Over on Technology Review there’s a good article by Richard Muller on the discovery of the K-T impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, and the history of the science behind its discovery. He makes the point that science is inherently a process of asking ever more questions, each concrete answer generating a host of new questions.

The article is worth a read on its own merits, but as soon as I read it I immediately thought of this article on global warming, written by people who claim to be conducting scientific inquiry, but then end with this astonishingly dishonest statement:

The science is settled. The “skeptics” — the strange name applied to those whose work shows the planet isn’t coming to an end — have won.

I’ll usually give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to what they believe about global warming, since the science is complex and information is still coming in. The state of the field is rapidly evolving, so disagreement is not just reasonable, it’s mandatory for the health of the science. However here we have three people claiming scientific credibility while making utterly inane statements which to a layman might seem like solid proof, but which don’t pass even the most basic scientific smell test. Let’s take a look at the quote above in detail:

The science is settled.

Bullshit. Simple, barefaced bullshit. The science is not settled until a model exists which is consistent with all the observations. The fact that there are difficulties with a certain subset of observations (atmospheric temperature data for example) does not mean that the null hypothesis (no warming) is true: in fact, if there is other reliable data that is inconsistent with the null hypothesis, the question is very much not settled. There is ocean surface temperature data, for example, which cannot easily be reconciled with the null hypothesis.

The “skeptics” — the strange name …

Apparently the authors are unfamiliar with the meaning of the word “skeptic” – it is entirely appropriate to apply it to people who doubt, who question, who disbelieve orthodox views. To be a skeptic in science is a good thing – it’s what the whole enterprise is about.

…applied to those whose work shows the planet isn’t coming to an end …

Ah yes, the signature of scientific integrity: distorting the view of your opponents beyond all recognition. The generally accepted view within the climate research community is that the world is warming and that there will be negative consequences. The difference between that and “the planet coming to an end” is the difference between a hangnail and death.

… have won.

Riiiiiiight. Questions about consistency of a subset of data completely overwhelm all of the data in favor of the hypothesis.

As I’ve said before, there’s a lot to be done before we’ll have a clear picture of what is up with global warming. There are entirely reasonable arguments that the warming is primarily natural rather than caused by humans, there’s plenty of reasonable doubt about the magnitude of the warming, there’s reasonable questions about wether the net long term effect might in fact be beneficial, and there are reasonable grounds to argue against any given policy regarding climate change. There is not even a slight amount of reasonableness to claims that the science of global warming is even close to settled, let alone settled in favor of the theory that there is no warming.

The authors of the TCS piece might have a defensible position if they were engaging is strictly political polemic, but they are not: they are brandishing scientific credentials on the one hand, and making blatantly false statements on the other. They are using scientific credentials to bolster claims which any credible scientist simply would not make. If you want to use scientific credentials to establish credibility, you have an obligation to meet a certain standard of integrity. Saying things which any scientist would know to be false, but which a member of the general public might believe, violates the most basic standards of personal and professional integrity. These guys are liars, and should be treated as such.

Via a story on NPR’s All Things Considered (last story on the page: audio link) the intrepid research submarine Alvin is going to be replaced with a larger sub capable of deeper dives and longer stays at depth.

Alvin is a truly storied scientific instrument, one of those few machines that almost singlehandedly revolutionize a scientific field. I’m looking forward to seeing what her successor will do.

This post isn’t entirely about the excellence of Alvin – I also have a little bit of an axe to grind. Let me point out that, in this day of submarine ROVs with ever increasing capabilities, the thing that oceanographers and deep ocean biologists want is a machine that will enable them to go in person into the depths. A dive in the new sub will take up to ten hours, cramped up in a space about the size of the interior of a VW beetle, with all manner of projections and angles to increase the discomfort. Internal temperatures during a dive hover in the neighborhood of zero celsius, and if something goes seriously wrong, you die. Much better to send a machine, don’t you think? But no: the people best equipped to make the judgement, the people who will be trading sitting in front of a computer in a climate controlled room, sipping fresh brewed coffee for a cramped, cold, dangerous machine that will put them right next to what they want to study – they choose the sub. Why? because you simply do better science on site than you can remotely, and it’s going to be that way for the foreseeable future. The lessons for space exploration should be obvious. I’m looking at you, Bob Park.

