Comment on YSK: You can make supercapacitors out of cement, water and carbon black
benignintervention@lemmy.world 1 week agoA couple of guys doing cool stuff in a lab is how progress is made. If we stopped people like Tesla, Newton, and Faraday because “candles are readily available and whale oil is a natural resource” we wouldn’t have any of the tech we take for granted today.
This discovery is super cool, like imagine its applications in walkable cities where the entire pedestrian pathway is also storing energy from wind and solar
Thorry84@feddit.nl 1 week ago
benignintervention@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They found a way to create a high surface area capacitor made largely from abundant resources. Even a proof of concept is a discovery. We may not see it in practice in our lifetimes because science and industry take time, but that doesn’t diminish the value at all.
Why is this a false equivalence? I’m not saying this is the next Faraday. I’m comparing contemporaries. You can’t know what technologies will make what kind of difference in the future, but there’s no harm in being excited about our interested in them and their possibilities. I think my comparisons are fair, especially if you consider the technology of each contemporary era. What about Turing? He created a mechanical computational machine and extrapolated the future possibility of machines that could mimic human communication. That is absolutely an edge case assumption given the technology of the time and yet here we are with LLMs running rampant.