Second day in Canada

Here's a brief rundown of my first two days in Montreal.

The first began, of course, with a bus from South Station. Unfortunately, I didn't sleep as well this time as last time I was on an American Greyhound bus: perhaps I should have taken a three week holiday first to tire me out (instead of more than three weeks on holidays but at home, which will only make me less tired).

Crossing the border was easy: a few questions about where I was going and for how long and I was waved through. Contrast this with my Chinese friends, who had to make two trips to New York ten days apart in order to get visas. It's handy hailing from a commonwealth country!

The bus arrived an hour late, so I didn't need to fill in the time between arrival and registration at the conference. I simply walked down Boulevard Rene Levesque, passing our hotel on the way, and found the venue. I saw a bunch of likely looking people in front of me, and indeed some of them had IMLB (International Meeting on Lithium Batteries) bags.

The conference began (well, my participation: I arrived on day 2 because day 1 was about anodes and our group is more interested in cathodes) uneventfully. A little too uneventfully, perhaps: having missed most of a night's sleep, I found it very hard to stay fully awake during most of the talks. That was disappointing, but there was nothing I could do about it except to get an early night that night to prevent the problem from reoccurring.

Warning: in the next paragraph, I slowly (ie. I go a long way, but I also take a long time) diverge from the topic to tell a "Smatthey was proud of this moment" story from 2006.

After sitting down for lunch (quite a nice lunch: a salad with cheese for entree, fish main and some generic creamy, fruity, sweet dessert), practically the first words of the person next to me were "I'm from Australia". That stood us in good stead for the rest of the conversation. He does neutron scattering research, and has worked with Darren Goossens. Darren taught some of my solid state physics class back in 2006, and he's married to Kate Wilson, former director of Australia's physics olympiad program. I think he was also my Honours thesis examiner. The examiners are anonymous, but he supervised another student so he was almost certainly an examiner, and the marking sheet for the final seminar requested markers to ask a question of the student whose work they were marking, and he asked me a question but wasn't asking many questions the rest of the time. I remember not being as satisfied with the answer I gave him as I was with some other answers. His question was 'shouldn't you be trying to explain X and Y as well as Z' and my answer was essentially 'ideally yes, but at this stage we don't understand everything at once and this is why explaining Z is likely to get us closest to the right answer'. That answer's fine, especially for an Honours project, but I'm not sure I got it across all that well. Perhaps I'm mentally juxtaposing it with my answer to his question at the seminar for that solids course, where he asked 'you've told us a lot about the use of inelastic neutron scattering to study crystalline materials, can you tell us anything about non-crystalline', and my answer was 'no'. Almost literally. Whereas there was another physics faculty member asking tricky questions during the Honours seminar (John Close: the name will be enough for anyone who knows him to nod their head and smile) - things like 'you chose to quantise angular momentum along the parallel axis, which is of course fine, but in the presence of a magnetic field states with definite angular momentum are no longer eigenstates, so can you tell us how this affects your work?'. For those of you who don't understand that question: it's not really any easier if you do! The student in question stood there for a moment like a deer in the headlights, but all the other students burst out laughing because John Close had spent all morning working his way up to such an intricate question, and the student was able to take advantage of the break in concentration to move on to the next question (and no one held it against him: he won a University Medal). Anyway, when it came to my turn, John asked me several questions but I was able to answer them all pretty comfortably, and was most happy with the last question (he asked 'you've used this method, but what about this other method', and I was able to say 'yes, that is another method that could be used, and there are members of our group doing that, and though I don't know much about it here is one snappy fact I remember from something my supervisor mentioned in passing one day, and these are the fundamental assumptions that the method I used makes, and they're probably the appropriate assumptions in this case, and in the end we have to see what our model predicts and experimental evidence will show whether it's valid': I was especially happy with the last bit because he has that quality possessed by all great physicsists of realising that constantly relating your model to experiment is essential in physics).

Diversion ends here.

A note on my use of quotation marks. I often use single quotation marks not to suggest actual quoted speech, but when I am paraphrasing, but want to take advantage of the advantages to flow that can come from reporting something as speech. Hopefully it's always clear from the context: I don't want to misquote anyone!

Well, diversion actually ends here.

