Israel's trailblazing electric car company Better Place announced Sunday that it is shutting down, less than six years after unveiling an ambitious plan that promised to revolutionize the auto industry by reducing the world's dependency on oil.
Better Place was perhaps Israel's best known clean-tech company and a leading symbol of its "startup" nation status. Israel, along with Denmark, was the company's test market for developing nationwide networks of charging and battery-swapping stations that it hoped would eventually spread globally. But the company experienced repeated delays in getting off the ground and experienced weak demand for its cars after burning through millions of dollars.
The announcement that the company was filing for liquidation comes less than eight months after company founder Shai Agassi was forced out. The project won the support of Israeli President Shimon Peres, received generous financial incentives from the Israeli government and made Agassi a dynamic celebrity CEO.Another reminder how incredibly the technology must be to get the "right" battery.
The interesting thing: Israel is so tiny, "range" for the battery-car should not have been an issue. And with all the natural gas Israel is finding, they will have no trouble producing electricity. If the Israelis can't make EVs work, it just begs the question...
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A Note to the Granddaughters
I guess I'm still in my Los Alamos / quantum mechanics reading phase. While visiting Tucson, my niece(s) introduced me to Louise Gilder's book, c. 2008, The Age of Enganglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn. My review of the book at Amazon. com should be up by the end of the week.
The author was 25 years old when she wrote this book, her first book.
Some years ago, I was unable to find the answer to the question: how and when was "quantum mechanics" invented? In high school and college, the atomic theory and quantum mechanics was presented in such a way that to those unfamiliar with how scientific discoveries were made (including me at the time) that it seemed like it "just happened."
Louise Gilder really does an outstanding job tracing the development of quantum mechanics. It will be interesting to see how quantum mechanics plays out over the next fifty years. It will be most interesting to see if what you lean in college (in about 10 years) is all that different than what I learned in college in 1972.
The book is just full of bits of trivia we all know, or should know, but have forgotten or never learned.
For example. back in 1927, one one atomic particle had ever been successfully predicted: Einstine's photon. The photon was one of only three particles even known at that time, and the other two had been found experimentally: the electron and the proton.
Feynmann, I believe, has said no one understands, and no one can understand quantum mechanics, and yet, with the development of QM, theorists predicted dozens of atomic and sub-atomic particles which have gone on to be experimentally confirmed. It's almost a metaphysics, I suppose.
And then this, in the golden years of physics (the five years after the 1927 Solvay Congress), "they" split the atom." A 25-year-old Gamow predicted that the proton, as a WAVE, could burrown into the nucleus and split it, but as a PARTICLE, the proton could not split the nucleus. Is that not bizarre? On April 13 or April 14, "they split the atom." [The exact date is open to question: two of the physicists dated their logs on this momentous day, but one dated it April 13th, one April 14th.]
This is a hard book to read; my review at Amazon, when it goes live, expands on this.
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