omenti

art

Growing up I managed to develop a deep familiarity with Ford Falcons.  My parents had three of them over the years.  Cars were simple mechanical objects even a teenager could deal with.  In the Winter part of my job was to get the engine running in the morning.  If it was colder than -20°F it meant raising the hood, taking off the air cleaner and spraying some ether into the carburetor.  Changing spark plugs, adjusting brakes and even pulling the head to replace the head gasket were amateur jobs a teenager could handle.  But this simplicity came at a cost.

 

The little straight six engine was based on a 1941 design.  Not only were the mechanical tolerances loose (oil changes every 2000 miles), but the design was inefficient.  The car only weighed 2,000 pounds, but 20 mpg was dreamland.  I think the best trip we took saw 18 or 19 mpg.  The inefficiency was the result of incomplete combustion that produced a witch's brew of nasty hydrocarbons.  Many cities of the day were covered with thick blankets of photochemical smog.

 

Two events would fundamental change the simplicity of the car - the environmental explosion of the late 60s and the OPEC oil embargoes.  Together these increased power train efficiency larger through government regulation.  The auto makers kicked and screamed about the pain of moving from 1940 technology, but the goals turned out to be achievable.  The industry had bigger problems at the time.

 

The OPEC embargo deeply impacted the country.  People were talking about conservation for the first time since WWII.  Convincing people to converse was a political trap.  It proved to be the turning point for a particle physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the nation.

 

Art Rosenfeld was a successful experimental particle physicist during a remarkable period of discovery.  In 1973 he started to think deeply about the energy problem and created a formal study of energy use.  Approaching the field as a physicist he and his group identified several areas of low hanging fruit - notably lighting efficiency and window insulation.  Industry was uninterested so they had to invent things like the practical compact fluorescent bulb and methods of making large scale tin oxide window coatings.  In addition to showing it was possible, Art did the impossible and managed to get California to mandate doable energy efficiency requirements.  Among other things this led to energy efficiency ratings for home appliances.  

 

The energy and pollution savings from this work has been enormous.  The savings in the early 2000s were calculated at over $100B a year in the US alone.  How many people can you think of who have had impacts exceeded a trillion dollars?  The ultimate savings in terms of mitigation from avoided greenhouse gas emission may be even greater.

 

A tribute

 

 

and a 2008 speech

 

Art mostly left particle physics in 1973.  1974 brought one of the greatest revolutions to particle physics and the five or so years that followed were electric as the Standard Model emerged as the best description of the Universe.  Art was doing something of more immediate impact.

 

He's one of my heroes.  I've had the pleasure of a few long chats. Nothing touched on the past - only the road ahead and work to be done.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Not a recipe, but a trick.  You should have local tomatoes ripe from the vine within a few hours of picking, but you can extend the tasty life of tomato flavor by dipping the tomatoes in hot water to prevent flavor loss during chilling.

Describing the process in more detail, Bai explains that he and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, and the University of Florida dipped Florida-grown green tomatoes in hot water (about 125 degrees Fahrenheit) for five minutes and then let them cool at room temperature. Next they chilled the fruit to between 41 and 55 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperatures commercial producers use for shipping. After the tomatoes fully ripened, the researchers tested them for flavor and aroma.

They found that tomatoes heated before chilling had higher levels of flavor compounds (6-methyl-5-hepten-2-one, 2-methylbutanal and 2-phenylethanol) than non-heated fruit, and they tasted better, Bai says. "Chilling suppresses production of oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur-containing heterocyclic compounds, ketones, alcohols and aldehydes, including 13 important aroma components of tomato flavor. But hot water-treated fruit actually produced higher concentrations of these important aroma contributors, even with subsequent chilling."

Currently, they are monitoring flavor compounds at additional time points -- when the tomatoes are green, soon after the process is performed and when they are partially ripened. This information will be combined with data on fully ripened tomatoes to help the team develop a better commercial process.

Bai says that his team's approach is an easy, inexpensive fix to the flavor problem. Many post-harvest technologies sacrifice flavor to prevent bruising or spoiling, he points out. "Our methods can easily be implemented in the current commercial system without risking fruit decay," he explains.

