Scientific Method as Strasberg’s Method
March 3, 2010
We’ve been hearing a great deal about science in the media in the context of climate change and new energy sources lately, and the quality of some scientific work has been called into doubt, and there have been calls for an increased understanding of science to try and stop misrepresentation by the media, blah, blah, blah. This call for dialogue between the fields of arts and sciences is happening on more and more occasions as science gets more difficult and mass media becomes less patient. Anyone still remember CP Snow ? So why don’t we look at things a slightly different way ?
Science is media
That sounds a bit odd, but philosophically science is a mechanism by which we try to understand the physical reality that we inhabit and mass media (especially news journalism) is also a mechanism to help understand the world around us. Their methods are different but their core goals are the same – enhanced understanding of reality.
So lets look at some recent science through a media lens. In fact let’s get PoMo on its ass !
Marshall McLuhan in ‘The Medium is the Massage’ posits that you perform the message that you wish to communicate. It doesn’t matter if that is verbally, ethically, artistically, mathematically or physically, what you do and how you do it IS what you say. On the other side of the coin if your performance does not tie in with your message the audience undergoes cognitive dissonance and the message is garbled, contradictory and ineffective.
Strasberg’s Method Acting technique is a great example of this. The actor does everything in his power to become the character in order that his whole performance reflects the experience of that being, in so doing the words and the physical body perform as one and, hopefully, the role is played well. The actor doesn’t actually become the character, that would be impossible, but he will take on or construct every aspect of that character that he can discover.
So if we take the recent CRU email scandal (yes, scandal), we have a set of scientists who perform their science under the scientific method which involves openness, respect for others results and views, self-criticism, peer-review and data validation. Over the years they have told us ‘trust us, we’re the best, we do good science’, in effect we’re following the scientific method, and now we find out that their performance is not backed up by their method. We thought that we were seeing the real thing, or at least a good approximation of the real thing with the scientists suffering for their art, but we were sold a poor performance. A shallow frontage. Its like finding out that a character that Al Pacino plays never actually liked coffee but Pacino forced a re-write because he couldn’t go without his morning joe.
For the record and as a former scientist I find the actions of the CRU scientists abhorant, but human (I never lived up to my own view of what a scientist is, which is why no longer call myself one, though I still perform the role of scientific critic). For me the affair doesn’t detract from the credibility of climate science as a whole, but its disturbing that their performance was more Lee Majors than Lee Strasberg.
They need to get their method back.
Royal Society Impressions
June 10, 2009
It was an interesting couple of days. Its a long time since I’ve talked to people doing fundamental science and I was really treading water when things started to get technical, but I survived, which is nice.
Impressions are;
That these guys are sick of being asked when its going to be in the shops. They understand the time-dependency where climate is concerned, the political dependency where energy security is concerned and the social and developmental imperatives too. They know their own areas incredibly well and were not really calling for more investment in those areas. What they want is science undergraduates from the UK in order to sustain the full development cycles for these technologies. OK, that’s investment, but its not something that can be fixed short term by throwing cash at it.
Overseas undergrads and postgrads are good at keeping university research departments open from a financial point of view, but those guys & girls go back home after a few years taking their skills with them. This disrupts development and slows it down. International and inter-disciplinary working are really good, even essential, things to get a set of solutions to market, but the fundamental science needs long-term dedication as well.
Having said that, the time-table is as follows:
Fuel cells – domestic commercialisation in the next couple of years in the UK for fuel cell CHP running on natural gas – looking at it from the outside the market needs a policy kick-start, but apart from that its good to go. Industrial commercialisation appears more price dependent because of the engineering involved in coping with the stack heat, and is strictly niche at the moment. The focus is on bringing the stack operating temperature down.
Hydrogen fuel cell cars – 2015 roll-out date from a consortium of several manufacturers, but requires govt investment in infrastructure. Looks ambitious to me, even in Japan. 2020 looks more like it.