Dismounting my hobbyhorse and returning to Alvin, there’s an interesting story in the book Water Baby. When Alvin was under construction three pressure spheres were made and tested. The best (no. 2) was used on the sub, and sphere no. 1 was to be tested to destruction. The test vessel was a large oil filled tank which could be pressurized to simulate dives to various depths. The 40,000 pound lid of the vessel screwed into place on top. The crush test of sphere no. 1 was also going to be the first test of the pressure tank above 4000 psi. From the book:

At 4300 psi there was an explosion. In the next second the engineers calculated the probable trajectory of the tank’s lid, concluding that 40,000 pounds of steel were headed for the tin roof above them. They ran, all of them headed at once to the only other door at the far end of the building. “I remember the instantaneous transport of myself, like a Tibetan monk using the mind to will myself out of that building” Walsh said.
[…]
The super tank looked oddly untouched and its 40,000 pound lid, undamaged, was in place. The deadman was broken and its 40 foot cable was gone. When they removed the cover, they saw that the shrapnel had come from the upper threaded portion of the tank. The lid had shot up at least 40 feet and dropped back onto the tank, driving it about three feet deeper into the ground.

In the tank sat sacrificial sphere no. 1 undamaged.

The test tank failed at a pressure equivalent to 9600 feet, testing the sphere judged to be of the lowest quality.

DOE has decided to scrap plans for FIRE, which was originally intended to serve as an alternative to the International Thermonuclear Energy Experiment (ITER, later changed to ‘Iter’). This is a bad thing for reasons too numerous to list. For one thing, it puts all the fusion eggs in one basket. For another, that basket is internationalized, so that every election, every economic shift, every change of national priorities, in every one of the major participating nations will threaten the experiment.

The original recommendation from the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee was that if there had not been a decision to proceed with Iter by the end of July 2004, then work should move ahead on FIRE. Unfortunately the Bush administration decided that Iter was a good idea, for reasons which are still not clear to me – I suspect the desire to do a little international fence-mending had something to do with it. Anyway, with Iter rejoined (the US had dropped out in 1998), FIRE is superfluous, at least if you assume Iter is going to meet its program goals, which I seriously doubt (at least, assuming that staying under budget is one of them). FIRE has been criticized for relying on pedestrian technologies like copper magnets instead of superconductors, but that’s a feature, not a bug. FIRE is a much smaller and less ambitious experiment than Iter, and it’s firmly in the hands of the US. Both things increase the prospects of success – the lower ambition makes the technical aspects more likely to succeed, and the single government funding source makes the political aspects less likely to force major redesigns partway through.

Given my druthers I wouldn’t fund either Iter or FIRE, preferring to put money into a basket of alternative confinement concepts, and try novel things like prizes. Kerry has made energy independence a major platform plank, so if he wins there may be additional funding for fusion, but Iter is going to suck up a lot of that, and any project which runs alongside Iter will almost certainly get killed as soon as there is a funding crunch. I like the energy independence platform plank: it seems obvious to me that reducing our dependence on oil from the mideast increases the range of options for dealing with militant Islam. In particular, getting to the point where the Saudis no longer have any ability to affect the US economy seems quite desirable, since their official national religion is extremist Islam – how anyone could possibly consider them to be our allies is beyond me, but that’s a post for another day.

The upshot of this latest development is that commercially viable fusion energy has receded still further into the future. Under a Kerry administration it would most likely get a little closer, but not by much, and not cheaply.

Francis Crick has died. Sadly, this event wasn’t prevented by being a discoverer of the secret of life.

I couldn’t quite figure out how to categorize this one. There are stories of children being raised by wolves, but here’s the first case, at least of which I’m aware, of a man being raised by chickens.

It will be certain to be the butt of jokes, but of course it’s a tragic situation. I really mean it–once you get past the absurdity of it, it really was catastrophic for the poor guy.

