It's more of a cultural difference between HN users (engineers/practitioners) and academia which can work in the abstract. The top comment is probably not wrong

It's more of a cultural difference between HN users (engineers/practitioners) and academia which can work in the abstract. The top comment is probably not wrong yet the base paper is not necessarily devoid of merits. Think of it this way, this has no practical implementation and does not solve the engineering problems we have right now but it might lead to a different yet related discovery down the line which we will solve a different problem in 10-20 years. Yes for us engineer this seems like a pointless (very stupid!) endeavour, but in practice that's just how research works. Scientist will explore ideas that are not necessarily feasible or useful and create building blocks for future research. Not everyone in energy storage has to work on designing new alloys for anodes and cathodes otherwise we'd stagnate. We need the fringe and very stupid ideas as well.