omenti

why are we here?

The professor drew a box around the words and added "do not erase" at the bottom.  That marked the opening of a two semester course in General Relativity.  He never commented directly, but its presence was anything but subtle . 

 

The circumstances under which Karl Schwarzchild wrote three significant papers in 1915 were a mixture of ideal and and anything but.  An artillery lieutenant in the German army on the Russian front, he had contracted a disease that would kill him a year later  Before the war he was a physicist and astronomer.   In the army he managed to find access to current papers and had become fascinated with Albert Einstein's brand new General Theory of Relativity.   The formula for General Relativity had written looks simple, but each symbol represents some very complex mathematical objects.  Einstein was unable to solve them exactly and his prediction of the precession of the perihelion of Mercury's orbit was only an approximation.

 

It seems strange that Einstein, with his beautiful geometric approach to General Relativity, tried to solve the problem in rectangular coordinates.  In a few months Schwarzschild created a novel coordinate system and was able to solve a simple system exactly with what is now known as the Schwarzschild metric.  Schwarzschild sent it to Einstein for comments with this preface.

 

As you see, the war treated me kindly enough, in spite of the heavy gunfire, to allow me to get away from it all and take this walk in the land of your ideas.

Einstein was delighted

I have read your paper with the utmost interest. I had not expected that one could formulate the exact solution of the problem in such a simple way. I liked very much your mathematical treatment of the subject. Next Thursday I shall present the work to the Academy with a few words of explanation.

 

The simple case was simple indeed - a non-rotating spherically symmetric mass.   Still there were remarkable conclusions.  At long distances it reduced to Newton's gravitation equation, but close to a large mass there was a point where nothing - not even light - could escape from its surface.  Any number of crazy things would happen as you neared this event horizon. Inside everything would collapse to a point - a singularity.  Furthermore any initial configuration of matter (dust for example) would gravitationally attract and, if there was enough of it, collapse into a black hole.

 

About two weeks into the course we had enough differential geometry under our belts to look at the Schwarzschild metric.  I remember looking up at the words on the upper right hand corner of the board and wondering why our Universe hadn't collapsed into a black hole - like almost instantly after it was formed.  Wasn't there an enormous mass in a tiny space?  I worked out the Schwartzschild radius for a mass the size of the universe in my notebook margin.  Why didn't this happen?

 

The next week it became apparent why.  The metric was for a static universe. General Relativity had a lot to say about non-static universes although that wasn't accepted until the next decade.  There are a number of other metrics that apply to more complex, eg. realistic, universes that do things like expand or contract.  One of these had major contributions from a Catholic priest who basically laid out the mathematical underpinnings of the expanding universe Hubble discovered in 1929, but that's another story.

 

Now it was easy to rule out a static universe .. immediately after the Big Bang (which turns out not to be the beginning) the new universe would find itself within a black hole and would have collapsed into itself.    Or so I thought

 

There's something interesting about General Relativity - you've probably heard the presence of energy and matter curves spacetime.  It turns out there's more -  it also impacts the evolution of spacetime itself.  There are three possibilities that depend on the initial expansion rate.  

 

Too small for the amount of matter and energy and the universe would expand for awhile - perhaps the tiniest fraction of a second - and then collapse on itself.  It's tempting to call it a black hole, but it's worse. Spacetime itself would collapse with it.  Not very promising for life. 

 If the expansion rate was too high, matter would separate so quickly stars wouldn't form.. in fact atoms wouldn't form either.  It's a bad sign if you can't make it to chemistry.   Not good if you want life down the road.

 There's an intermediate case.  There's an exceedingly fine line between collapse into nothingness or expansion into a nearly void.  Here the expansion rate eventually drops to zero with stars, galaxies, planets an us developing along the way.  You want this one.

