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Every time there is some news on some research breakthrough in a technological field, lots of people comment how it is unrealistic, not yet a working product...

Every time there is some news on some research breakthrough in a technological field, lots of people comment how it is unrealistic, not yet a working product... Yes, it's research if they had a product they would have founded a company and made lots of money already. I suspect these comments are due to the fact that many here are in software, where an idea can essentially instantly transition from research to production. In hardware that can take decades (and there might be lots of deal breakers discovered along the way). Now if the complaint is about the press releases reporting on those breakthroughs. That is a problem with the pressure on scientists to work on relevant problems (often strongly called for by the same people who then complain it's not a product yet), and demonstrate impact.

synctext 5y ago
Indeed, not a working product. Working lab-only 'hardware'. The "methods section" in the Nature paper is fascinating: "The anode-solid electrolyte-cathode for half-battery or anode-solid electrolyte-anode for symmetric battery were pressed together in a homemade pressurized cell at 467 MPa and kept at 50–250 MPa during testing." "All batteries were assembled in an argon atmosphere glovebox and the galvanostatic battery cycling test was performed on an ArbinBT2000 workstation."
magicalhippo 5y ago
A lot of things which look good in the lab don't make it to production because issues not highlighted in the original research though. I've seen this in software as well, trying to implement novel algorithms from papers. For example, one raytracing denoising algorithm I tried worked wonders, except it required the entire rendering to be serialized (raytracing is "embarrassingly parallel"), alternatively use a per-pixel instance of the data structure, leading to many GB of extra memory required for larger images. Results looked great in the paper, not so much in the real world...

synctext 5y ago

Indeed, not a working product. Working lab-only 'hardware'. The "methods section" in the Nature paper is fascinating: "The anode-solid electrolyte-cathode for half-battery or anode-solid electrolyte-anode for symmetric battery were pressed together in a homemade pressurized cell at 467 MPa and kept at 50–250 MPa during testing." "All batteries were assembled in an argon atmosphere glovebox and the galvanostatic battery cycling test was performed on an ArbinBT2000 workstation."

magicalhippo 5y ago

A lot of things which look good in the lab don't make it to production because issues not highlighted in the original research though. I've seen this in software as well, trying to implement novel algorithms from papers. For example, one raytracing denoising algorithm I tried worked wonders, except it required the entire rendering to be serialized (raytracing is "embarrassingly parallel"), alternatively use a per-pixel instance of the data structure, leading to many GB of extra memory required for larger images. Results looked great in the paper, not so much in the real world...