Best wishes for the future!
The battery and electrochemistry fields owe their origin to Volta and Faraday around two centuries ago. Since then, many well-known inventors, including Edison have studied batteries; he is quoted as trying several thousand empirical approaches in developing the Ni/Fe battery. Today we used a systematic scientific approach to make the Li-ion battery successful.
I would like to think that we have gone back to the roots of science, in that 21st~century Science does not recognize disciplinary boundaries. This year’s chemistry Nobel Prize emphasizes that. I am a chemist from Oxford University trained in solid state/materials chemistry; John Goodenough is a physicist from the University of Chicago, who went on to become Professor of Chemistry at Oxford; Akira Yoshino is an engineer from Kyoto University.
The Nobel Prize also showed that Science is truly an international endeavor; our breakthroughs came with me, an Englishman working in America, and John Goodenough, an American working in England, and Akira Yoshino, working in Japan. Science knows no geographical boundaries. We must continue to work across boundaries.
My hoped-for vision of the future and wish is that the development of the lithium battery will let everyone work together to build a cleaner environment, make our planet more sustainable, and help mitigate global warming, thereby leaving a cleaner legacy to our children and grandchildren.
Stanley Whittingham
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2019
Couverture
Visuels issus de Wikimedia Commons
Conception graphique : Mag Design (magdesign.fr)