Synfuels from CO2, sunlight and water – 10-15 years to pre-commercial scale. Something about this one seems a bit ‘too good to be true’ to me. I’m sure that you can synthesize simple hydrocarbons from water and air, but I’m not sure that its a great idea in the full life-cycle. I think that we should probably aim higher. Early days though.
Fusion – sometime this century (probably)
Fission – the first 3rd gen is currently being built in Finland
Photovoltaics – 15-25 years to cost parity with current grid power based on silicon technologies – dye-sensitized organics or thin film could disrupt this curve. Dye sensitized cells are much closer to mass roll-out than second gen thin film. First gen thin film (CIGS) are available now in small volumes.
Supercaps – already commercialised and in 1 million Prius’s
Hydrogen storage – 10+ years at best
So, really and truly sustainable solar PV, hydrogen and synfuels are 10+ years away, at least, and investment will not help in the short term because there are not enough science grads out there to do the actual work. That’s kinda depressing.
There were some misapprehensions, from non-scientists in the audience, about what fundamental scientists do. These participants seemed to feel that scientists should know what their discoveries will bring before they discover them. Seems weird to me, expecting an explorer to draw the map before they set out. Maybe that’s the communication breakdown between arts & science (CP Snow’s Two Cultures and all that), and why we are lacking science undergrads. People just don’t understand what science is or does at a really fundamental level, never mind the applied sciences and engineering.
The most pleasant folks that I met were the nuclear scientists, the least pleasant the environmentalist (singular), but please don’t extrapolate that to all nuclear scientists are nice guys and all environmentalist are ogres. Of the 4 or 5 people in the audience of ~200 that I had a decent chat to, two were nuclear, one environmental, one finance and one undecided.
A word to the wise – never be in London when there is a tube strike about to start, things get a bit crazy.
Anyway Day Two of the discussion meeting covered: Hydrogen storage, cerium oxide (for synfuels and hydrogen production), nuclear fission & fusion, more fuel cells, some super-capacitors and a bit of policy.
Interesting stuff that I noted down:
Zuttel
Each kWh provides €25c of full-cycle economic advantage while the current average cost to European consumers is about €5c/kWh.
The oil price spike in 2008 took those prices towards parity meaning, that no net economic advantage was effected by the energy expended, contributing in a large part to the economic crash.
I’d not heard it put in those terms before, and if there is a real and verifiable corelation between delta energy cost/benefit and the occurrence of economic crises, then we have a really powerful preventative tool. My guess is that this relationship is much less clear cut and that the materials scientist who proposed it isn’t fully up to speed on behavioural economics, but that’s only a guess.
Hydrogen carries 39kWh/kg
Recent regulations against the use of asbestos have effectively killed the prospects of using electrolysis of water as a large scale hydrogen production method in Europe. Asbestos was used in industrial electrolysis as a membrane.
Hydrogen storage tanks are now made of a thin blown aluminum shell, wrapped with kevlar or carbon fibre.
Hydrogen storage in metal hydrides can be twice the amount that can be held in tanks as the hydrogen is adsorbed onto the metal hydride in a very densely packed fashion. However, you need one metal hydride per hydrogen, so the storage media gets really heavy, really quickly as the tank size increases. There is an option to combine both hydride and liquid storage to get the best of both worlds.
Even with hydrogen stored in metal hydrides, the energy density is still only half that of gasoline.
Haile talked about ceria (cerium oxide) – a wonderful material apparently (she got her mineral economics all out of whack of course, but was better than most on the resources side).
Full cycle ceria-mediated synfuel production is currently 13% efficient, 23% efficient if you recover 50% of the process heat. The inputs are sunlight, water and CO2 as far as I can tell.
She quoted ceria availability at 40Mt – enough for >50,000 100MWe power plants operating 6hrs a day. Cost $140/MW installed using $20/kg of ceria. She didn’t mention that in Feb 2008 cerium price was $9.50/kg, so I will.
