Steve LeVine

I am going to have to take off. I enjoyed it. If anyone wants to follow up, feel free to email: s@qz.com.

Amine is an immigrant from Morocco. His wife is Chinese. But his style is learned from years working in Japan. As I say, a fascinating window into invention that I did not expect.

The story is character-driven, and so I am driven to reply from that space. The most interesting character from the vantage of a writer--the hardest to write about because of the strong emotions he elicits in others--was Khalil Amine, one of the two battery geniuses at Argonne. I heard no end of gripes about him, most or all of them deeply and sincerely felt. Ultimately, I concluded that...

The most surprising aspect of batteries, in my opinion, is how careful we have to be about what we hear. It turns out that many or most of the "breakthroughs" that we read about are not quite what they are implying; there is an invisible "yes, but ... " embedded--or should be embedded--into these announcements. Some of them are simply narrow--one aspect of the battery is improved, but a host of...

At 92, he is focused entirely on lithium metal, and--though he is careful now about his secrets so he did not tell me precisely his approach--he thinks he has a decent shot at figuring out how to fashion lithium metal into an anode without it turning into an explosion while a car is rumbling down a freeway.

I did have the sense that at least he thinks he is onto an answer to the anode side of the battery.

Renaissance man and decent person besides.

Ah, John Goodenough.

I am looking at that now--at entrepreneurs who are trying to reinvent how batteries are made.

Toward the end of the research, I found out--and Elon Musk hints at this--that the answer to getting to the goals of the super battery can be otherwise reached. That is, you might not have to make the big leap in the discovery lab--you might achieve at least the cost goals by getting a lot better at manufacturing batteries.

Hey everyone. Glad to be here, and thanks to the Product Hunt for inviting me.

Probably not since Alessandro Volta himself has so much public attention been lavished on the battery. Like then (the first decade of the 19th century), that's included big hopes, some inflated claims, and much hoopla. Inventing one that is much cheaper and far more powerful is truly a big deal. But it's not the usual science or technology story -- no one knows when or even whether we are going...