Reddit reviews The New Science of Strong Materials: Or Why You Don't Fall Through the Floor (Penguin Science)

The appearance of car windows through polarised sunglasses is due to the toughening process during manufacture, in which the hot glass is cooled by jets of air. This causes the outside surface to be in a state of compression and the inner surface to be in tension.

Strains in glass can be seen with polarised light, and using polarised sunglasses shows up the pattern of air jets used in the toughening process.

Source: The New Science of Strong Materials JE Gordon, 1968 (Footnote in Chapter 5.)

The problem is generally going to be the microstructure of the cell rather than the Chemistry itself. At really small scales (ie nano and sub-nano) you can almost always reverse the Chemistry by reversing the flow of electricity.

If you wanted a really crude tl;dr for battery technology development, it would be, microstructure is annoying; going to a nano scale takes microstructure out of the equation, and this can get you much closer to the performance implied by simple chemistry.

This also applies to making really strong materials; if there weren't microstructural defects messing everything up, you'd be able to directly relate material properties to chemical bond energies. If you do sums on that basis then you end up with very impressive performance. So carbon nano-tubes aren't so much massively strong, as not massively weakened by microstructural defects. See for example the excellent works of J.E. Gordon.

I'm a mechanical, but I found J.E. Gordon's

https://www.amazon.ca/New-Science-Strong-Materials-Gordon/dp/0140135979/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=why+you+don%27t+fall+through+the+floor&qid=1554554032&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull

and

https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=structures+or+why+things+don%27t+fall+down&crid=2RE2JL3NBE3K6&sprefix=why+things+don%2Caps%2C191&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_14

both entertaining and eye-opening. Gordon was in on the beginning of fracture mechanics, but snuck away from classes to soak in an art gallery. I particularly remember that wood is a great material for panels (if it didn't exist we would have to invent it) that on a weight basis sinew is nearly the best material for energy storage, and that amphorae were the Greek equivalent of the Coke can, and they are beautiful because the Greeks were incapable of creating anything ugly. Seeing a can in the street reminds me that we are not only capable, but nearly revel in our ability.

The really eye-opening one for me were his comments on masonry structures, particularly scaling. If you build a model of a cathedral, and it stands up, it can be built to any scale until you reach the compressive strength of the rock, which is kilometres high. That means that the cathedral that took 400 years to build had its foundations laid by people who knew that their granchildren's granchildren would not see it completed.

We don't build like that anymore.

Neither book is nuts and bolts, light on math, and more directed to sharpening your eye than beefing up your calculations.

I'm sure all the materials science is out of date, but I doubt that much of it is wrong.

A good wikipedia page on the square-cube law to start digging for various sources. It's such a solid part of maths and materials that most papers on it are probably filled with 'thou art' and so forth.

Again a wikipedia page, this time on fracture mechanics and, specifically the 'griffiths crack length'. This stuff was worked out after WW1 boats started splitting in half unexpectedly due to square portholes and access hatches rather than ones with rounded edges. This subject is so demonstrated we cover it in first-year engineering at uni.

A great pair of books on the subject that are both very informative AND fun to read rather than just dry academia are Structures; or why things don't fall down and The new science of strong materials; or why we don't fall through the flaw. I know those links are for amazon but hopefully you can find a copy in a library or something.