Cerium (for the uninitiated) is the least rare of the Rare Earth Elements (REEs), but that doesn’t mean that is is geologically more readily available than, for instance, lead which has a similar crustal abundance. The geochemistry of REEs means that there are very few deposits rich enough to be mined at a profit. Deposits are generally rich in either ‘light’ REEs or ‘heavy’ REEs, but not both. This limits a mine’s ability to fully service a customer with a mixed REE product, so limits its profitability. There are three main REE deposit types as far as I know; carbonitites (igneous intrusions such as that previously mined at Mountain Pass, California), ionic clays (where the REEs have been adsorbed onto clay minerals from groundwater) and REE-enriched iron ores. These last two are the forms seen in China, which currently provides 95%+ of the world’s REEs. Anyway, yes they may be relatively abundant, but they are not very available.
Grimes showed some nice animations on defect modeling in radiative environments.
Duffy talked on fusion. Apparently the bigger, the better with fusion (less losses through reduced surface area of the plasma per unit volume). ITER should be a net power producer giving up 10x the energy put in (50MW in – 500MW out), but it won’t be set up to extract that energy from the system because that isn’t what its for. It is primarily a materials test lab since the plasma physics is pretty much sorted (they think). The demo plant, to follow in 30 years or so, is sketched out to be a 3,000MW monster producing 50x energy input. First electricity to grid sometime after 2050.
For Paul; the fusion boys are not in the least worried about lithium availability for the tritium breeder jacket because there is ‘loads of it around’. As you know I tend to agree, lithium availability is energy price sensitive and not geologically constrained.
However other elements in the reactor vessel may be resource constrained – beryllium & tungsten specifically and they are looking at these very closely.
Hirose (a bit of a legend apparently, now works for Toyota Fuel Cells division)
The Japanese always have a different angle on things and it was fun to hear the debate between the Japanese view and the Californian when it came to transport availability. Hirose stresses the Quality of Mobility (QoM) and the role of fuel cells in maintaining or extending QoM, whereas Haile warned against generalisations of social conformity in development of scientific solutions. The point was actually raised several times that social science needs to be engaged in progressing societal change and the roll-out of these new technologies. I agree, why else would I be here ?
Toyota’s well to wheel efficiency for fuel cell vehicles using hydrogen is about 40%
Simon on Supercapacitors – ‘supercaps’ in the biz
They are a complimentary technology, not a disruptive one to batteries. They have a short discharge time ~10sec at high power, so have applications in acceleration of mass, quick deployment mechanisms and the like, but the most interesting applications were in energy harvesting from mechanical systems to time-shift that energy back into later acceleration. Effectively its the regenerative braking that is talked about in Formula One.
But you will never run transport just on supercaps, they just make the system more efficient, ~30% more efficient at present. Good news, but not a stand-alone solution.
Foxon was the only speaker to come in under time, brought no new data and was dull. I’m just all-round glad he’s not coming down to speak at our conference 
OK, I lied – Report from Royal Society on Energy Materials to Combat Climate Change – Day One
June 8, 2009
I’m at a ‘discussion meeting’ at the Royal Society in London on Energy Materials to Combat Climate Change.
Interesting stuff – sessions today were on lithium batteries, photovoltaics (thin film & dye sensitized) and fuel cells. Its a but more fundamental science than I’d normally get into, lots of talk about membranes, ion migration paths, p & n materials, dopants and multiple junctions. I managed to keep up with most of it, just.
Some interesting comments from the speakers though:
CdTe-based photovoltaics have been ruled out on the basis of tellurium availability and cadmium toxicity, but mainly the tellurium shortage.
Current dye-sensitized module efficiency is 8.2% (that’s including all the connections, conversions, not just a lab measure). Apparently they are the architect’s choice, and I have to say they look really good as the dye doesn’t have to be in simple blocks, so can be made into single or multi-colour ‘stained glass’.