 

What we now know is a bit more complex.  It's the third case, the goldilocks universe, but dark energy which is causing an accelerating expansion.   It has been slow enough to allow the formation of everything we have.  What really astounds me is the balance.  The fine tuning of the right amount of expansion for the amount of mass energy is precise..   If there had been an extra hydrogen nucleus it would have collapsed.  One less and the infinite expansion would have prevented the formation of complexity.  The words on the blackboard seem much deeper to me now than they did at the time.

 

And if your name becomes associated with something in the public imagination there are always the joke.  Einstein and Schrödinger both mentioned cats so...

RrdD: how a lot of new stuff happens .. (sort of)

The ripped and stained vinyl covered seat of some lost color puffed a cloud of tobacco smoke when I sat down.  It wasn't the worst seat in the room.  One wall of the windowless basement room was a painted green chalk board.    Over forty years had gone by and it was still called the opium den.  Someone had brought a box of doughnuts from the shop next door.  Fifteen was their  bakers dozen.  I was lucky to have been in this place before the building was torn down.  You could feel the presence of history.

 

In the late 1940s at the Bell Telephone Laboratories an acronym for inventing the future of electronics and telecommunications appeared in the technical journal.

    RrdD

Big R, little r, little d, big D:  pure research, applied research, investigatory/inventive development and development at scale. It was supposed to be a path from a discovery in the laboratory to the next marvel you'd use anywhere from five to fifty years out.  Parts of the labs and the Western Electric manufacturing arm were organized to support that path.  There was just one little problem.  That's not how things happen in the real world.  Some bits of it work sometimes, but it influenced how people think.  That said it's a useful framework.  You can identify the pieces, but they may not appear where you think they will.   I have a lot of experience in R, r and d.  I'll spend most of the post talking about little r as it's the one that often brings dramatic change.  It's probably the one to study if you worry about change, but it's often impossible to see the early signals unless you're a participant.  You need to be playing the game.

 

First a bit on "pure" research.  Science as we know it really didn't develop until the early 19^th century.  One of the great inventions of that century was the modern natural science laboratory.  It was a radical departure from anything people had seen and was best exemplified by the creation of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge around 1870.  A half century later the modern large government lab grew out of Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley and the Bell Telephone Laboratories started to become a formidable industrial lab. All of these places supported pure research - research with the primary aim was understanding Nature better.  It was assumed that some of these discoveries would be useful and it was important to have people intimately familiar with the discoveries as well as finding some practical use.  It was an important step as the pure research was becoming very expensive to justify as pure curiosity.  

 

Pure is a bit tainted.  A feature of science is when you look at something in a new way - a better telescope, microscope, particle accelerator - you often learn things beyond your wildest imagination.  Technology drives instrumentation.  Computers and exotic electronics and materials fuel better views of Nature so scientists find themselves inventing and perfecting new tools in addition to using commercial tools that came from engineering organizations.  

 

There's an interesting story about the global positioning system.  Shortly after the USSR orbited Sputnik in 1957 the US launched a frantic effort to track satellites.  It enlisted thousands of amateur astronomers and high school students with a dirt-cheap azimuthal spotting scope.  You'd record your latitude and longitude, find the satellite, read off a couple of numbers and note the time.  The largest source of error was accurate timing.  It was recommended people use a shortwave radio and tune to the time standard at WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado, but even then human reflexes got in the way.  A physicist was part of the team and wondered what it would be like if these trackers had their own accurate clocks - atomic clocks. It wasn't practical, but he flipped the problem in his mind.  What if the satellite had it's own clock?  If you had several in orbit you could calculate your position to great accuracy. That was the holy grail of navigation.   There were a lot of details to work out and it wasn't technically possible at the time, but it resurfaced at the government research organization DARPA about fifteen years later when they realized you could do it for a few tens of billions of dollars.  A bargain given the need.