But it could have been worse–he was fortunate that it happened after he had at least developed the ability to speak. Children raised without human contact from birth never develop the ability to do so–there’s a certain critical point in development and the wiring of the brain during which speech is acquired, and if you miss it, you’ve apparently missed it forever. The story claims that he is learning (or relearning) how to speak, and presumably to eat with utensils instead of pecking.

Of course, as the old joke in the Woody Allen movie (Annie Hall?) went, they may not want to go too far in rehabilitating him. They won’t get any more eggs. Besides, he may have a thrilling career ahead of him as a sports team mascot.

So anyway, it turns out that Wood’s Hole, being one of the nations finer scientific establishments, actually has internet access. Who’d a thunk it? A technological widget developed for the transmission of porn, spam, and offers from deposed Nigerian dictators, being used by scientists as a means of remote collaboration. Just goes to show the innovative and unexpected uses to which researchers can turn everyday objects.

Obviously I’m being a little ironic above. More seriously, my wife just showed me a really cool little trick that allows a >$10,000 piece of scientific equipment to be replaced by common items costing under $100. It’s a neat little illustration of nonlinear thinking and creative problem solving on the part of a graduate student who simply did not have enough money to buy the high end gear, so she tried to figure out a way to do it on the cheap. Nobody told her it wouldn’t work, and she was really keen on getting the work done, so she kept trying until she made it work. It’s a very cool little application, so why am I being evasive about details? Well, it involves a basic technique for genetic engineering. If this was September 10th 2001, I’d blissfully blog away. In the current environment I think dropping the cost of making genetically modified organisms by over $10,000 is not necessarily in the best interest of anyone. I had a nice little post all lined up to talk about technology and creativity and the importance of persistence, but I think I’ll just leave well enough alone.

It’s only a matter of time before genetic engineering techniques come within reach of basically anyone with a couple million dollars. The long pole in the tent right now is just the sheer amount of time it takes to carry out all the work, and the scattershot nature of the results. Given time, and especially given volunteers willing to die, a terrorist attack using GMOs is a real possibility. Technology is advancing rapidly, and established technologies are becoming cheaper and more accessible. The only effective way of reducing the risk of a mass casualty attack is to undermine the ideas behind the ideologies that drive the attackers. There will always be people who want to cause destruction, but the fewer collaborators they have the lower their chances of success.

So anyway, it turns out that Wood’s Hole, being one of the nations finer scientific establishments, actually has internet access. Who’d a thunk it? A technological widget developed for the transmission of porn, spam, and offers from deposed Nigerian dictators, being used by scientists as a means of remote collaboration. Just goes to show the innovative and unexpected uses to which researchers can turn everyday objects.

Obviously I’m being a little ironic above. More seriously, my wife just showed me a really cool little trick that allows a >$10,000 piece of scientific equipment to be replaced by common items costing under $100. It’s a neat little illustration of nonlinear thinking and creative problem solving on the part of a graduate student who simply did not have enough money to buy the high end gear, so she tried to figure out a way to do it on the cheap. Nobody told her it wouldn’t work, and she was really keen on getting the work done, so she kept trying until she made it work. It’s a very cool little application, so why am I being evasive about details? Well, it involves a basic technique for genetic engineering. If this was September 10th 2001, I’d blissfully blog away. In the current environment I think dropping the cost of making genetically modified organisms by over $10,000 is not necessarily in the best interest of anyone. I had a nice little post all lined up to talk about technology and creativity and the importance of persistence, but I think I’ll just leave well enough alone.

It’s only a matter of time before genetic engineering techniques come within reach of basically anyone with a couple million dollars. The long pole in the tent right now is just the sheer amount of time it takes to carry out all the work, and the scattershot nature of the results. Given time, and especially given volunteers willing to die, a terrorist attack using GMOs is a real possibility. Technology is advancing rapidly, and established technologies are becoming cheaper and more accessible. The only effective way of reducing the risk of a mass casualty attack is to undermine the ideas behind the ideologies that drive the attackers. There will always be people who want to cause destruction, but the fewer collaborators they have the lower their chances of success.

So anyway, it turns out that Wood’s Hole, being one of the nations finer scientific establishments, actually has internet access. Who’d a thunk it? A technological widget developed for the transmission of porn, spam, and offers from deposed Nigerian dictators, being used by scientists as a means of remote collaboration. Just goes to show the innovative and unexpected uses to which researchers can turn everyday objects.

