<story><title>Epistemic standards for “Why did it take so long to invent X?”</title><url>https://rootsofprogress.org/epistemic-standards-for-why-it-took-so-long</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pfdietz</author><text>Some inventions are gated by scientific discovery, particularly in materials.&lt;p&gt;For example, ductile iron (which involves adding 1% magnesium to molten iron, causing carbon to precipitate on cooling as small spheroids instead of dendrites, making the iron much less brittle than ordinary cast iron) could have been invented any time after 1808, when Davy produced magnesium.  But it wasn&amp;#x27;t invented until 1948.  No one had done the experiment and seen that effect.&lt;p&gt;Another example, also coincidentally involving magnesium, is magnesium diboride.  It was synthesized and its structure characterized in 1953, but it wasn&amp;#x27;t until 2001 that it was realized it was a superconductor with a critical temperature of 39 K.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Gravityloss</author><text>Basic research. There are a lot of combinations to try. It makes sense to try them methodically and share the results, to avoid duplication of effort.
(The experiment of course can certainly be retried, in case there was an error, but the published result has value). There was a good interview of Doron Aurbach on this, but sadly it appears to have disappeared from Soundcloud. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.electrochem.org&amp;#x2F;ecs-blog&amp;#x2F;doron-aurbach-commercial-li-ion-batteries&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.electrochem.org&amp;#x2F;ecs-blog&amp;#x2F;doron-aurbach-commercia...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chemistry and materials research is an especially bad fit for the startup solution model where everybody&amp;#x27;s repeating the same things, often even in secret.&lt;p&gt;The startups instead build on top of that basic research. Like electric scooters or cars were built on top of the technology of cheap energy-dense lithium batteries.</text></comment>
<story><title>Epistemic standards for “Why did it take so long to invent X?”</title><url>https://rootsofprogress.org/epistemic-standards-for-why-it-took-so-long</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pfdietz</author><text>Some inventions are gated by scientific discovery, particularly in materials.&lt;p&gt;For example, ductile iron (which involves adding 1% magnesium to molten iron, causing carbon to precipitate on cooling as small spheroids instead of dendrites, making the iron much less brittle than ordinary cast iron) could have been invented any time after 1808, when Davy produced magnesium.  But it wasn&amp;#x27;t invented until 1948.  No one had done the experiment and seen that effect.&lt;p&gt;Another example, also coincidentally involving magnesium, is magnesium diboride.  It was synthesized and its structure characterized in 1953, but it wasn&amp;#x27;t until 2001 that it was realized it was a superconductor with a critical temperature of 39 K.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scythe</author><text>Discovery is half the battle. Theory plays a role.&lt;p&gt;Currently there is some research into &amp;quot;high-entropy alloys&amp;quot; which are just mixtures of metals we&amp;#x27;ve known about for a while with certain special crystal properties. It&amp;#x27;s a foregone conclusion that many of the known HEAs could have been prepared in the 1930s, but would it make sense to do so? What epiphany could possibly tell you to prepare Cr19.75Mn20.10Fe20.25Co20.48Ni19.42 (&lt;i&gt;Science&lt;/i&gt; 345 (6201) 1153-8) without having a theory of crystal deformation in metals?</text></comment>