 

This is a commercial technique, but tomatoes are cheap at the moment.  I've been trying it in a 125°F bath for five minutes before refrigerating and comparing with fresh ones after a few days.  So far so good.  There is a lot of room for experimentation!

 

 

aim down from the mind and go for the heart

 

There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three — storyteller, teacher, enchanter — but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.

To the storyteller we turn for entertainment, for mental excitement of the simplest kind, for emotional participation, for the pleasure of traveling in some remote region in space or time. A slightly different though not necessarily higher mind looks for the teacher in the writer. Propagandist, moralist, prophet — this is the rising sequence. We may go to the teacher not only for moral education but also for direct knowledge, for simple facts… Finally, and above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter, and it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems.

The three facets of the great writer — magic, story, lesson — are prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought. There are masterpieces of dry, limpid, organized thought which provoke in us an artistic quiver quite as strongly as a novel like Mansfield Park does or as any rich flow of Dickensian sensual imagery. It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.

- from Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature

 

Seven years ago I gave the first of what became a series of about fifteen public talks about energy.  I had been worrying about global warming since the mid 90s and was at the point where speaking in public felt necessary. I'm not a good public speaker, but  improved with time with the question and answer sessions often taking more than an hour.  Most of the questions centered on what could be done at the individual level.  It became clear that many people lacked the background to sort out the costs and rewards of their actions.    

 

I thought a short energy primer would make a difference.  People seemed interested and some good conclusions could be made with a bit of a toolkit.  The talk shifted more towards energy education, but still had global warming as the main draw. I thought I was making progress - there wasn't any rotten fruit and a few places even invited me back for a second talk.

 

It is probably true that you can get one or two concepts across in a one hour talk.  The idea of a book written for the intelligent non-STEM reader began to gel.   I partnered with a smart friend who could write, but had no background in science or engineering.  Between the two of us perhaps we could find the right level.  

 

Early on she made a very important observation about how people perceived energy. It struck her that no one thinks in terms of energy, but most of us have an intuitive understanding of power - the rate at which energy is being converted from one form to another.¹  It was a great observation and gave us a foundation. Ask much as possible we would frame energy use in terms of power - something people often have control over - and we would try to keep as close to the human scale as possible rather than trying to impress people with the enormous scale of the system.  After all, we were hoping to speak to individual actions.

 

I have the bad habit of tending towards fundamental explanations where a quick paragraph would probably do. It was difficult finding the right level and still be different from a hundred other good books.  Not only was it difficult to find the right level, but it was also becoming clear that energy education, at least what happens in a book, wasn't going to have much impact.  Another friend kept reminding us that anything aimed at a mass general audience probably had to be video - and probably short youtube pieces at that.

 

This was difficult for someone like me to grapple with.  Putting together videos is far beyond what I could do.  It was also a bit depressing seeing the growing pushback against science.  There was  overwhelming evidence.  But that isn't important in a climate of unscientific doubt.  Asking people to recognize the risk and make a change requires much more than understanding what has been learned. We dropped work on the book.   A new journey was necessary.  She proceeded down her path of working with people at the individual level and I continued to speak, but now I was spending a lot of time talking to social scientists, science educators and film makers.  There was much to understand, but a few issues stood out:

 

Why do people ignore solid scientific evidence? 

How do you communicate something this important that is also technical?  

How does change happen?

How badly will we fail?²

 

The rejection of climate science appears to be cultural.  Concern is  high in sea level countries like Bangladesh and island nations that are impoverished and poorly shielded from disaster. Change is happening now.  A few bad crops or a bad storm and that's it.  But the abundance in wealthy nations allows us to distance ourselves from the immediate impact of Nature. A bad hurricane may kill a few people and destroy a billion dollars worth of property and raise prices by a tiny amount, but for the average citizen its something forgotten in a week or two.  People living in a wealthy climate change conflicted nation like the US have several issues to deal with:

 

distance in time, space and psychology Many of the predictions are distilled to a sound-bite:  sea level will rise by one or two meters by 2100.  Even 2050 seems a huge step into the far future.   Most new parents aren't thinking about their children's college education, let alone their retirement - events on a much shorter scale.  Change is taking place in the Antarctica and Arctic, but they're physically far away and we don't see dramatic changes happening locally.  We think of the others who are responsible as groups and ourselves as individuals.  The distance between us and the problem has several dimensions and each component seems too large to be important in our lifetimes.