 

With that, on to little r:

 

A century ago a little polytechnic school in Pasadena created  the premiere astronomy program in the world.  A few other brilliant people outside of astronomy were attracted and the school was transformed.  They needed some technical goals to grow past pure science.   The hottest game in the technical world was electrifying the country.  It seemed like magic.. spin a bunch of copper wires in a magnetic field with steam or moving water and make a light bulb come on in a home a hundred miles away.  For many it was more desirable than indoor plumbing and universities, companies and politicians were falling over each other trying to make it happen.  It seemed to be the natural problem for an electrical engineering program to work on.  The folks at Caltech looked studied it and came to the conclusion that the fundamental problems had been solved - it wasn't worth the effort if you were trying to make a major impact.  Rather they decided to work in more basic areas and trust that practical developments would take place. Not in one person or even a department, but if they cleverly linked departments and had people float around a bit..    They went long and deep with the blessings of their leadership.

 

It paid off. They developed an understanding of earthquakes, aerodynamics, and biochemistry.  They developed a rich understanding of the emerging field of quantum mechanics and were able to make contributions in solid state physics - the key to semiconductors and computing.   But the big steps didn't seem to follow naturally.    In the late forties the transistor form Bell Labs was regarded as an exciting curiosity.  They were difficult to manufacture and didn't amplify as well as tubes.  Early devices had a high failure rate.  Bell Labs saw them as being useful for long distance telephony.  A bit later on, as the solid state physics of silicon developed it became clear that you could capture the energy of the sun with silicon and the solar cell was invented. And some people in Caltech were finally positioned to help change the world.   But let's go back to the opium den.

 

My first director was a young Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Labs in the early fifties.  The Labs, as part of AT&T's agreement with the government to exist as a regulated monopoly, had to make most of its inventions available for very modest and sometimes non-existent licensing fees.  He had become an expert on one of the early types of transistors and tricks used to make it  and was in Allentown, Pennsylvania teaching a master class to two in the opium den. One of the two at the table liked the doughnuts, but both were probably wishing for sushi. Akio Morita and a Japanese physicist had traveled from the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation - a tiny Japanese tape recorder company.  They wanted to make smaller tape recorders and were hoping the lower power demands of a transistorized amplifier would make a difference.  They were also interested in the high frequency characteristics and the possible use in a radio receiver.  They asked a lot of questions and managed to survive the room and its doughnuts. Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation later became known as Sony and the transistor radio was a breakthrough product. 

 

By the late fifties a core of R and r people from Bell Labs left to start Fairchild in the Bay Area.  There were some connections to Berkeley and Stanford, but for more fundamental work, to Caltech where some of these people had done their degrees.  Early transistors were about the size of the eraser on a pencil with three wire leads coming out. They were hand assembled and had to be individually tested and then soldered into circuit boards mostly for military and telecommunication applications.  Until it was realized you could turn them into switches.  Suddenly it made sense to build transistorized computers.  Transistors were still too expensive and the tube industry wrote white papers telling people not to waste their time and money.   Few realized one door was closing and another opening.  

 

Radical change seems to come out of left field.  There's rarely an "aha!" moment. People who have done the most impactful work will tell you they've been frustrated working at something for a long time meeting with failure after failure.  They end up trying something different and wonder why it seems to be working differently than expected.  There are still failures, but also a series of promising developments.  Some of these are little ahas!, but the final result is often anticlimactic.  

 

There was a twenty year period when electrification technology went from almost zero to having almost all of the basics sorted out.  There was still an enormous amount of work and investment required to bring electricity to America and large areas of the Earth are still in the dark today, but during this amazingly intense period when almost every good engineer seemed focused on the problem until a certain maturity was achieved and progress slowed dramatically.  About the time electrification was slowing, radio lit up.  Ten to fifteen years and most of the basics had been worked out.  We still use designs that date back to the twenties.  Television followed a similar path during the 30s.  The North American NTSC standard dates to 1941.  Post WWII advances like color were much less radical in scale than the early developments.  And the earliest precursor to the Internet sprang up in the early 70s.  By 1985 most of the necessary technical leaps had been made.

