John B. Goodenough

Fisker have recently ramped up their activity to try to bring their original launch date of 2023 forward to 2020, presumably in response to the growing competition amassing around him.

The final slot has to be reserved for the massively undervalued genius and father of the lithium ion battery, Mr. John Bannister Goodenough.

Back in 1980, Goodenough and a team of chemists at Oxford made several key breakthroughs, including the use of cobalt for the cathode, which brought lithium ion batteries into reality.

He got ripped off by one of his research partners at the time, and as a result, he never saw a penny for his invention, an invention now so ubiquitous that our modern lifestyles would be almost impossible without it.

In recognition of his achievements and the fact that he's still going at the age of nearly 96, John gets pride of place right at the top of our Muppet Genius chart.

And for a good example, the major components of a smartphone.

are a lot of them like the screen uh the original form of android operating system ssds ram um they were all publicly designed and publicly funded as how they were invented the only things in like my google pixel the major components that weren't is google's tensor cpu which is specific to them, and the lithium battery, which was designed by John B. Goodenough for Sony back in 1989 because Sony wanted to have a better battery for their CD players.

So it's like the concept of a profit mode of being the real deciding factor for exploring something doesn't really exist in reality.

And

That would be Malala Yousafzai, who was only 17 when she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 for her work fighting for the rights of women and girls.

And the oldest prize winner is the Chemistry Prize winner from 2019, John Goodenough, who was 97.

And that's his real name, Goodenough.

That's a great name, John Goodenough, and he was too.

And you said there were two people who had won a Nobel Prize but declined it, meaning they said, no thanks to a lot of money and prestige, why would you do that?

That's right.

That's...

Well, it's, I've, I've, I spent a long time cheerleading for, uh, John Goodenough, and he finally won, so, um, I feel like I don't, I don't need to, like, be cheerleading too, too much nowadays.

But, um, I think that, uh, one sort of category that often gets forgotten about a little bit in this chat is the sort of, uh, techniques, analytical, um, spectroscopic kind of things, and we haven't had one of those since the Cryo-EM one back in twenty seventeen.

Mm.