 

gloom and doom Most global warming communication aimed at the citizen is gloom and doom.  The last polar bear standing on a shrinking piece of ice in the Arctic Ocean...  It is well known that fear inducing communication instills makes people more passive.  If you're feeling guilty you often compartmentalize and ignore problems.  

 

cognitive dissonance  Most of us are aware that that the use of fossil fuel is at the root of the problem, but we go about our lives flying, driving, cooking, eating meat and so on.  When we try to think of solutions we have to deal with this cognitive dissonance and the default is often weakening the link ....  It's mostly the Chinese who use so much coal. I don't drive much, but my neighbor has two SUVs,  I know someone who flies 50,000 miles a year...  Fox News tells me there is doubt among scientists that CO₂ even causes global warming...  It is so cold this Winter...  We can ignore the problem because science will solve the problem without any effort from us...

 

If people intellectually partner with the doubters and minimizers, they have created a way to ignore their cognitive dissonance.  Some political and corporate forces are skilled at exploiting this bit of human psychology. 

 

denial It is convenient for some to outright deny the problem.  In some ways this is a deepening of our psychological mechanism for dealing with cognitive dissonance.  We are defining ares that we've chosen not to deal with.   Curiously those who are well educated are often more skilled when it comes to denying something outside of their expertise than less educated people.  

 

Another interesting bit of psychology is at work.  If you try to get people to change by criticizing them, they often build a stronger resistance as part of their denial.  I admire them. but I've come to believe a good deal of the messaging from self described greens has been extremely counterproductive^.3  

  

At one point I was speaking to a group of several hundred animators.  I was expecting a lot of good questions and had some good examples on changing a lifestyle at the personal level and politics above.  I thought I was communicating.  Halfway through the talk it struck me I was in one of storytelling's sacred places.  The entrance of the building had a three story soccer's hat.  This was the place that produced Bambi.  I didn't have anything important to say to these storytellers. I stopped with words and emotion took over.  I hadn't thought about that film for years.   Suddenly it was back.  I had seen at a special time and, against all odds, my heart told me I could no longer eat meat.  It wasn't logic, it wasn't science, it was just a flight my mind had taken while I was part of the story.  It took about two minutes to regain my composure and I thanked them for changing my life and wondered out loud if they could do it again - this time on a more pressing problem.

 

 If there is to be change we need great stories. Positive messages that go directly to the heart.  I'm not a good storyteller, so I try and partner with those who are.  Not everything we tried worked - making a film is expensive and can fail at many steps.  But it is clear to me now that you must speak to someone's heart than their head.  

 

Nabokov continues...

 

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.

Going back for a moment to our wolf-crying woodland little woolly fellow, we may put it this way: the magic of art was in the shadow of the wolf that he deliberately invented, his dream of the wolf; then the story of his tricks made a good story. When he perished at last, the story told about him acquired a good lesson in the dark around the camp fire. But he was the little magician. He was the inventor.

 

I can encourage and partner with the storytellers, but there is another path.  What if impactful change can be had by encouraging new behaviors that don't address global warming directly?  Consider meat eating.  

 

Making meat is enormously inefficient - corn to cow, under ideal conditions, is about ten percent efficient and that doesn't count the energy inefficiency and environmental impact of intense corn cultivation.  A few people have meatless Mondays and a vanishingly small percent are vegan or vegetarian, but these are non-trivial behavioral shift.  What if less impactful food was more appealing?

 

Worldwide it we rely on about 150 plants for food with about 70% of food energy coming from three crops - rice, corn and wheat.  Nature offers much more - about 50,000 crops are edible.  It would take time, but moving further into the space of the 150 known and beginning to experiment with what may be amazing flavor combinations in the great unknown may shift a non-trivial percentage of meat based meals back to something with a smaller impact on global warming.  Maybe it makes sense to encourage outstanding chefs to experiment and create a desire...

 

There are so many other ways.  In California a program of subsidized low income housing incorporates solar arrays.  The power is not quite enough to cover internal use, but conservation is encouraged by a box with a few colors of light.  If you are close to being a net exporter of power, your utility bill is $5 a month - otherwise you pay the full rate.  People quickly become expert at conservation.  It may not be cost effective now and there are questions about home solar arrays, but it is an example...  You can say the same about automatic thermostats and those with utility overrides.