Obviously I’m being a little ironic above. More seriously, my wife just showed me a really cool little trick that allows a >$10,000 piece of scientific equipment to be replaced by common items costing under $100. It’s a neat little illustration of nonlinear thinking and creative problem solving on the part of a graduate student who simply did not have enough money to buy the high end gear, so she tried to figure out a way to do it on the cheap. Nobody told her it wouldn’t work, and she was really keen on getting the work done, so she kept trying until she made it work. It’s a very cool little application, so why am I being evasive about details? Well, it involves a basic technique for genetic engineering. If this was September 10th 2001, I’d blissfully blog away. In the current environment I think dropping the cost of making genetically modified organisms by over $10,000 is not necessarily in the best interest of anyone. I had a nice little post all lined up to talk about technology and creativity and the importance of persistence, but I think I’ll just leave well enough alone.

It’s only a matter of time before genetic engineering techniques come within reach of basically anyone with a couple million dollars. The long pole in the tent right now is just the sheer amount of time it takes to carry out all the work, and the scattershot nature of the results. Given time, and especially given volunteers willing to die, a terrorist attack using GMOs is a real possibility. Technology is advancing rapidly, and established technologies are becoming cheaper and more accessible. The only effective way of reducing the risk of a mass casualty attack is to undermine the ideas behind the ideologies that drive the attackers. There will always be people who want to cause destruction, but the fewer collaborators they have the lower their chances of success.

The reason I’ve been a little quiet these past few days is that I’ve been preparing a talk for presentation at the IEEE International Conference on Plasma Science, held in Baltimore this year. I presented yesterday, and it was generally well received. The topic was technical and boring, so I won’t gn into details here. The talk that ended the session I was at was particularly interesting, though, so I thought I’d blog about it.

The talk in question was presented by J. E. Brandenburg of the Florida Space Institute, titled Microwave Enhancement of Inertial Electrostatic Confinement of Plasma for Fusion: Theory and Experiment. Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) uses two (or more) nested spherical grids charged to a high relative voltage to accelerate ions towards the common center of the grids, where they collide and fuse. Philo Farnsworth patented an IEC concept he called the Fusor, and there are all the usual conspiracy theories about suppression of his research surrounding the history of the Fusor, though I suspect the truth of the matter has a lot to do with the fact that it didn’t really work very well, at least for power generation.

Continue reading Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion →

I’m a member of a group of young fusion researchers who are trying to figure out how to make fusion happen in our lifetimes. This is nontrivial because ‘young’ in this case means under 40, and current plans from DOE don’t put fusion power on the grid for another 35+ years. Given the accuracy of government forecasts a whole year down the line, I’m not holding my breath.

I think that the single largest factor holding up the development of commercial fusion is not physics, its program structure. We need to revolutionize the way fusion research is structured, and the best way to do that is to bring the power of the market to bear. Prizes have been suggested (notably by Bob Bussard). I offer here an alternative proposal, seeking your feedback.

The goal is to encourage private funding. This means finding a way to reduce the risk to investors in potential fusion schemes. If a given idea can pass a basic peer reviewed sanity check (doesn’t violate any laws of physics), DOE should offer to insulate investors from some measure of risk. As a concrete proposal, say DOE will purchase all the intellectual property assets of any innovative energy company which closes down after raising private venture funding. There would be some limit, indexed to the amount of money raised, say 1/2 the total venture funds raised, up to a limit of $50 million expended by DOE per company. The physical plant would remain property of the investors or creditors. DOE would pay an external auditor to catalog and organize the intellectual property assets, and would make them freely available to interested parties.

There would have to be sensible mechanisms for peer review and for deciding when to shut down (presumably the investors would make that call), but I don’t see showstoppers there. I think the idea would work, but getting congress to agree is likely to be hard. There’s a real danger of the money disappearing after a venture is funded, thanks to diversion to some more worthy cause, like rainforests in Iowa.

Anyway please comment, kvetch, suggest, advise, discuss, either in comments here or in email to me.