 

After each one of these hot engineering periods people wonder if that's the end of progress.  It never is.  To drop in a bit deeper consider the solid state electronics revolution that began at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, 

 

The cold war created strong demands for radar, computers as well as general miniaturization.  Money was flowing and engineers were focused mostly on dealing the the problems of tube based computers (there's a separate story on computer architecture that I'll leave out for now).  Exotic materials in the tubes to make them last long enough that a computer might work for a day evolved into computers that could have sections die and still keep working. It had been discovered that transistors could be switches and from that you could build all of the logic elements a digital computer required.  The problem was cost and reliability.  IBM stated making some of the first practical solid state computers, but there were a series of wack-a-mole class problems.  

 

Robert Noyce was also frustrated by these problem.  He came up with connecingt them on the silicon with metallic runners that were created as part of the manufacturing process.  He added a few passive components and had invented something he called the integrated circuit.  It was completely out of left field, but helped solve some of those pesky connection problems. Suddenly an entirely new direction had been found.  The focus shifted to increasing the density of devices on the chip.  

 

Carver Mead started wondering, assuming you had the manufacturing technique to make things arbitrarily small, what the practical limit of "micro" was.  As part of what started as a back of the envelop exercise he found factors conspiring with each other in such a way that it should be possible to make working complex devices near the region where quantum mechanics would become an issue - you should be able to make working ICs more than a million times denser than the state of the art at the time.   Gordon Moore was also working in this area and observing progress to date and understanding Carver's clear blue skies, wrote a document that became known as Moore's Law.  It isn't a natural law, like the laws of thermodynamics or gravity, but rather a permission.  It provided people with the belief that fundamental road blocks didn't exist - or at least wouldn't for decades.  You might only see a generation - a year and a half or so - ahead, but if you worked hard you'd get there.  Then there would be a new set of hurdles you could set your eyes on a conquer - but it would be possible for someone to take them down.   It was a permission slip and  probably the most optimistic document in all of engineering and technology.

 

There isn't any isolated pure research in solid state electronics.  The tools and money are in advanced development and production. It is where that part of Nature is most easily studied.  Researchers work in these areas informed by the fast moving problems.  It's somewhat different from the natural sciences and you ignore manufacturing technology at your peril (arguably Intel has fallen victim as have many others).   Now back to the late sixties.

 

Laying out dozens and then  hundreds of logic elements was becoming a difficult task.  The design progress had become a bottleneck for logic based ICs and people were inventing frustrating solutions that weren't solutions.  Wack-a-mole.  The herd is working very hard, but some people get frustrated and realize there's something wrong with the zeitgeist. A few had the freedom - or have managed to create it for themselves - and wander off in other directions.  There was failure but enough little successes and hints to keep going. Federico Faggin had the idea to put enough of an array of logic elements on a chip that he could make it a programmable general purpose computer.  His four bit 4004 microprocessor with a few thousand transistors ignited a revolution was created.  

 

Microprocessors were complex beasts and enormously difficult to design.  Carver Mead had been working on improving design languages and ended up creating a new direction with his silicon compiler.  It was now possible to design very complex chips in a language designers would work with and debug - not unlike the compilers and debugging tools used in software development only rather than an executable program the output was a "tape out" that would let an electron beam writing tool create a set of photomasks used to manufacture the chips.  It became possible for people to design chips without owning a manufacturing plant.

 

Even now there's a new revolution underway. People were building supercomputers in the 80s and 90s as they had for two decades before for scientific tasks, but it was felt they'd be needed for perceptive systems and the next generation of artificial intelligence. Conventional digital computers aren't exactly well matched to these fuzzy perceptive tasks.   A few people had been playing with neural networks and a couple of architectural advances had been made along with the realization that simple processors used in gaming computers could be used as building blocks.  This new class of fuzzy computing is still being sorted out, but it works with a tiny fraction of the energy and cost required for equivalent work on a supercomputer. It even exists in smartphones.

 

I don't think we're at the beginning of that exciting twenty year period for quantum computing yet - but it's probably coming. 