 

There is active transportation ... and so many other possibilities.  You can probably sit down and make a different list on your own.  It may be that serious opportunity for the environment as well as business lurk in such lists and some of it may not be technical.  I remain very hopeful that change will occur, but have come to believe much of it will be done for reasons other than 'being green'...

 

In the meantime I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to talk about power and energy.  Education isn't the direct path to change in the short term, but it is still useful.  Every once and awhile I'll probably write a bit here.  Who knows.  Perhaps there should be a podcast or a series of videos.  Maybe it is worth trying...

 __________

¹ Her analogy is energy is the gas in your car, power is what happens when you push down on the accelerator.  A more technical explanation is power is the rate at which energy is converted from one form to another.  In any event her point was we physically sense power by how we use our muscles.  How much we need to eat is less immediate and more abstract.

² Given the amount of carbon that has been burned and the fact it stays in the atmosphere for so long guarantees a temperature rise, and more importantly a swift rise, that we are guaranteed some pain.  How much depends on mitigation.   At the same time we need to sort out how to adapt.  Wealthy nations will be able to afford some adaptation - think of it as a tax on our children based on our non-action.  It will be much more expensive than a successful mitigation effort, but we're not paying.  There will also be a lot of companies that get rich from the work.   At the same time there will be hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people who will lose.  As we've learned in the past 20 years that may have consequences far beyond their local hardship.

³ It would be hypocritical for me to claim to be green.  My personal rate of energy use is 6.5 to 7.0 kW.  While this is low for an American, it is far from what is needed given the current energy mix I use.  It was as far as I could easily go given my financial resources and resolve.  I have a young friend in Cameroon who is probably under 0.5 kW.  That would be green in my book, although she'd never call herself that.  It is also an unfortunate way to be green.

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Recipe Corner

 

There are many ways to go on this potato salad.  It goes for olive oil rather than mayo and picks up much of its salt from olives.  

 

Potato Salad

 

Ingredients

 

° about a pound of waxy potatoes cut into inch-ish cubes - I like the skin, but peel them if you don't

° 1/2 pound of trimmed green beans cut into inch long pieces

° 1/2 cup of olive oil

° 2 tbl red wine vinegar

° 1 mined shallot

° 1 tsp minced garlic

° 1 tsp Dijon mustard

° 1/2 cup pitted olives, chopped.  I used cheap black olives, but fancy olives would be better

° 1 pt of cherry tomatoes, halved

° salt

° freshly ground pepper

 

Technique 

 

° Bring the potatoes to boil in a large pot with enough water to cover them by about an inch.  Throw in a pinch of salt (1/4 tsp?) Lower the heat to just below boiling and cook for about 6 or 7 minutes until just tender.  

° Add the green beans and cook until potatoes are somewhat tender and the beans are brightly colored - another 4 or 5 minutes.  Drain and rinse in cold water in a colander for about a minute

° Combine the oil, vinegar, garlic, shallot and mustard in a large bowl with some ground pepper and a bit of salt.  Mix in the potatoes and beans along with the tomatoes and olives.  Adjust the seasoning as necessary

 

finding the right concentration

Early this morning I spent a bit over an hour heating the basement.  I'm no athlete, but my morning exercise session has about an hour of rowing with the target of an average of 150 watts of power.  A real athlete could do much better - 400 watts for a cyclist is certainly possible, but 150 watts is what I can do and still function later in the day.  A rower with a bit of training somewhere between 22 and 25% efficient, so my body is burning energy at the rate of about 700 watts.  600 watts for rowing and about 100 watts to keep the rest of me alive.  That means I need to get rid of a lot of waste heat. 

 

It is interesting to think about this in terms of power density - the power I use divided by the surface area of my body.¹  Without exercise I need an average of about 100 watts of power from nutrition and my surface area is about 2 square meters, giving a power density of about 50 watts per square meter.²  Power density shoots up during exercise.  Usain Bolt generates about 2000 watts of waste heat in his 100 meter trips - over 1000 watts per square meter.  A problem is a body can't rid itself of heat that quickly, but that's another issue.

