
We don't know why lithium batteries work - mike_esspe
http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/398842.html
======
jpxxx
I like the side-point this author makes. Anytime there's a new discovery in
quantum theory or some other escoteric, sexy area of research, thousands of
armchair scientist knowitalls fall all over themselves to decry or incorrectly
interpret what's been found.

Ask a basic question on physics, biology, or engineering and only an actual
scientist will pipe up. I blame science fiction novels.

~~~
dalke
To be fair, if there's a new discovery related to evolution, you are likely to
get non-scientists to respond. Granted, those will be people who argue that
Darwinism is an evil, false influence in the world, but biology still has its
own knowitalls.

Or, look at controversial topics in other domains of science: AIDS was created
as a biological weapon, vaccines cause autism. Fluoridated water is a
Communist plot to "deplete the brainpower and sap the strength of a generation
of American children." The WTC could not have fallen because of planes
crashing into it, and must have been leveled due to planned explosives.

This holds even outside of science. Ask a question on copyright laws and a
bunch of people with no formal law training (including me) will chime in -
leading to complete ripped movies on YouTube prefixed with the magic phrase
"fair use."

~~~
ekianjo
You forgot "JFK was not killed by Oswald" and "We did not go on the Moon".
Apart from that, you should avoid putting ridiculous conspiracy theories next
to more believable ones. The fact that governments can and do stuff is secret
and cover it up is hardly a "theory" anymore, wikileaks should ring some
bells. Always believing what is written in the History Books sponsored by
government oversight does not mean you are being fed the truth. Everyone has
their own agenda.

~~~
derleth
> Always believing what is written in the History Books sponsored by
> government oversight does not mean you are being fed the truth.

The alternative to this is _not_ believing whatever Alex Jones and
NaturalNews.com say.

In fact, this false dichotomy is amazingly common among Internet conspiracy
theory believers: Unless you fall in lockstep with them, you _must_ believe
_everything_ Fox News tells you. No middle ground. (Or, of course, they accuse
you of being a COINTELPRO Zionist shill, which is really a more extreme
version of the same fallacy.)

> you should avoid putting ridiculous conspiracy theories next to more
> believable ones

Which theories, out of that list, do you think are believable?

~~~
ekianjo
I do not believe JFK was killed by Oswald, for example, and I believe there
are ample doubts about the official story of what happened in Dallas. And
archives being locked until sometimes in the future, who knows when we will
finally know about the truth.

There were obviously no WMDs in Iraq even though it was used by several
governments as a reason to go to war, so there are many cases in History where
we are blatantly lied to and we might as well recognize that and learn from
it.

As for the rest, unless you are sufficiently knowledgeable about a particular
subject, just saying "I do not know enough to have an opinion about it" would
be more honest than putting every idea in the bag with stinky ones.

~~~
derleth
> I do not believe JFK was killed by Oswald, for example, and I believe there
> are ample doubts about the official story of what happened in Dallas.

Doubts like what? Do you believe foreign government agents killed him? Do you
believe domestic government agents killed him? Do you believe he's still
alive?

Just saying you have questions doesn't cast doubt on any theories. Evidence
casts doubt on theories.

> There were obviously no WMDs in Iraq

This doesn't qualify as a conspiracy theory because the cat was essentially
out of the bag from the beginning.

> just saying "I do not know enough to have an opinion about it"

Except I can do research, which conspiracy theory believers seem incapable of.

~~~
ekianjo
> Just saying you have questions doesn't cast doubt on any theories. Evidence
> casts doubt on theories.

The Zapruder film clearly shows Kennedy being hit from the front when
approaching the grassy knoll. That's the evidence I am talking about. And when
the official government story has a single magic bullet making 7 injuries by
going in all crazy directions, then I wonder which one is really the
conspiracy theory in the end? You are not the only one capable of doing
research.

> This doesn't qualify as a conspiracy theory because the cat was essentially
> out of the bag from the beginning.

Well it was a conspiracy theory that become true, actually. It's just that
there were too many people who did not believe the lie and did not want to
walk into it, and foreign powers involved who did not want to be trapped in
another war. But the US and UK governments did try to fool people with false
evidence as long as they could.

> conspiracy theory believers

Classic fallacy. It's not because some believers are morons that all believers
are. And the other fallacy is the put all the theories in the same bag no
matter how much research is done on them : some are obviously ridiculous, some
other deserve more attention. It's too easy to dismiss everything.

~~~
derleth
> The Zapruder film clearly shows Kennedy being hit from the front when
> approaching the grassy knoll.

No, it doesn't.

[http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/issues_and_evidence/zapruder_fi...](http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/issues_and_evidence/zapruder_film/Oattes
--Fatal_shot.html)

> And when the official government story has a single magic bullet making 7
> injuries by going in all crazy directions

Another lie:

<http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/sbt.htm>

> Well it was a conspiracy theory that become true, actually.

You're confusing the issue by bringing up an irrelevant matter. The phrase
'conspiracy theory' has a definite definition in English and it isn't just a
theory that involves a conspiracy. It's a theory about a massive conspiracy
involving many people over a long span of time. Words (and a noun phrase is a
'word') have meanings based on usage, not logic.

