~
patrickk
How would this work in practice?

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):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791)

~~~
JDiculous
The problem is that investments in the future and public goods will always be
unfunded in a free market capitalist economy due mainly to the free-rider
problem. Fixing it would have to involve the government (or a government-like
entity) subsidizing these projects. Of course care would have to be taken to
make sure this money is properly allocated, the incentives are properly
aligned, etc.

------
swamp40
I cannot decide if that Soundcloud laugh was completely distracting, or
whether it improved the storytelling.

~~~
davidgerard
Completely improved. That's what we want our Mad Scientists to sound like,
dammit.

------
gregorkas
But.. the one we had was Goodenough.. yeahhhhh

------
hayksaakian
tl;dr version:

> Although Goodenough will not spell out his precise new idea, he thinks he is
> on to something

