As usual 🤷‍♂️
Seriously: don’t write this lightly. This is very common in my field (materials science). Prepare a fancy new material at lab scale, measure super cool and promising properties at small scale. And then claim it will have terrific applications and scale up will be easy.
Well I don’t know if this is the case here (I hope it is!), but most likely it’s not. Scaling up processes and materials is HARD and, tadam: almost *nobody* wants to to it, unless you have a fantastically strong incentive to do it (e.g €€€€€€)
Scientists usually prefer to stick to science and that’s absolutely fine. Industries making materials are moving slowly. You need a seriously amazing material to convince someone to build a new factory for it.
But before even getting there, you need to solve the scale up issues. And that’s the Death Valley of materials science. Nobody wants to do it. No benefits for scientists (can’t publish), no € for industrials for a while.
On the long term, I think making such repeated claims is damaging to our field and science in general. Making promises that never (ok, almost) come true.
After a while, people are disappointed that we don’t find applications, despite our repeated claims in proposals, papers and press release from Univ. See, there still no space elevators yet.
The truth is : almost all new materials are *not* new. They are incremental improvements over previous ones, using processes already in place or that only require adjustments that are not too expensive. And that’s fine, that’s just how it works.
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