 

So that's what would have been called little r research ..  the process that makes dramatic pivots in technology possible.  You can't create them with market research .. that approach is exactly backwards and there are tragic examples.  It's remarkable that you find yourself with something new that you intended to solve a problem with and suddenly a thousand new other solutions to other problems - problems you couldn't have dreamt of - become available. This is a great example of why trying to predict the detail of future technologies doesn't work.  

 

What happens in what was once called little d .. advanced development .. is also fascinating.  Only a few organizations have managed to pull it off more than a couple of times.  I'll write about it somewhere down the road. 

 

 

 

canada's beautiful new $16 million camera

My Grandmother King gave me my first camera for my eighth birthday - a Kodak Brownie.  My parents had a camera, but I wasn't allowed to use it.  This was my camera.  I also received two rolls of black and white film and a voucher for developin.  Of course I did what most eight year olds would do - I took pictures of the sky, the side of the house, my sister, the dog - twelve exposures in all.  A week later the prints came back and you can guess how bad they were.  The second roll was a bit more better, but I never developed the artistic skill.  But I did I did become fascinated with devices that capture images and have designed and built a few over the years.  

 

Some of you are excellent photographers.  My friend Om happens to be just such an artist and I believe he is writing a book on the subject.  My sister Corinne is an artist who uses photography and computers to offer quirky commentary.  I'll be content with my simple snapshots and videos enjoying the art of others.  And I'll think about the process and tools.

 

The term camera conjures up something that focuses light on film or an electronic image sensor where an image is captured.  Still or moving images, but almost always visible light.  Currently the definition is being extended to computational photography - the processing that goes on in your iPhone for example.  I stretch the definition a bit.

 

For me a camera is something that captures some event or series of events in time.  It doesn't have to be visible light, but any form of electromagnetic radiation and or something a bit more exotic - like charged particles or the shaking of space-time.

 

I first came to this way of thinking on Sulphur Mountain near Banff, Alberta.  I was almost thirteen and had gone over to a curious little shack on one of the mountains twin peaks while my parents had lunch at an observation deck a half kilometer away.   The two young men in the shack turned out to be cosmic ray physicists.  They patiently explained in kid language how they captured muons.  What they were really doing is capturing and recording part of a particle shower that came from cosmic rays striking the atmosphere twenty or so kilometers up.  They'd run these recorded events through some calculations and  would be able to say something about the shower and from that perhaps something about the Universe.  After listening I said something like "you've built a cosmic ray camera.  That tape is your film and you turn it into something like a picture"  They nodded , smiled and showed me how an image could be abstract and still give a lot of information. That day would change my life. 

 

Since then I've been around my share of particle physics detectors - essentially cameras that capture the aftermath of violent particle collisions at places like CERN.  I've also used optical and radio telescopes that, typically after a lot of computation, produce real or abstract images of places and events back in time.  It still astounds me to look at parts of the Universe as it was twelve or thirteen billion years ago.  And for fun I  even designed a homemade digital camera back in the 80s. 

 

Cameras capture images that can be meaningful.  Images that can be artistic, historical or even offer evidence of Nature's workings.   Some of the techniques are familiar and straightforwards, others are sometimes deeply computational. And if you consider the eye-brain combination a camera, as many do, there are surprises  We usually think of an image falling on an imaging surface and being turned into a more of less faithful representation of the image.   In fact there is a lot of processing that goes on between the front of the retina and the brain.  What eventually turns into an image has very little in common with what fell on the retina.  Our brain stitches together information, often out of order and spread over several seconds, to construct an approximation of reality we think of as the real thing and a sense of "now" that is equally artificial.  The comic strip is a nice example of something that is temporally impossible that happens in your brain all the time.  It turns out temporally out of order processing often happens in computational photography.    And then there are many instruments you might not think of as a camera that are much closer to the classical definition.. things like MRI, ultrasound imaging, radio telescopes and the like.  

 

Back to this $16 million Canadian camera...  

