December 31, 2009
Newsmaker of the year: Steven Chu
From Nature:
Nature is pleased to name physicist Steven Chu, Nobel laureate and the US Secretary of Energy, as its Newsmaker of the Year.
Steven Chu made his name — and earned his Nobel prize — by developing an ingenious laser technique for capturing and studying atoms. He is an extraordinary experimentalist who loves the challenges of the lab. But five years ago, he embraced a much bigger challenge when he took the helm at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and dedicated it to clean-energy research. Chu was sworn in as secretary of the US Department of Energy this January, and is now charged with transforming the way the world's largest economy powers itself. That is why Nature has selected Chu as its Newsmaker of the Year.
Chu has already had a significant impact. From his position near the top of President Barack Obama's administration, he has helped make the case that the United States must commit to reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions, not only to save the planet but also to ensure that the country will be able to compete with China, India and Europe in the emerging green economy.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 12:28 PM | Permalink
Comments
This is a totally unenlightening editorial by the editors of Nature.
As a physicist, Dr. Chu knows only too well the severe restrictions the laws of physics place on the choices one has to move mass around the planet and heat or cool environments for people to occupy. It all takes a thing called energy and energy means money.
Unlike the laws made by politicians, where the military force and power of government can be misused to provide "free" money to some at the expense of others, through a Robin Hood, Communist form of taxation, the laws of physics act equally for everyone automatically. There is absolutely no free lunch for anyone with the laws of physics.
All one can do is change energy from one form to another form and some is always lost along the way.
It is not possible to overcome the technology of the internal combustion engine, which has evolved in over 100 years, in a day or a year even. It is not simply a matter of discovering another "less polluting" means of producing energy. One must also produce the entire distribution system for that energy and the entire labor force and parts force to service such a system which is already in place for the internal combustion engine. Why even if we were to go back to the horse and buggy there wouldn't be enough horses in the world and every male and female horse would have to spend the next hundred years reproducing just to produce them, not to mention the horse manure created in the street by them and the CO2 exhaled out of their lungs too.
Some people advocate electric cars and trucks. But where is all that electricity going to come from? Burning coal or natural gas or running a nuclear powered steam plant? And remember the steam engine used on railroad locomotives for about 200 years? They still exist. Most nuclear submarines run on steam turbine engines, the steam being produced by nuclear fuel. All this is a Hobson's choice because while theoretically an infinite or almost infinite amount of energy is available from converting mass to energy, what about the radioactive waste which is almost always left? How about sending that to the Moon? It is much easier to write down E=mc2 than to actually carry it out in practice isn't it?
Unfornately Man is very spoiled and very wasteful and has been used to a decadent life style.
Imagine you to be the last person filling your gas tank with the last 20 gallons of gas on the planet. What happens then?
Our politicians do not have the intelligence to manage themselves out of a paper bag. They did not create the system, however polluting and wasteful, we now have. Very intelligent geniuses did that. And by the way, what happened to that failed fusion project we have poured about as much money into as the war on cancer, but both are dismal failures?
Do not expect good for nothing corrupt politicians who consistently fail at wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars on cancer, wars on drugs, etc., to make any intelligent decisions about these vital issues and don't expect a lowly physicist to have the ability to convince these corrupt morons either. Only when their fancy vacation home gets flooded at will they likely be convinced of global warming and then it will likely be too late.
Perhaps the computer age will save the day. Instead of paying all that money wasted transporting all these millions of people and goods around the planet every day, perhaps the computer can create a virtual reality instead so everyone can derive all the benefits of travel from their own living rooms or computer keyboards. Of course then the economy as we know it would be doomed.
Posted by: Winfield J. Abbe | Jan 2, 2010 11:57:56 AM
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