Ruthenium (a common additive in lots of these highest of high-tech energy conversion technologies) is not in short supply and in dye sensitized solar cells would use 0.5t/GW on current designs. Recycling will be necessary somewhere along the line, but not in the first generation.
Substrate materials for thin films are seen as the highest energy portion of the fabrication process.
Organics are the ultimate aim for both thin film and dye-sensitized types, but don’t hold you breath. The Profs were talking 10 years+, probably more like 15 years, before getting these two techs to a truly sustainable form that makes economic sense.
The thermodynamic limit (known as the S-Q limit) for single junction solar cell efficiency is about 30% (probably not news to anyone apart from me). Good commercial silicon cells are running at 12-20% efficiency. Triple junction cells have a theoretical efficiency limit or around 50%.
There is potential to couple dye sensitized with thin film to catch more of the spectrum and up the efficiency, but its never been tried.
CIGS (Copper Indium Germanium Selenium) thin film are the current cutting edge commercial technology (from other sources I’ve heard that the Chinese thin film factories should be starting up any time) – however Indium, Germanium and Selenium are all pretty rare/expensive so work is going down the route of using other metals. The are trying CZTS (Copper Zinc Tin Sulphur) and CBS (Copper Bismuth Sulphur) and getting good results, but again don’t expect anything in the shops for Christmas. This is coming from primary researchers and even these guys are saying 10-15 years at least with a following wind and everything crossed.
The fuel cell guys are singing from the same hymn-sheet. We are at second/third generation cell membrane technology. Focus is on bringing operating temperature down so that the structure around the cell membranes can be made of common(ish) stainless steels rather than exotics.
The encouraging thing from my perspective was that today’s speakers were taking metals availability into account before embarking on extensive programs. They also repeated that its time for social science to take up the reigns for the roll-out of all these new technologies. They even nodded sagely and agreed that metals availability isn’t a simple matter and market and geo-political availability should also be taken into account.
Problems with Precaution
March 30, 2009
I’ll say it up front – I find some advocates of ‘strong’ implementation of the Precautionary Principle incredibly frustrating.
Just as a reminder what we’re talking about here’s the EU version
“The precautionary principle applies where scientific evidence is insufficient, inconclusive or uncertain and preliminary scientific evaluation indicates that there are reasonable grounds for concern that the potentially dangerous effects on the environment, human, animal or plant health may be inconsistent with the high level of protection chosen by the EU”
Great. Looks good. No problem there.
Well, yes & no.
The problem is that using terms such as ‘insufficient’, ‘inconclusive’, ‘uncertain’, ‘indicates’ and ‘reasonable’ is that they are open to interpretation when the scientific evidence used to reach conclusions about ‘potentially dangerous effects’ is simply evidence, not proof. My issue with this is that you are using subjective, interpretive legal status to regulate objective investigations. In effect the Precautionary Principle is opposed to scientific method.
This is where I start to loose my cool. Scientific method is one of the foundations of our society and our primary means of interpreting the world around us. Most of us don’t know what it is explicitly, but whenever things like evolution vs creation or mysticism vs medicine come up, most of us go with the option that we believe has the greatest chance of successfully explaining reality.
Most us us choose to have the cancer treated with drugs & radiation and choose not to believe the Usherian age of the Earth. Most of us choose scientific method.
You can’t say ‘our models of the atmosphere show with a 95% certainty that global warming is a real danger we should take action’ and then turn around to say that you shouldn’t investigate ways to mitigate the risk of that scientific prediction coming true. Its nonsense.
Unfortunately that is what we are seeing in the world right now. Decision-makers and people of influence propagating anti-scientific twaddle and using the Precautionary Principle to justify it.
I agree with the fundamental tenet of the Principle, but not with the way that it is expressed or often interpreted. If you want to mitigate risks you should use a risk-based approach not a voodoo-based approach. To do that you have to at least try and understand some of the basic science and not just run away at the merest mention of empirical evidence.