 

CHIME is a radio telescope at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory near Caleden, British Columbia.  It consists of four 100 meter by 20 meter upward facing semi-cylinders that are sort of like snowboarding half-pipes.  Sprinkled up and down the foci the semi-cylinders are 1024 radio receivers that operate between 400 and 800 MHz .. covering a frequency range similar to that of UHF television - a frequency range was chosen to detect a signal hydrogen emits.¹  That's where the name  comes from - the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment.

 

An enormous amount of computation takes place in several steps after the radios receive the signal.  The first step sets the instrument apart.  You may have a wifi router that does beam forming.  Basically you use a small array of antennas and the properties of radio waves to construct a "beam" to the source.²   CHIME creates 1024 beams listening to over 16,000 frequencies (think of them as colors) all imaged 1000 times a second.  While beam-forming adds to the computational load it dramatically decreases construction costs over a mechanically aimed antenna and for this application is a very clever strategy.  The computing just behind this is equally clever.  Sixteen million dollars to get this kind of data over what will be several decades of life is a bargain. The electronic and computer designs are elegant and if you're into that sort of thing you should look into the details.

 

The hope was it could detect an unusual recently discovered event called a fast radio burster.   At first some suggested the short radio bursts  of a thousandth of a second or so might be signals from extraterrestrials as no one had a compelling physical explanation.  They're very rare and transient.  Before CHIME only one burster called FRB121102 has been seen to repeat sending out about 100 irregularly spaced bursts since its discover in 2012.   A few hypothesis have been made, but studying a single event can lead you astray.   Then CHIME switched on for three weeks last Summer and thirteen new events were detected even though it wasn't fully functional completely.  This is far and away the most sensitive camera in the world for studying these events.  It is also well suited for mapping - making images of - hydrogen clouds in a much younger Universe, studying a special class of neutron stars called magnetars, and answering a number of other astrophysical and cosmological questions.  There's the added bonus of looking at the sky with a new type of camera.  You tend to discover things you hadn't imagined.  

 

 Human beings have become remarkably adroit at extending and even going beyond their senses as we try to understand the world.  CHIME is easily one of the most beautiful cameras ever made.

__________

¹ The 21 centimeter line of hydrogen is a great signal for studying the distribution of hydrogen atoms in the Universe.  It would be far too short to be detected by the telescope, but distant hydrogen is red shifted down to this frequency range..  Since the emission line is very narrow and well known, you can calculate the redshirt and therefore the distance of the gas.

² Beam forming is done by changing the signals phase at each antenna in an array in such a way that constructive and destructive interference create a pointed beam. It works well for wavelengths not much different from the antenna size.  Wifi base stations aren't very accurate, but they don't have to be. You can also do it with sound leading to some interesting pranks.

 

attacking global warming with deep insight from a brewery

The 1970s were marked by two dramatic energy disruptions that shook the world.  Petroleum became much more expensive and a geopolitical weapon. Small cars suddenly became popular and American drivers began to look to countries that made them.  In the US large sums flowed into energy R&D.  Much of it went into shale oil, but alternate energy labs appeared.  Electricity from wind and solar were far from practical, but there was a mini-boom in solar hot water heating.  It turns out you need solid engineering if you're going to water running in panels on your roof.  Unfortunately there was a lot of poor engineering, short module lifetimes, and water damage. 

 

Since then we've seen dramatic reductions in the cost of electricity from wind and solar energy.  Expanding these sources to levels needed to deal with global warming is extremely challenging - too challenging given the current political climate.  It's important to remember that electricity is just a way to move from a generator to a load.  It's very practical, but also ephemeral.  Storage is expensive as is the infrastructure to efficiently move it from where it's produced to where it's needed.

 

Electricity demand represents about a fifth of the world's primary energy supply.  This will grow with electrification in transportation, but the numbers are so staggeringly huge that it will be awhile before the needle moves.  Solar, wind and nuclear are the primary non-fossil fuel sources.  Two are growing and one is shrinking.  But even if all electricity came from clean sources it would just be a fifth of the primary energy supply.  

