Einstein and Car Batteries - A Spark of Genius From The Economist
Einstein and Car Batteries - A Spark of Genius From The Economist
Einstein and Car Batteries - A Spark of Genius From The Economist
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ALBERT EINSTEIN never learned to drive. He thought it too complicated and in any case he
preferred walking. What he did not know—indeed, what no one knew until now—is that most cars
would not work without the intervention of one of his most famous discoveries, the special theory
of relativity.
Special relativity deals with physical extremes. It governs the behaviour of subatomic particles
zipping around powerful accelerators at close to the speed of light and its equations foresaw the
conversion of mass into energy in nuclear bombs. A paper in Physical Review Letters, however,
reports a more prosaic application. According to the calculations of Pekka Pyykko of the University
of Helsinki and his colleagues, the familiar lead-acid battery that sits under a car’s bonnet and
provides the oomph to get the engine turning owes its ability to do so to special relativity.
Relative values
The lead-acid battery is one of the triumphs of 19th-century technology. It was invented in 1860
and is still going strong. Superficially, its mechanism is well understood. Indeed, it is the stuff of
high-school chemistry books. But Dr Pyykko realised that there was a problem. In his view, when
you dug deeply enough into the battery’s physical chemistry, that chemistry did not explain how it
worked.
A lead-acid battery is a collection of cells, each of which contains two electrodes immersed in a
strong solution of sulphuric acid. One of the electrodes is composed of metallic lead, the other of
porous lead dioxide. In the parlance of chemists, metallic lead is electropositive. This means that
when it reacts with the acid, it tends to lose some of its electrons. Lead dioxide, on the other
hand, is highly electronegative, preferring to absorb electrons in chemical reactions. If a
conductive wire is run between the two, electrons released by the lead will run through it towards
the lead dioxide, generating an electrical current as they do so. The bigger the difference in the
electropositivity and electronegativity of the materials that make up a battery’s electrodes, the
bigger the voltage it can deliver. In the case of lead and lead dioxide, this potential difference is
just over two volts per cell.
That much has been known since the lead-acid battery was invented. However, although the
properties of these basic chemical reactions have been measured and understood to the nth
degree, no one has been able to show from first principles exactly why lead and lead dioxide tend
to be so electropositive and electronegative. This is a particular mystery because tin, which shares
many of the features of lead, makes lousy batteries. Metallic tin is not electropositive enough
compared with the electronegativity of its oxide to deliver a useful potential difference.
This is partly explained because the bigger an atom is, the more weakly its outer electrons are
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Einstein and car batteries: A spark of genius | The Economist http://www.economist.com/node/17899724/print
bound to it (and hence the further those electrons are from the nucleus). In all groups of
chemically similar elements the heaviest are the most electropositive. However, this is not enough
to account for the difference between lead and tin. To put it bluntly, classical chemical theory
predicts that cars should not start in the morning.
Which is where Einstein comes in. For, according to Dr Pyykko’s calculations, relativity explains
why tin batteries do not work, but lead ones do.
His chain of reasoning goes like this. Lead, being heavier than tin, has more protons in its nucleus
(82, against tin’s 50). That means its nucleus has a stronger positive charge and that, in turn,
means the electrons orbiting the nucleus are more attracted to it and travel faster, at roughly 60%
of the speed of light, compared with 35% for the electrons orbiting a tin atom. As the one
Einsteinian equation everybody can quote, E=mc2, predicts, the kinetic energy of this extra
velocity (ie, a higher E) makes lead’s electrons more massive than tin’s (increasing m)—and heavy
electrons tend to fall in and circle the nucleus in more tightly bound orbitals.
That has the effect of making metallic lead less electropositive (ie, more electronegative) than
classical theory indicates it should be—which would tend to make the battery worse. But this
tendency is more than counterbalanced by an increase in the electronegativity of lead dioxide. In
this compound, the tightly bound orbitals act like wells into which free electrons can fall, allowing
the material to capture them more easily. That makes lead dioxide much more electronegative
than classical theory would predict.
And so it turned out. Dr Pyykko and his colleagues made two versions of a computer model of how
lead-acid batteries work. One incorporated their newly hypothesised relativistic effects while the
other did not. The relativistic simulations predicted the voltages measured in real lead-acid
batteries with great precision. When relativity was excluded, roughly 80% of that voltage
disappeared.
That is an extraordinary finding, and it prompts the question of whether previously unsuspected
battery materials might be lurking at the heavier end of the periodic table. Ironically, today’s most
fashionable battery material, lithium, is the third-lightest element in that table—and therefore one
for which no such relativistic effects can be expected. And lead is about as heavy as it gets before
elements become routinely radioactive and thus inappropriate for all but specialised applications.
Still, the search for better batteries is an endless one, and Dr Pyykko’s discovery might prompt
some new thinking about what is possible in this and other areas of heavy-element chemistry.
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