 

Most of the energy we use ultimately comes from the Sun.  On average we get about 1366 watts per square meter at the top of the atmosphere.  About 1,000 watts makes it to sea level on a clear day.  Now through in the fact that the Earth is a rotating sphere, clouds, etc and the number drops to about 250 watts per square meter.  More than a person.  

 

Some of the sunlight is turned into carbohydrates by green plants.  If the average efficiency of green plants was one percent (the real number is a few tenths of a percent), they would be average about 2 watts of power.  If we could eat these high efficiency plants, about 50 square meters of garden would feed me.  Real farmland needs are much greater - something like 0.5 hectares in the US and 0.08 in China. 

 

Something like a 10,000^th of the plants are turned into a stored fossil fuel over long periods of time.  Coal production may only average a few tenths of a milliwatt per square meter, but the planet has stored it for millions of years.  A little over a large area for a long time can add up.

 

Geothermal power sounds great at first glance.   Some of it comes from heat leftover from the Earth's formation and some from radioactive decay within the Earth.   On the scale of humans this amounts to a non-exhaustible power source.  The interior of the Earth is hot, so why not let it heat up water to make power?  We would have something rare - a non-intermittent renewable source of power.  The problem is that of concentration. On average geothermal energy is diffuse working out to about 50 milliwatts per square meter - about a thousandth the power density of your body.   On the other hand the Earth has a lot of surface area, so an estimate is in order to see if it is generally practical before considering its economics.

 

Unless you are in a location with active volcanoes or geysers, the diffuse heat from the ground only produces a tiny temperature difference at the surface.  The efficiency of a machine that can extract power from a heat source depends on how hot the source of power is.³  The trick is to find some really hot water.  Either find hotspots like those seem in Iceland, California, New Zealand and Japan or drill a deep hole to where it is hot.

 

On average drilling about 10,000 feet takes you to a hot enough area to get to give a 30% theoretical efficiency.  50 milliwatts per square meter is now down to about 17 milliwatts.⁴  We have to have a lot of surface area for the water to heat up, so fracking the rock is essential.  A square kilometer would provide 17,000 watts.  Now it is a question of asking your population density and looking at your needs.  The average American household uses about 1,000 watts of electric power (twice that much if there is an electric car).  Do the arithmetic, but this is not a global solution.

 

Geothermal can be great locally.  Reykjavik gets almost all of its non-transportation power from hydro and geothermal and has the cleanest air of any world capital (assuming a volcano is erupting).  A few other areas with very dense concentrations of very hot water have been exploited totaling about 11 gigawatts of electric power generation worldwide along with hot water for district heating and industrial use.  The Western US is, at least in theory, economically exploitable using fracking, but some experiments have led to an increase in small earthquakes to prevent widespread use.

 

Iceland is so beautiful - unfortunately the weather gets a bit depressing over the long haul.  Between the climate and language it seems likely the population should remain in check to allow them to get by with just hydro and geothermal power.

__________

¹ For historic reasons power density is usually power/area rather than power/volume although both are used.  Confusing ...  I'm sticking with power/area for now.  

² Direct measures of human surface area are difficult, but a few good approximations exist - fortunately as it is needed for dosing some medicines.  My tables and formula handbook suggests one by Mosteller:  body surface area (m²) = [height(cm) x weight(kg)]/3600]^0.5.  Mine comes out to 1.95m² - close enough to 2 m².

³ The theoretical efficiency limit is 1.0 - (ambient temperature)/(source temperature) where temperature is measured in degrees Kelvin.  It is rare to find a geothermal source even one degree hotter than the ambient temperature.  That would give about 0.3% maximum theoretical efficiency.  A complete non-starter. 

You can use this formula to find the maximum theoretical efficiency of an internal combustion engine.  The temperature of the burning gas in a cylinder is about 1500°F - roughly 1100°K.  So 1 - 300/1100 is a bit over .7 - 70% efficiency.  Even the best engines are far below this.  When you add the drivetrain about a quarter of the energy of the gas you buy goes towards moving you and your car.  I like bicycles and electric vehicles:-)

⁴ Note there is enough heat to extract more than 17 wW/m².  The problem is you end up cooling the rock and need to move your well and fracture field.  The 17 mW number represents the sustainable resource - its average replenishment rate.  Hot spots have much larger power densities, which is why this technology is likely to be geographically limited.