~~~
ekianjo
This is clearly becoming out of topic, but there's not only the Zapruder film
that attests of the front shot. Numerous witnesses saw gunfire coming from
behind the fence and heard shots coming from different areas. Do you mean to
say they are all part of conspiracy fools ? And if that was not enough, Oswald
being able to do such a shot was not very likely at best: he was never known
to be good shot in the army, and the rifle he supposedly used could not allow
rapid-fire such as shown in the Warren Report. And he would have been firing
perfect shots through dense tree leaves.

Yeah, the official version make total sense, for sure. Oswald himself said he
was a patsy - why is that not considered a possibility ?

~~~
Ntrails
I don't like to get involved, but..

>Numerous witnesses saw gunfire coming from behind the fence and heard shots
coming from different areas

Eye witnesses are beyond useless at everything. Gunshots echo. No one 'saw'
gunfire. Everyone filled in their own blanks.

For example, big aircraft crash at an English airshow. Of the hundreds of
people asked what they saw only one remembered correctly. There have also been
more scientific studies into this. (eg something about a video of a speeding
car, some participants were told there was a barn in the video, there was not.
3 days later when asked about the barn a significantly higher % of people who
had been told there was a barn said they saw one.)

Anyway. I have no opinion on the assassination - but if I was trying to make
an argument for anything the last thing I would take as true is the statements
of witnesses.

------
meaty
Doesn't this apply to all of science?

I mean we don't actually know why anything really works, but we have some
models which fit the observations at the moment. This is just a very shallow
model i.e. "we poked it and it worked".

~~~
raverbashing
Exactly!

We know very little. The same goes for the atomic model and a lot of other
things.

Electrons, protons, quarks? That's _our model_. We know the equations, we know
how to predict a lot of stuff.

This guarantees nothing. Maybe tomorrow someone comes up with a different
theory that explains things better but doesn't say anything about waves or
particles. Who knows.

Quick example: what's a magnetic field? It is a measurable quantity, there are
theories about how forces are exchanged between charged particles, but
essentially it is more a mathematical aid than anything else.

And physics is the most 'hard' science. Easily reproducible, the same
everywhere in the universe (as far as we know), experiments can be reproduced
as many times as you want without interference.

Now if you go to more specific sciences (biology, medicine, etc) it gets
worse. They are only valid on planet Earth for a short period of time, for a
start. Test subjects all have differences and experimenting on them affects
the results.

~~~
Confusion

      This guarantees nothing.
    

It guarantees a whole lot of things. When necessary, you bet your life on
these mere 'models'. These 'models' cause you to trust stepping into an
airplane and stepping out of the trajectory of a falling rock.

    
    
      We know very little.
    

We know _a lot_ about these models. We investigate where they hold and where
they don't. We don't just know they are valid on planet Earth for a short
period of time: we investigate whether they also hold elsewhere and held in
the past and have every reason to believe they did and do.

To move on to some philosophical background behind your assertion: the idea
that there is some 'real', 'objective', 'true' reality that is modeled by
these models, is a pre-Kantian point of view. A post-Kantian point of view is
that these models of how the universe works _are_ our reality. They are the
only thing we can possibly have knowledge of: the models we use to categorize
and structure our observations.

Most of them only exist in our brains. They got there by nature and nurture,
without us usually spelling them out. They govern our daily behavior. We've
tried to formalize the more complex ones in language that is independent of
individual humans.

Sometimes observations are not consistent with a model, so we revise the
model. Still we only know the new version of the model, which describes what
we expect to observe.

~~~
raverbashing
Of course, I don't mean 'guarantees nothing' in the sense of "planes won't
fly" or things like this.

These are the results that are verified. The math

What we don't know about is if our model (and not the math or the results) has
anything to do with "reality" (and that may not even be possible)

Take the particle/wave duality for example. We're talking about an electron
being 'a particle' but sometimes 'a wave'. Of course, we can predict things
about the behaviour of this electron, but the story behind it, of particles,
waves, may not be accurate, and this may be replaced by something that
completely does away with electrons (difficult to imagine since electrons have
mass) but comes with similar predictions.

~~~
akiselev
For all we know, we may never "describe" reality with mathematics, but it's
purpose is nevertheless to estimate and predict to a certain degree of
precision an event within its boundary conditions. In this sense, science and
mathematics are not one and the same. The scientific method is designed to
push these mathematical models past their limits so that we may get closer to
discovering what this "reality" really is. These models are how we know when
something doesn't fit with our scientific understanding, it is nothing more
than a feedback loop.

Edit: hnhg: You're right, rephrased properly :)

~~~
hnhg
I think the parent is making the same point as you are.

