“It is the way of this world that a ‘crazy person’ is often required for lowering the risk barriers for everyone else,” said 1998 Nobel Laureate in Physics, author and professor at Stanford University Robert B. Laughlin. “In science we like to say that there are three stages of any important new idea; the first stage is “that is crazy,” the second stage is “that is not crazy, but it will never work in practice,” and the third stage is “I thought of it first,” he continued. Laughlin was speaking about his ideas for a reliable and sustainable energy strategy at the signing ceremony for the NADINE (National Demonstrator for IseNtropic Energy Storage) project – a joint effort by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR), together with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Stuttgart. This consortium intends to build a research facility to study and develop […]