The session after lunch was similar to the morning. It included the three talks that I found most useful so far. One gave very direct experimental evidence that diffusion in the electrolyte is important in batteries under certain conditions. When I say very direct evidence, I mean they almost took a picture of it (I think they used X ray scattering, but that's good enough for us). The second looked at cells very similar to the ones I'm currently focussing on, and also suggested that electrolyte diffusion is important. I was already coming to this conclusion (thanks to Prof. Ceder, who gave the third of the useful talks), but something else he said really helped me out. He mentioned that diffusivity can be influenced hugely by relatively minor changes to the composition of the battery. I had been confused by why very similar batteries were giving me very different results, and I think (hope) that's why. That was just what I needed to get me out of the minor dip I was having in my research.

The third talk was by Ceder, as I mentioned (actually, it was the second, but that's irrelevant). What he had to say wasn't of particular relevance to my research, but he was probably the best speaker yet, so I got a lot out of his talk.

Unfortunately the speaker quality overall hasn't been that high. I think a large reason for that is that most people are not talking in their native language. Most native English speakers don't speak like Ceder (who I think is actually not a native speaker, but has presumably known English for a long time and currently works in the US - at MIT, as people with sharp eyes and good memories will recall), but the language barrier makes good speakers sometimes challenging to follow, and makes poor speakers appalling (too many times I've switched off and just watched their Powerpoints). I guess that problem is unavoidable.

At this stage, and I wouldn't be surprised if it continues, I would say that this conference would have been at least 90% as useful if I had only heard those three talks. The other 10% or so is just getting a general idea of what is going on in the world of battery research.

The evening contained ordinary evening things: dinner (Peng and I went to Chinatown, just beside our hotel), a poster session (none of great interest, at least after the high standard set by the evening's talks), battling (successfully, as you would have noticed) with hotel wireless... I did receive an email from my supervisor, who is not at this conference, recommending I have a look at a particular paper, which happens to be the one the first of those three interesting talks was about.

This morning, the keynote speaker made things interesting in what I would call the wrong way. I was surprised, to say the least, when he accused of "crimes against humanity" the company holding particular battery patents and not utilising them as much as he considers appropriate (my apologies to Barratt, who was complaining the other day about the rule against splitting infinitives, but I tried that sentence with the dramatic phrase at the end, where it should be for full effect, and it just sounded odd. Actually, I'm not even sure if that's the rule I was dealing with there, or even whether, if so, I was following it or breaking it. I would ask google but I'm writing this in notepad in my room).

Back to the story. After this wild accusation, he moved on to a paper by Prof. Ceder and one of his students. He had a valid point to make. This is that Ceder and his student were trying to push a particular process to the extreme, to find when it would limit how quickly a battery could be discharged. They probably should have made clearer the fact that in reality this is unlikely to be the limiting factor, at least in the situations they mention. They certainly know what is the limit: it's diffusion in the electrolyte, as I mentioned above - Ceder told me so himself (and why). To be honest, I think it's their work that clearly proves this, although perhaps earlier work did or would have if considered systematically and in the right way. I don't know whether they didn't mention this because they didn't yet know it, or because they didn't want to draw attention away from the results of their work by mentioning that they weren't necessarily of particular technological importance. Instead of drawing attention to the omission, which would have been sufficient to direct the attention of young researchers in the area (eg. me) to what was important in the problem, he accused Ceder of being "more damaging to battery research than the Inquisition was to Galileo's ideas about gravity".

Note that I use double quotes: that's either a direct quote or as close to it as my memory allows.

What was just as disappointing was that this remark, or one very similar, drew applause from many people in the front of the room (populated by well-established researchers, ie. a generation older than Ceder; contemporaries of the speaker).

I don't think it was just me being sensitive, but I found this comment and his approach to criticising Ceder's work completely unprofessional. Naturally the act of criticising Ceder's work was completely professional: there was a weakness, and it is other scientists' job to point this out and provide the necessary improvement. Surely it shouldn't be too difficult to do this without resorting to what the speaker described as "calling a cat a cat" (I guess this is the French equivalent of calling a spade a spade).

The rest of the morning was less eventful.

In the afternoon, I went for a long walk around Montreal, but since this has already become rather long, I'll leave a description for some later time.