------
driverdan
Something makes me suspect this article is missing part of the truth, similar
to sites that claim we don't know how bees can fly (we do).

~~~
semenko
Yeah, this piece is a little misleading. The author is referring to a nuanced
difference between ethylene carbonate (EC) and propylene carbonate (PC) in the
formation of a protective film around anodes.

See this (paywalled) review of electrolyte chemistry:
<http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cr030203g>
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15669157>

""" The unique position of EC as a lithium battery electrolyte was established
in 1990 when Dahn and co-workers reported the fundamental difference between
EC and PC in their effects on the reversibility of lithium ion
intercalation/deintercalation with graphitic anodes.36 Despite the seemingly
minute difference in molecular structure between the two, EC was found to form
an effective protective film (SEI) on a graphitic anode that prevented any
sustained electrolyte decomposition on the anode, while this protection could
not be realized with PC and the graphene structure eventually disintegrated in
a process termed “exfoliation” because of PC cointercalation. The reason for
the effectiveness of the SEI has incited a lot of research interest in the
past decade but remains an unsolved mystery, although it is generally believed
that EC undergoes a reduction process on the carbonaceous anode via a similar
path to that shown in Scheme 1. Because of the important role this SEI plays
in lithium ion chemistry, the research efforts on this topic will be reviewed
in a dedicated section (section 6). """

~~~
runn1ng
So still, the main claim sort of stands - there are unsolved mysteries in
every day's life, which we still don't understand fully, but that we use
anyway.

(I know nothing about electrochamistry or batteries :( )

------
jimbokun
"“Science literacy” tests quiz the initiated on their command of abstract
dogmas acquired through no exercise of one’s ability to generate knowledge."

This is something that often bothers me about the r/atheism crowd.

A young person encountering an idea like evolution for the first time _should_
be extremely skeptical and require much convincing, because it is not an
intuitive idea at all. Believing in it just because the teacher says you will
get a bad grade on the test if you don't does nothing to inculcate scientific
thinking in young people.

Now, students unwilling to engage with physical evidence obviously have a
different problem. But with the level of discourse I see coming out of many
proponents of atheism on the Internet, I often feel many of them are proud of
their "command of abstract dogmas" and are not particularly people
demonstrating the "ability to generate knowledge."

~~~
Centigonal
Personally, I thought evolution through natural selection was pretty intuitive
and obvious, given the previous instruction on how DNA and chromosomes worked.
If everything changed a little bit, and only the good changes stayed, then
they'd all stack up and constitute a big change!

DNA and chromosomes were pretty unintuitive, but we have pictures of those, so
that helped.

Also, I think Occam's razor applies even if you're a young person who hasn't
heard of it yet: with no previous knowledge on the subject, I am wont to
accept the simplest explanation that doesn't contradict reality without much
skepticism.

~~~
username3
Presuming everything will follow a linear path is simple.

------
daniel-levin
> Still no one knows what chemical process yields this material, what is this
> material, and why a small structural change in the electrolyte makes such a
> colossal difference in the performance

I read this an immediately saw a parallel with computer science. To quote from
CLRS: [1] "Computer scientists are intrigued by how a small change to the
problem statement can cause a big change in the efficiency of the best known
algorithm". It strikes me as incredible how seemingly simple concepts can be
the tip of a much bigger iceberg of complexity. Another example of this would
be the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem [2] . A proposition one can understand
with primary school mathematics, whose proof eluded mathematicians for
centuries and required the invention of new mathematics. Sir Andrew Wiles, the
person who proved the proposition, had to see deep symmetries between a
plethora of domains in mathematics. The main idea that I find remarkable is
the incredible complexity of the world in which we live - even the smallest of
changes to a concept we think we understand (Electrochemistry, Algorithms,
Mathematics), can redirect the trajectory of our understanding completely. To
me, this seems as if we have only the most superficial understanding of the
myriad structures and substructures of the universe. New developments in all
areas of science excite me greatly purely because our understanding has been
advanced that _infinitesimally_ bit more.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms> [2]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem>

------
JoeAltmaier
Easy to claim in chemistry - where loads of research is done by simply trying
everything and seeing what works. Its no longer interesting to understand why.
Medicine, industrial processes, it doesn't matter. I read once that the last
medicine designed by a chemist was the cure for syphilis - decades ago.
Probably not true any more, but lots of Edison-style 'science' is being done
still.

~~~
illuminate
"where loads of research is done by simply trying everything and seeing what
works."

Do you seriously think research is "throwing shit against a wall and seeing
what sticks"?

"I read once that the last medicine designed by a chemist was the cure for
syphilis - decades ago"

Yet another folksy anecdote parroted by the same people who claim "the last
disease we've cured was Polio". Saying these things does not make them true.

