No More Hustleporn: John B. Goodenough, inventor of the lithium battery
In honor of John B. Goodenough, who helped invent the lithium battery and RAM, and passed away Sunday at 100, here is his official Nobel Prize interview from 2019. Transcription and light editing by Anthropic's Claude, curation by Yiren Lu :-)
Highlights
How did you meet your wife?
I was in graduate school, and she came a little later on my graduate school time and I was living in the International House and she was living in the International House and the girls lived in one side and the boys in another. And we met at the dining room table in between.
She didn't blow me over because she was glamorous. She wasn't glamorous. She was just herself. She was very comfortable with herself. And so it was very easy for me to make a friend. You see, love has to do with friendship. Friendship. I suppose the most important thing is that you have a companion, that you share the deep things of life. But it's always difficult for a man to understand the secrets in a woman's heart.
What life advice can you share?
Well, I think you should be enthusiastic about life. You should enjoy what you do. And I say to myself each day, help us, O Lord, so long as we live. To live nobly and to the good cheer of our fellow man. I think that to live life at the fullest you have to be able to have dialogue with people who want a dialogue with you. And so I think you have to just be thankful for life and be thankful for people who like to engage in meaningful dialogue with you. Yes. I don't think pessimism gets us anywhere. Even though we may live in illusions, we have to work very hard to fulfill our illusions as best we can.
What environment encourages creative thinking?
Quietness. I mean, you have to think, that's hard work. Some people can listen to music and think at the same time, but if you're a musician, they never want background music, right? You either listen to the music or you turn it off.
Full Transcript
What advice would you give to a younger version of yourself?
That's a difficult question because I hope that the younger version of myself that you're talking about would be a little bit brighter than I was as a younger person. But dialogue, dialogue, dialogue is always very important. We both learn that way.
How do you recognise a good teacher?
Well, I think you recognize a good teacher first if they're clear and understand what they're talking about. But they also have to know how to challenge you, not in a way that turns you off, but in a way that challenged you to turn on. So a good teacher always makes you do something a little bit more than you thought you could do.
Do you see yourself as a mentor now?
I go to the lab in order to interact with my postdoctoral students and try to see if I can shape them to not copy, but to ask questions and to think. And we have to have a little dialogue because you don't pretend to be the spouse of all wisdom. Wisdom comes out of dialogue. So you have to develop the capacity to expose your own ignorance in order that they may discover their own wisdom first. Don't copy. Think about the problem, and to remember that we compete against problems, not against people.
What qualities do you think you need to be a successful scientist?
Well, as I say, don't believe everything you read. Don't be afraid to think. And it's all right to understand what has gone before, but don't just rely on copying, but develop your own internal voice and your own internal means of interpreting. It's a very individual thing, and there are many different ways to be successful. Some people are very good at building equipment. You got to be able to measure and you got to be able to know what you're measuring and you and to interpret and so on. There are other people who do theory and develop theoretical understanding and then there are people who develop intuition. You have to have some scientific intuition as well. And every scientist is an individual and brings a different talent to the problem. But you have to be willing to dialogue so that we can all benefit from one another's intuition.
How do you cope with failure?
We all have to recognize that we're going to fail sometimes. All right, but some failures are more traumatic than others.
How has your dyslexia shaped you?
It meant that I learned to love nature, but it meant also that I would never have been a very good reader. You have to struggle to read as best you can, but you have to not worry. You have to just get out and enjoy life and enjoy what you can. Do well and do it as well as you can.
How important has nature been for you?
We are supposed to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our mind, and with all our strength. All right? But that's separate from loving our neighbor as ourselves. It means nature is God's creation. So we should love nature and understand nature the best we can in order to show our love for the Creator. It's a wonderful thing, this nature that this earth and its abundance and its surprises and its resources and its change. So for me, it's just I'm grateful to be a part of nature.
Has music played an important role in your life?
I can't say that I am a good musician. I'm not particularly musical, but I got rhythm. I prefer. I like Bach.
How did your interest in poetry start?
