Many tasks, but what is common for all of them?
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FEATURE ARTICLE
Many tasks, but what is common for all of them? Jiří Ludvík 1 Received: 3 June 2020 / Revised: 3 June 2020 / Accepted: 4 June 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
There are many tasks, themes, and dreams for electrochemical science in the future—partly already expected, planned in grants projects, and accompanied by current aimed research and partly still unsuspected or undreamed, which appear by chance, unexpectedly, amazingly. I am not able to predict or select the most important and most desirable ones. But I would like to stress the very basic, natural aspect, which is, unfortunately, often overlooked or skipped: fundamental research based on good knowledge of principles and published achievements. I know, I am saying nothing new, but ... It is evident that (any) research from the very beginning of human existence has always two main aims: (1) to observe, describe, and understand the processes around us and to recognize and formulate the rules how the things function and (2) to use the acquired knowledge as well as the understood principles for improvement of human life, for development of technologies, medicine, security, ..., generally for various applications. These aims are consecutive (even in electrochemistry): prior to any application, the fundamental research must precede. Usually (and specially today) the research activities leading directly as fast as possible to application are much more attractive than investigation of general fundaments, search for new structures, new phenomena, new principles, and new effects. It is natural—everybody is looking forward to new technology, new medicals, new materials, energy sources, and new artificial processes; moreover, all these achievements are attractive also for publishers, for providers of financial support, for patent business, and for social recognition. Therefore, I expect that even in this special issue, the actual “hot” topics in applied research will be mentioned
* Jiří Ludvík [email protected] 1
J. Heyrovský Institute of Physical Chemistry, Czech Academy of Sciences, Dolejškova 3, 18223 Prague 8, Czech Republic
preferentially as the future tasks of electrochemical research. And I agree, it is necessary. Nevertheless, I would like to remind that every brilliant application is based on fundamental research performed years and decades earlier, by many “unknown” scientists, and, paradoxically, often with different original intention. Therefore, in order to develop more and more smart applications, the most important general task for future electrochemistry remains the fundamental research on molecular and submolecular level—we can call it “pico-science” (in contrast to the actually most used “nano-science”). In other words, it is necessary to focus the attention to the understanding the observed phenomena, processes, principles, mechanisms, consequences, activities, and properties that means to use more (and first) the question “why?” (why it functions according this mechanism, why the molecule or
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