__________

Recipe Corner

 

It is now high tomato time and you should be celebrating.  Here is an old recipe I've mentioned before, but with perfect tomatoes it is both simple and brilliant.

___

The format of this one is not standard, but rather from an email I sent to one of you a year ago. I won't translate as it seems better in the narrative form.

This is the time of year that excellent tomatoes begin to appear. If you find some with amazing flavor and want an equally amazing dinner the trick is to keep things simple. This is a tomato and pasta dish I dream about all Winter and Fall. If the ingredients are great it can be spectacular and it also happens to be amazingly simple

 

Simple Summer Pasta and Tomatoes

 

Some time ago I had a very simple tomato and pasta dish. The tomatoes were
in chucks and not really cooked. It would only work if they were perfect so
I gave it a try. Here is about what I did. This would be enough for two
hungry people or four people if served as a side course.

Two really amazingly blimpishly ripe tomatoes that are going to have great
flavor. I would go with an heirloom tomato as the new ones have so much
goodness bred out of them. My guess is I had maybe about one and a half
pounds of tomato. Chop these into half inch pieces and scape them into a
big enough bowl (how is that for precision?) be sure and get some of the
juice that is sitting on the cutting board.

Pour some good extra virgin olive oil on them. Maybe two glugs (another quality
measurement). Put a good amount of a good finishing salt (Malden is great) and freshly ground pepper on them stirring to mix. Let them sit.

Start some water boiling for the pasta and throw some salt in. Cheap salt
of course

Now chop a strong red onion or some scallions into slivers. Maybe about a
quarter cup

Chop a handful of good arugula

Cook about a half pound of pasta and try to stay away from the marinating
tomatoes

Place the onions on top of the tomatoes spreading them out, then make a layer
of arugula choppings

Now dump the pasta on top of the layered mixture in the bowl and leave it
for a two or three minutes. To deal with the frustration grate some good
cheese for a topping and top it. The heat from the pasta is slightly cooking the ingredients beneath, but just barely.

Now mix it all up and serve.

 

 

a question of what products and services do for you

Over the years I’ve come to think about products and service in terms of ‘does this improve my life?’ and ‘does this make me happier?'  Reflecting on these questions has changed how I look at my relationship with services and things. More recently I’ve asked a few others to take their time and ask similar questions.   Rather than sumarize, I’d like to ask a larger group:

 

‘what product or service has made the largest impact on your life in the past decade?’ It could be a positive or negative impact.  Feel free to go into detail and tell a story.    I’ll collect the answers and summarize (if you want to be anonymous let me know) and send the results to those who answered.

 

send them to esc at mac dot com

 

tzero for the modern world

1 January, 1865

 

At least that's my take, but as usual a story lurks.  With physics many stories trace back to Isaac Newton.  Newtonian physics was and is an amazing triumph.  While we now have a much deeper understanding of how the Universe works, it is usually accurate enough to describe how the world - how much of the solar system - works at our scale.  We used it to get to the Moon.    The success was so great and the math so beautiful that it created a framework for physicists and mathematicians that lasted for a few centuries.  And that was a problem.

 

There are a few fundamental problems with Newtonian gravitation.  Newton was deeply troubled by one of them In his physics space is an empty void.  Gravity is an attractive force that acts on all pieces of mass in the Universe without any delay.  Its force depends on the distance between two bodies and falls off as the square of distance.  Just how is that force transmitted and how does it gauge the amount of empty void that separates the two bodies?  The math was simple and beautiful, but conceptually the model was ugly.

 

Newton worked on the problem playing with several alternate conjectures.  All of them failed.  Many mathematicians and physicists who came immediately after saw the theory as a useful tool and, in the end, read too much into it.  It was being elevated to physical law.

 

Michael Faraday almost shouldn't have happened.  The son of a blacksmith with only a few years of schooling, he managed to get an apprenticeship with a bookbinder - a firm that printed a few science books.  That was the hook.  He attended some of Humphry Davy's lectures and asked enough questions to be hired as an assistant.   He only had math up to trigonometry, but it was possible to do science without deep training in math then. Perhaps being clever at math would have kept him from making novel mental connections.  