I was to take a course in poetry. And of course, if you don't read very well, poetry is a more difficult thing to really understand metaphor and so on. So I had to try to see how would I learn how to read poetry. And I thought, well, the only way to do that is to write poetry. And if you start to write poetry, then you realize the problem he has to make, the metaphors and so on. So that's how I started to write poetry. I tried to write a poem for my wife every birthday and every Christmas. My wife and I shared very much a vision of Christianity. And so I would always write something that was relating to character or to something or other of that nature and had always had a religious bent to it.
How did you meet your wife?
I was in graduate school, and she came a little later on my graduate school time and I was living in the International House and she was living in the International House and the girls lived in one side and the boys in another. And we met at the dining room table in between.
She didn't blow me over because she was glamorous. She wasn't glamorous. She was just herself. She was very comfortable with herself. And so it was very easy for me to make a friend. You see, love has to do with friendship. Friendship. I suppose the most important thing is that you have a companion, that you share the deep things of life. But it's always difficult for a man to understand the secrets in a woman's heart.
What life advice can you share?
Well, I think you should be enthusiastic about life. You should enjoy what you do. And I say to myself each day, help us, O Lord, so long as we live. To live nobly and to the good cheer of our fellow man. I think that to live life at the fullest you have to be able to have dialogue with people who want a dialogue with you. And so I think you have to just be thankful for life and be thankful for people who like to engage in meaningful dialogue with you. Yes. I don't think pessimism gets us anywhere. Even though we may live in illusions, we have to work very hard to fulfill our illusions as best we can.
How do you remember so much of your life?
One of the great mysteries of life is memory. I helped somebody who was trying to understand memory and the sources of memory and so on. And I learned it was a rather complex problem.
How does it feel to be back in Stockholm after 80 years?
My first visit here that summer or that autumn with the autumn that Hitler moved into Poland.
I am very grateful to the city of Stockholm and to all the people who are here to not only the city, but what the city represents and so on. So thank you all for your hospitality and for even embarrassing me by asking me so many questions I don't answer very well.
How has living through World War II influenced you?
Well, I've realized the stupidity of war, the waste of war, the bravery of some and I believe not in walls, but in building relationships. All right, if we can build relationships, we minimize the attempts to go to war. And I think that science is an international language and helps to build the relationships that are necessary to suppress the greed and stupidities that lead to war.
What is your relationship with your lab colleagues?
My lab colleagues are very good to me. We enjoy working together in the laboratory, but I don't necessarily hobnob with all of them. In the recreation times, we do it in the laboratory and so on. But that doesn't mean I don't like other friends and that I have other friends too. I dialogue with them about other things than just their work. And so if we're eating, they bring me some lunch and we're having some lunch together, so on. We talk about other things.
When my wife was living she was a gracious hostess and a good cook so then we would invite students who couldn't go home for their holidays always to come and enjoy their holidays. And she would cook very well. I'm afraid I miss my wife quite a bit. She was very special.
What are the characteristics of a very good team?
A good team is never selfish. It shares and recognised that they do things together.
I shouldn't steal the intellectual property of my students and they shouldn't steal the intellectual property of one another.
What is your relationship with Akira Yoshino?
We're not good friends in the normal sense of friendship, but he has always been a person who has listened to what I'm doing and reacted to it. And we've had dialogue in the science together. In that sense, we're good friends. And for example, when I say, Well, Li CO2 is going to be a very good cathode, he immediately comes up and says, yeah, and you've got to join it with carbon.
How has the scientific landscape changed over the years?
Science is an international language. That's one of the beauties of science. And so there's always international interaction in all aspects of science. That's why people publish papers and read papers in order to be able to interact and dialogue as best you can with everybody who's interested in the same kind of problems you are.
I'm not an astrophysicist to continue with their exploration or particle physicists to keep looking at what are the building blocks of nature and so on. But scientific, I mean, people do learn some things, and even I learn some things. My scientific landscape changes according to how much I've learned in the last year. All right? The science hasn't changed. It's just my understanding of the science has changed and come along.
What environment encourages creative thinking?
Quietness. I mean, you have to think, that's hard work. Some people can listen to music and think at the same time, but if you're a musician, they never want background music, right? You either listen to the music or you turn it off.