~~~
Alex3917
"Do you seriously think research is 'throwing shit against a wall and seeing
what sticks'?"

That's exactly what most pre-clinical research is. Testing hundreds of
thousands of different molecules in hopes of finding on that works. For every
NME that makes it onto the market, there are several thousands or tens of
thousands that are initially tested.

------
alizaki
I always wondered why everything related to my computing devices seems to
follow some variation of Moores law but the battery. This explains it.

~~~
kragen
I don't know if this is really the reason. Moore's Law started with planar
photolithographic silicon semiconductor integrated circuit fabrication (aka
making chips) around 1958. We're now in year 50 of planar photolithographic
silicon semiconductor integrated circuit fabrication, although now we have
environmental laws so we can't just dump hydrofluoric acid into the
groundwater, and we have to use X-rays instead of ordinary light, and we worry
about smaller dust, stuff like that which makes it a lot harder. But basically
we've just been scaling stuff down. We have about another ten years before we
reach the physical limits of planar photolithographic silicon semiconductor
integrated circuit fabrication, which are about two orders of magnitude away.
That means we started about 17 orders of magnitude away.

By contrast, we seem to have reached the fundamental limits of carbon-zinc
batteries a couple of centuries ago, and the fundamental limits of ordinary
electrolytic batteries in 1990 with the invention of the lithium battery. (Or
maybe the zinc-air battery.) The fundamental limits on chemical energy density
seem to be about two or three orders of magnitude from where we started, not
17.

In both cases it's possible to do better by using fundamentally different
approaches: microturbines, tiny fuel cells, or betavoltaic batteries in the
case of batteries; diamond, three-dimensional structures, and molecular
assembly in the case of electronics. But all of these have substantial
engineering obstacles.

------
brittohalloran
Not an expert but I find this difficult to believe. We know a LOT about
battery chemistry.

~~~
VLM
I think the author intuitively knew that "A slight difference in electrolyte
composition results in dramatically different long term electrode reliability"
would not get quite as many page views as the completely false "No one has the
slightest idea how and why it works." Especially by carefully phrasing the
article such that the "it" refers to a hyper detailed corner case but implies
its the entirety of mankinds chemistry knowledge, or at least battery
chemistry.

So three good PR lessons:

1) Dramatically exaggerate

2) Confuse pronouns... which "it" is the author writing about?

3) Appeal to ignorance, wave away all that science-y stuff in favor of awe and
wonder.

~~~
Dylan16807
I thought the article was fine.

1\. We really have no idea what the molecules are doing in this protective
layer. See the quote from an actual paper in semenko's post.

2\. The it is the bit that makes lithium batteries not fall apart.

3\. What the hell are you talking about with appeal to ignorance? The article
is just explaining that there are gaps in our knowledge, basic science that we
can measure, use, tweak but don't know the mechanism. There is no attempt to
prove or disprove anything.

------
stcredzero
We didn't know exactly why lots of pharmaceuticals worked either, and we still
don't in some cases.

------
ricardobeat
I also wonder about the "graphene sheets" - it's not the first time I read
that on the description of a battery. Surely it's graphite, not graphene? I
don't think batteries are built with one-atom-thick layers.

~~~
jcromartie
He means graphene that's incidentally always there in graphite ("in graphite
in the anode"). We didn't coax it into sheets, it's just there and it's what
makes things happen.

------
damian2000
Some diagrams here [http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/everyday-
tech/lithium-i...](http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/everyday-tech/lithium-
ion-battery1.htm)

~~~
Tloewald
Doesn't address the specific unknown described in the article, but yes, we do
know how LIon batteries work, just not how the specific solvent used prevents
the batteries rapidly degrading.

------
noonespecial
We may not always know how or why (at the deepest fundamental levels). We
don't need to. We use science to know that it does.

------
balsam
a digression but the writer seems russian by virtue of his/her sentence
construction. I can't really pin down the reason, perhaps a linguist can help
me out? (Disclaimer: I'm not russian. Edit: By the comments on his page it
looks it's actually a russian. Also the use of livejournal)

------
loceng
Related to not knowing why lithium works in the brain?

------
waqar
I read it in 12th :p

