> THE MATERIALS OF THE FUTURE ALREADY EXIST IN THE LAB
Do they? There’s plenty of stuff in our labs, most of them are completely useless, some that were bought to be useless become fashionable again, and we get new and exciting ones every day. There are a lot of issues in going from concept to useable material, and "scaling up" is only one of them.
> FRONTIER INTELLIGENCE WILL BRING THEM TO THE WORLD.
It will probably help, but I doubt it will do it by itself.
> Put simply, materials innovation has a scale-up problem, not a discovery problem.
I just don’t think that’s true. It’s also a scale-up problem, but discovery itself is not solved.
The problem spaces keep getting larger (composites! nanostructures! High-entropy!). High-throughput thermodynamic and electronic structure calculations, automated characterisation and testing, and things like that are being developed because we just don’t know what materials could exist and what could be their properties. The problem is that while there is room for AI there, particularly in automation, even cutting edge models are very dodgy to extrapolate materials properties outside their training sets, which are utterly negligible compared to the size of the search space.
> The bottleneck has never been a shortage of promising candidate materials. It is the decades of trial and error it takes to manufacture even one of them reliably.
It’s worse than that. The first sentence is true (ideas are cheap), but the main bottleneck is to try to figure out the properties of the damn thing and whether some of them are deal breakers or not. The vast majority of materials we come up with never see any application, not because we don’t have processes at the right scale, but because they just have terrible properties.
It is well documented in France as well. It was seen as a revenge for 1870. There was quite a bit of enthusiasm. At least initially, before the killing started in earnest and people got stuck in the trenches.
> Isn't he on record that his documentation was listening to techies talking shop in bars?
Yeah. I don’t think he was a technophile himself. Which might have helped him because he was not trying to be realistic. But at the same time there are things he understood deeply.
That’s nice in principle, but it really is not the same budget around here, even though the shops are here. Small neighbourhood supermarkets and corner shops are significantly more expensive than the big supermarket that’s a 10-minute drive away.
We’re doing both: buying what we need in large quantities or with a long shelf life once a week from a supermarket and things like some meat, fruits and vegetables from the corner shop but that takes a bit of work and planning. Still, there’s money to be saved taking advantage of economies of scale.
Besieging a city is difficult and expensive. And it fixes a significant attacking army that has to monitor the whole city’s surroundings. They do fall every now and then, but the whole point is that it takes a disproportionate amount of power to do it.
The Maginot line gets ridiculed often enough, but it did its job: it forced the Germans to find another way. It’s too bad the Ardennes were much more porous than expected and the fortifications did not extend all the way to Dukirk, but without fortifications at all it’s pretty much certain that the Wehrmacht should have gone straight through the plains of Lorraine and Champagne.
When that’s the case, the preprints would be just as short. We don’t really like unnecessary pain so we write short manuscripts from the beginning, if we plan to submit in such a journal. Usually, the longer versions get published somewhere else anyway.
There’s a lot of stuff on Researchgate. And with the evolution of European grants, there are a few publicly-available repositories, like hal.science (funded by the French government and the default repository for public research in France, I think you have to be with some kind of research institution so it’s not quite as open as arxiv but there are plenty of good articles there).
> I am still suspicious that this has something to do with the relationship between Springer-Verlag and the Max Plank Digital Library (MPDL) which supports open access.
Why? Max Plank (the dead Physicist) has nothing to do with whatever the Institute is doing these days. Or the library. Or anything that was named after him.
> I can't read French, but having evaluated many of these plagiarism cases in the past, a lot of them truly are witch hunts.
It’s not the case here.
> The plagiarism will be something like "Einstein presented a new theory: ___" and the ___ and several sections of the next few pages will be barely modified Einstein quotes.
Again, that’s not the case here. There was no attribution, no reference, and no quotes, for entire paragraphs. About a third of the thesis overall.
> As an academic, I really would not care much if someone did this to my work so long as they mention and cite me generally.
Which is fine, but again not very relevant to this case.
> It's very obvious he pieced together interesting ideas from others to pass them as his own. And it worked very well, he has radio shows and TV shows and whatnot. And he still has a lot of supporters!
Also, being able to get ideas, synthesise them and present them in a way palatable for mainstream audiences is a useful skill and an important role in society. It’s just not research.
> I often write about stuff on my blog and I know a lot of what I’m writing or thinking about are ideas someone else has come up with
These tools compare words, not idea. They would not detect someone copying concepts but coming up with their own words. I guess some specially fine-tuned LLMs could work but I am not aware of a company actually licensing those for plagiarism detection.
> Did this physicist / media star recently say something controversial?
Not really. This is the consequence of an investigation by some journalists about a decade ago, and an audit that lasted for almost 2 years.
> I mean why did the system let him pass as a physicist, and why did it let him rise the media rank?
He is a smooth talker and by all accounts good at vulgarisation. He does well in interviews and is easy to deal with for journalists. There’s always been controversies but media thrive on those.
You need more than that. No university is going to revoke anything without very good reasons, they have too much to lose. Their first action is always to try to bury the case.
Do they? There’s plenty of stuff in our labs, most of them are completely useless, some that were bought to be useless become fashionable again, and we get new and exciting ones every day. There are a lot of issues in going from concept to useable material, and "scaling up" is only one of them.
> FRONTIER INTELLIGENCE WILL BRING THEM TO THE WORLD.
It will probably help, but I doubt it will do it by itself.
> Put simply, materials innovation has a scale-up problem, not a discovery problem.
I just don’t think that’s true. It’s also a scale-up problem, but discovery itself is not solved.
The problem spaces keep getting larger (composites! nanostructures! High-entropy!). High-throughput thermodynamic and electronic structure calculations, automated characterisation and testing, and things like that are being developed because we just don’t know what materials could exist and what could be their properties. The problem is that while there is room for AI there, particularly in automation, even cutting edge models are very dodgy to extrapolate materials properties outside their training sets, which are utterly negligible compared to the size of the search space.
> The bottleneck has never been a shortage of promising candidate materials. It is the decades of trial and error it takes to manufacture even one of them reliably.
It’s worse than that. The first sentence is true (ideas are cheap), but the main bottleneck is to try to figure out the properties of the damn thing and whether some of them are deal breakers or not. The vast majority of materials we come up with never see any application, not because we don’t have processes at the right scale, but because they just have terrible properties.