4 ms·

To be honest, what you're saying is that to get a 'good model' - you have to 'tweak' these approximations it so they work well "to fit what it was designed for"

To be honest, what you're saying is that to get a 'good model' - you have to 'tweak' these approximations it so they work well "to fit what it was designed for". Maybe you don't like the word 'tweaking' - but your entire post sounds that it is exactly that, make your model match (certain properties of) reality as close as possible. I'm not saying that in a dismissive/judgmental way - it is probably the most realistic way of doing a lot of things - but it pretty much is exactly what the original post says (although he is dismissive/negative about this). I don't know enough about chemistry in general to comment on this, but we do have batteries and they do improve over time - so some people must be doing "something" right. What surprises me more are his claims that we don't even understand (or understood) even the basics of lithium on a chemical level? Is this even true? What could be the impact of this paper on future battery development? Could computational models be improved using this data?

Xcelerate 13y ago
> but it pretty much is exactly what the original post says (although he is dismissive/negative about this) The difference is that he is implying scientists tweak their models to get what they want to see; i.e., they have a hypothesis and then manipulate the model until it gives them results that confirm their hypothesis. This is bad science. What I'm saying is that scientists (should) create their model to fit reality for only the specific situations where it is provably applicable. If the model then confirms the hypothesis, great. If it doesn't, no big deal; it just means your hypothesis was wrong and you probably won't get a paper out of it (in an ideal world, we would publish papers about negative results because that is science as well, but I'm afraid those papers don't garner near the attention or interest that positive results do). > What surprises me more are his claims that we don't even understand (or understood) even the basics of lithium on a chemical level? Is this even true? Yeah, it's true. That's why me (and a whole lot of other people) are doing research in this area. As for the paper, I'm not sure what its impact is. Research becomes very narrow in fields like this, and I don't study electrolytes (I study carbon anodes). So I can't comment on that.

Xcelerate 13y ago

> but it pretty much is exactly what the original post says (although he is dismissive/negative about this) The difference is that he is implying scientists tweak their models to get what they want to see; i.e., they have a hypothesis and then manipulate the model until it gives them results that confirm their hypothesis. This is bad science. What I'm saying is that scientists (should) create their model to fit reality for only the specific situations where it is provably applicable. If the model then confirms the hypothesis, great. If it doesn't, no big deal; it just means your hypothesis was wrong and you probably won't get a paper out of it (in an ideal world, we would publish papers about negative results because that is science as well, but I'm afraid those papers don't garner near the attention or interest that positive results do). > What surprises me more are his claims that we don't even understand (or understood) even the basics of lithium on a chemical level? Is this even true? Yeah, it's true. That's why me (and a whole lot of other people) are doing research in this area. As for the paper, I'm not sure what its impact is. Research becomes very narrow in fields like this, and I don't study electrolytes (I study carbon anodes). So I can't comment on that.