The third dimension

I think right now battery technology, or, I guess, energy storage in general, is the most significant arm of technological development. So many other important technologies depend on batteries, and would benefit so much from significant breakthroughs in battery technology.

Mostly, I think of batteries along two dimensions: battery life, and battery size. Obviously those are kind of related, in the sense that you can make a longer life battery if you can figure out how to make batteries smaller and just use more of them. Unfortunately, progress in those areas seems to have stagnated over the past few years.

But, having started using a phone with the new Quick Charge system, I've begun to realise that charging time actually makes up a fairly significant third dimension. If you can charge a device quickly enough that recharging stops being inconvenient, then battery life stops mattering as much. At an extreme, you can imagine a battery that charges instantly, at which point you could just touch your phone to a charging point for a second if you ever notice it getting low.

It seems like this is one of those situations like CPU development where physical limitations are stopping us from making much direct progress, and future gains have to come from making clever end-runs around the problem. Those end-runs come from figuring out some other dimension like recharge speed that can still be optimised, even if it isn't the thing you set out to improve.