 

Like many scientists of the day Faraday was interested in electricity, magnetism and optics - three separate fields.  Electric and magnetic forces appeared to share some features with gravity - after all - the strength of their force fell off with the square of distance and they appeared to act instantly.  Many of the theories looked like modifications of Newtonian gravity.  Faraday couldn't understand the math and turned to his wickedly powerful mind and deep physical intuition.  He noticed if you spread iron filings on a piece of paper that covered a bar magnet  the filings would trace arcs from one pole of the magnet to the other.  These magnetic lines of force were easily explained by the Newtonian void model people.  The instant forces from the magnet just act on each filing managing to orient it appropriately.  It just worked.  QED.  

 

Faraday's explanation was fundamentally different and novel.  He used a space filling medium - a fluid of sorts. The filings were just revealing the local state of that medium.  The magnet represented a disturbance in the fluid and the filings were just reacting to the fluid's current state.  

 

Consider the atmosphere.  Imagine placing a grid of tiny weather stations - miniatured wind vane/anemometers.  At each station you record the direction and speed of the wind.  These instruments are measuring the field.¹  Faraday had intuitively come up with field theory.  His model had some problems and mathematical physicists of the day discarded it as it was far from the mainstream work in Newtonian void models.  But it was a seed.

 

It should noted that Faraday wasn't considered a crackpot.  He had enormous respect in many areas and made fundamental contributions to many areas of physics and technology. Among other things he was a phenomenal public speaker.  For a treat you might want to read his six Christmas lectures on candles - a model for clear and deep public science speaking to this day.  I first learned about them from a friend who referred to them as the six lessons and carols.

 

Not every mathematical physicist ignored Faraday's idea. He had done brilliant experimental work discovering, among other things,  that moving a magnet could generate a current in a nearby wire. Not shabby as that led to the electric motor. Perhaps more importantly his idea managed to fire the imagination of one James Clerk Maxwell.

 

This is my favorite photo of Maxwell.  He was something of a physics polymath and had a deep interest in color.  Here he's holding a color wheel top created to test human color perception.  Unfortunately the photo is in black and white.  To see the colors you'd need color photography, but he hadn't invented that yet.

 

The best physicists are enormously playful and Maxwell brought that to the problem of electricity and magnetism.  He flew from idea to idea with several schemes, but recognized something deep in Faraday's observation and focused for several years.  By the early 1860s he managed to express several important laws of electricity and magnetism using the idea of a field (he would say fluid).  The result was messy, perhaps inelegant,  with something like 20 partial differential equations, but it was enough to tell him he was on the right track.

 

With his new model Maxwell could show how Faraday's experimental observation worked - that if you move a magnet near a wire an electric current is generated.  But something else came out.  If a current changes in a wire a magnetic field is generated.  There were time varying magnetic fields and time varying electric fields.  One could generate the other.  An almost trivial, but astounding beautiful, result was that this dance of the fields propagated through space - and at precisely the speed of light!  He wrote:

 

The velocity of transverse undulations in our hypothetical medium ... agrees so exactly with the velocity of light ... that we can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.

 

A necessary consequence of linking electricity and magnetism was that shaking the electromagnetic field created a disturbance that propagated at the speed of light - this disturbance was, in fact, light.

 

oh wow

 

There are few observations in science at that level.  I doubt there are more than a handful of times when such a brilliant discovery presented itself.  There were some issues to work out.  Maxwell had expressed the electric Gauss's Law, the magnetic Gauss's Law, Faraday's Law,  and Ampere's Law.  These were almost enough, but there was a sticky point which was fixed with something called Maxwell's law.  Five laws that ultimately were expressed as four partial differential equations.  He presented the result in December of 1864 and published A Dynamical Theory of the Electrodynamic Field on 1 January, 1865.  

 

It needed to be verified by experiment or it was just another piece of beauty that didn't represent Nature.  Verification came in 1886 when Heinrich Hertz was able to generate and detect a radio wave starting with a spark neatly inventing radio in the process.

 

The math was too much for most physicists and mathematicians of the day. Around the time of Hertz's discovery a simple version with just four equationswas proven to be identical to Maxwell's original equations.  The simple version of the equations was taught in engineering and physics classes directly impacting the last, and possibly most important, part of the Industrial Revolution - which became the a revolution in communication.  