 

Thermal energy demand is larger at a bit more than a third of the supply worldwide. Space and water heating, industrial processes, cooking and so on.  In homes it's much higher than a third usually running above sixty percent.  Thermal energy can and is electrified, but you have to deal with the inefficiency of making, transporting and then converting the energy. Wouldn't it be neat if you could do it directly without the intermediate step?

 

You can and you have.  All of us have sat inside on cold sunny days next to the window enjoying the heat.  Insulated homes and insulating windows can dramatically drop external energy requirements.  Solar hot water heating is dramatically better than it was forty years ago and is required by code in a few regions.  But what intrigues me is the direct mechanical production of heat.

 

An apple rolling off a dinner table hits the floor with about a joule of kinetic energy.  The energy unit is named in honor of the son of a prominent brewer and followed his father into the family business.  The family had money and the young James Joule was tutored by John Dalton and a few other great scientists of the day.  Science became his hobby and passion.   In the 1840s he built early electric motors to see if it made sense to replace the brewery's steam engines.  It was far too early, but he established himself as a solid amateur scientist.  With this mindset and approach he set himself to was understanding the economics of brewing.  It would change the world.

 

He worked in many areas, but this most important work was on the convertibility of energy from one type to another.  The caloric theory of heat was accepted wisdom - basically heat was conserved and couldn't be created or destroyed.  While wrong, it led to the creation of some rather beautiful mathematics.  Joule found something deeper and more accurate -  that energy could be converted from one form to another.  As it happened brewers had the best thermometers allowing careful measurements to figure out what was really happening.  He mechanically did work to water by stirring it and showed a unit of work heated the water by the same unit.   The energy increase of the water by heating was equivalent to the work done by the mechanical stirring.   He had made the leap to the conservation of energy and created the basis for the first law of thermodynamics.

 

It's neat to think about a simple extension of his apparatus.  Put a mechanical stirrer inside an insulated box and spin it with a wind turbine.  Mechanical energy from the wind is directly converted to heat and can be used for home hot water or space heating.  

 

The sketch is just a simple version.  Vertical axis turbines aren't that efficient, but that may not be a major issue. While big turbines are more efficient,  it is impractical to move hot water far enough to make it practical.  The natural size of these units may be home with a small turbine or, where district heating is popular, a medium sized wind turbine.

 

The back of the envelopes are interesting.  A cubic meter of water (a metric ton or 1000 liters or about four average bathtubs) can hold up to about 90 kWh of heat energy.. enough for a two days for a family of three or four.  It's fine if the wind is intermittent.  When it blows, heat is added to the water.    Getting the size right for a household and location would require a fair amount of experimentation and modeling, but this is the sort of work that would probably be crack for mechanical engineering grad students.  It's a great exercise in systems optimization.

 

Here's a simple simulation for a small half meter radius turbine in a location with an average wind speed of 16 miles per hour over two days.  The first graph is wind speed.  The second is the mechanical power delivered to the mixer in the water.  Note that power increases quickly with windspeed (you know this if you've held your hand out of a car window or biked into the wind)  The last is the water temperature given good, but not fantastic insulation.   The water gets hotter and keeps its heat in spite of a very bursty power source.

 

There are a lot of ways to tap energy.  The direct conversion of mechanical energy to heat is particularly attractive given the enormous worldwide heat use.  This may be a good technique in some cases and there are undoubtedly others.  It's not very technical - heavens - it was easy in the 1800s and it's remarkable no one stumbled on it earlier - the technical capability to do this goes back about a millennia.   Now we have the capacity to measure and model as well as utilize a wide range of materials and construction techniques.  It may be interesting again.

 

There are a variety of mechanisms to deliver energy in some practical form for us to use.  Many are more efficient as centralized sources and some are better at smaller scales.  This is one that works best when highly distributed.