 

Electric power and radio - and now understood deeply.  There was great and unexpected predictive power that continues to this day.  Perhaps as important, he gave credence to the idea of fields.  It took a generation or two for that to really since in, but most physicists now describe the fundamental Nature in terms of fields.

 

Let's go back and pick up on Maxwell and color.  We see an array of colors when sunlight is broken into a spectrum, but some are missing - pink for example.  Artists have long known that pigments can be mixed to obtain any number of colors and some rules and ideas had been floated, but none were robust.  

 

Maxwell approached the problem playfully.  He noticed that patterns smear out when you spin a child's top.  Our minds assemble a model of the world from very sketchy input - in the case of vision roughly twenty fives images per second are assembled into something that appears to have continuous motion.  Spin a top fast enough...

 

Yellow is a simple example.  It exists in the spectrum of of sunlight and yellow pigments reflect it.  But if you blur two other spectral colors - red and green - by spinning them on a top, the mind perceives the result as yellow even though no yellow light is directly reflected.  Maxwell painted a yellow reference ring on the top and added concentric arcs of red and green.  He added non-reflective black to control the apparent brightness.²  By choosing just the right amount of certain shades of red and green his mind created a yellow that appeared identical.  

 

Most colors required three primary colors.  Maxwell carefully built a color triangle showing just how much of each of the primary colors were required to form nearly anything you wanted.  The work was extended to transmitted light and he was able to show that if you want to use just three colors, they need to be a bit artificial.  

 

Around 1855 it occurred to him that by taking three exposures with either filters or colored illumination and a photographic film that responded to the those colors that color photography was possible.  A few years later, working with a photographer, the first color photo was made.³

 

Maxwell's equations had shown that light was just an electromagnetic wave traveling at the speed of light. Visible light had a tiny wavelengths - four tenths of a micron for blue growing to seven tenths of a micron for red.  Hertz's radio waves were the same thing, but impossibly longer - many meters long.  In fact there is a continuous spectrum of light ranging from incredibly gamma rays produced by very energetic events to radio waves of enormous wavelengths.   Our eyes only detect the tiniest silver - but a silver that coincides with much of the Sun's output that makes it to Earth. Evolution selected the light we see based on solar physics and the nature of our atmosphere.

 

There are so many jumping points from here - the hallmark of a rich result and one that marks the beginning of modern physics and with that probably the most important point in the development of modern technology.  Deep beauty lies here.

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¹ For the physics types note that the word field is used to describe two things.  One is the force divided by charge in the electric field - it is somewhat analogous as the wind velocity at the point of measurement.  The other field is the underlying 'fluid' --  an electric fluid of sorts.   In one case it is a description of the measurement, in the other it is the medium itself.  Using the wind analogy it is like one is the wind, the other the air.

² poorly drawn on an iPad in about two minutes:-)  The iPad is a poor drawing tool for my purposes - perhaps that will improve some day.

³ There were some technical issues, but the concept was sound and others ran with the idea.  That's a Tartan ribbon ...

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Tomatos are finally great.  I love to roast them to pull out even more flavor

 

Roasted Tomatoes

 

Ingredients

 

° 3 pounds large tomatoes sliced into 3/4" thick rounds

° 2 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed

° 1/4 teaspoon dried oregano

° kosher salt and freshly ground pepper

° at least a half cup extra-virgin olive oil (I probably use half again as much)

 

Technique

 

° oven rack in the middle and oven to 425°F

° line a baking pan with foil and spread the slices .. smaller ones in the center.  put garlic cloves between the tomatoes and sprinkle with oregano and salt (maybe 1/4 tsp to start) and pepper to taste. drizzle with oil

° Bake for a half hour rotating the sheet halfway through if your oven is uneven like mine.

° remove sheet and flip tomatoes. Reduce heat to 300°F and hold door open to let it cool to temperature (I use an oven thermometer, but final temperature isn't too critical)

° cook until skins are blistered and spots of brown appear.    I go for a final thickness 1/2" or less .. maybe 90 minutes, maybe a bit more.

° pull the sheet, cool, discard the garlic and move the tomatoes and oil to an airtight container.