Review: Penrose's Road to Reality

This one's a rather long review... looks like they didn't cut much, though rearranged slightly. Anyway, it's an interesting book...

Review: Space: What Now?

Another Huntsville Times review... I met Tom Hill last summer, and it sounded interesting.

Review: Ben Bova's Powersat

My latest review is up at the Huntsville Times! An interesting novel, at least nominally about a subject I've become very interested in - solar power satellites!

New Web Site and Organization

It's past time for some real action on the energy alternatives - we'll be collecting and posting articles on real solutions: things that are, at least in theory, technically and economically capable of replacing oil in the next few decades. Should be interesting...

Baroque Cycle Review

Looks like they finally got my latest review up, of Stephenson's last book of the trilogy. Not bad... :-)

Moon/Mars and Physics

Well, it's a new year, time for an update!

My recent letter to APS News on the "Moon-Mars" program was published in the November 1st edition - a copy is also appended below. Meanwhile, however, my beloved organization went ahead with publishing an anti-"Moon-Mars" report . I've exchanged some email with the report authors, particularly Joel Primack - but I don't think we've convinced anyone of anything yet. Oh well.

Here's the letter:

Moon/Mars Offers Physics Opportunities

The August/September APS News highlighted a June resolution of the APS Executive Board, urging review of the Moon/Mars proposal and NASA's recent redirection. Calling the 10-15 year timeline for a return to the Moon a "rapid pace", the statement indicated concern about the impact on science and budgets.

Given that the most immediate scientific impact of the new "vision" is a termination of physical science research on the space station, there is certainly reason for this concern. But coming from APS the new statement is ironic in light of the still unrevoked 1991 APS Council "Statement on the Manned Space Station": "The United States needs a vigorous space science program, but such a program can be implemented for the foreseeable future without the proposed manned space station."

Science was never a good justification for the space station. Former APS Public Affairs director Robert Park is widely known as an outspoken critic of human space flight. Park is absolutely correct that human spaceflight is still far too expensive to justify any scientific returns. So far.

With a limited budget, hard choices have to be made on which programs will benefit society more. The money spent to make the aging space shuttles safer, since the Columbia accident, is taking away from science programs at NASA right now. The space station still has billions of dollars worth of committed funding before it can be declared even minimally complete. Bush, in announcing the new Moon/Mars direction, called for an end (by 2010) to the wasteful space shuttle, and thereafter a phasing out of space station commitments as well. This will both protect the substantial continuing science programs at NASA, and leave room for the new program as well. Whatever your views on our president, it's a logical way to proceed.

The reason we need humans in space is not for science. It is to learn how to do things better in space. Robots don't have the intelligence and insight that humans bring. The problems are basic: in our laboratories on Earth we take for granted simple things—shelter from the outside world, a steady internal climate, access to substantial electric power, and of course an abundance of graduate students to put the equipment together, twiddle the knobs, and fix it when it breaks. Fixing things in low gravity isn't so simple—even soldering doesn't work. Small-scale bench-top science that could bring great breakthroughs in space requires all of these, and we don't know how to do any of them cost-effectively yet—and we'll never learn by just sitting in our armchairs and thinking about it.

If the APS is interested in having any real impact on NASA's future, it should make an effort to understand the changes under way. Is it a good idea to turn NASA centers into independent research centers more like the DOE labs? Are there physical science areas that can contribute significantly to the new program, and should receive new funding?

Can we imagine any science we would like to do if the more robust and inexpensive private and federal space infrastructure expected actually comes to pass?

The Moon/Mars decision doesn't have much to do with science—and despite its political origin, has an inevitable logic that a new administration would be hard-pressed to reverse. NASA people are energetically tackling the new challenges they've been given—there are real opportunities here for physicists and physics research, if we are willing to be a part of it.
Arthur Smith,
Selden, NY

Newsday letter

But that link is going to be invalid in a day or so. Here's the letter as they published it:

Climate change and terrorism

Your cartoon with Dick Cheney linking hurricanes to al-Qaida and the upcoming presidential vote was doubly ironic [Editorial, Sept. 25]. The record-breaking hurricane season this year is exactly the sort of thing scientists have been warning will happen, as we continue to burn fossil fuels and carbon dioxide warms the global climate.

If you think this year was bad, it will only get worse. Climate change threatens as much damage to our society as any conceivable terrorist attack.

The four years of the Bush administration have seen a tragic lost opportunity for the world. We Americans have joined our leaders in denial of the facts - yet the facts are there, as even the Bush administration admits in a recent climate report. Renewable energy research and development is grossly underfunded, and this administration and Congress allowed the wind energy production tax credit to expire.

And there is a link to al- Qaida: replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and energy efficiency improvements is the only sure way to starve the terrorists of the oil money that supports them.

Arthur Smith

Selden

New Moon Rising

My review of Sietzen and Cowing's book, on the new US space policy.

Moonrush

And another review - Dennis Wingo's Moonrush. It's an interesting concept - whether the Moon might be a major future source of precious metals.

Latest Review: Futuring

I should probably post here more often... :-)

I do post often on sciscoop - http://www.sciscoop.com/

Also I've been occasionally posting to various NSS sites - for example here: http://chapters.nss.org/weblog/ - though that's more routine space society business.

Actually, regarding Huntsville, it looks like I'll be there in November for an NSS board meeting. Should be interesting.

Wired on Space Solar Power

John Gartner, a reporter from Wired, called me last week about funding for space solar power. Apparently there was some money for it in 2001, but it disappeared somehow, without much outcry, into NASA's general budget. And I'm heading off to the SPS '04 conference in Spain next week, so we'll see if anything comes of that... good to have some advance publicity!

Out of Gas review with htimes

My review finally came out in print now too...

The other book I've been reading on this is Vaclav Smil's Energy at the Crossroads - he has a lot of numbers, many seeming very useful (despite the typos) - but he seems to have a subtle bias in all his arguments that implies energy is not as important to the world economy as, in fact, one would discover from the actual numbers he uses. A little disappointing...

And on slashdot

They took a couple of weeks to put this up too - and oddly, changed the title (maybe Barnes and Noble has a different title for it)? Weird. Anyway, nice to have this getting some attention - and lots of posts!

Stephenson Review Up

My review of Stephenson's "The Confusion" just came out in the Huntsville Times. Hope you all like it :-)

Recommendations to Aldridge Commission

I finally got around to writing up what I'd been thinking about and sending it in to the commission.
Comments are welcome here or there.

Two specific recommendations:
1. Establish a National Space Board, similar to the National Science Board, to provide stable long-term planning and oversight of the nation's space activities, including policy recommendations on budgets, taxation, regulation, and technology incentives to the President and Congress.

2. In planning, focus on enabling the key components of potential virtuous economic cycles: lower-cost access to space stimulating space markets, lunar oxygen for in-space refueling, production of energy in space for sale on Earth, etc... These are the pieces that, as we've experienced in use of computers to design new computers, can lead to truly exponential economic growth. This focus would appear in two areas: the general policy recommendations and incentive structures recommended by the Board, and prioritized lists of demonstration projects that could jump-start these new economic engines.

Baseball season

Ben doesn't have quite so many this year (16 teams in the league), but every Tuesday and Thursday for the next couple of months we'll be out watching 2+ hour games. So far they (the "Rangers") have 1 win, 1 loss... A lot of his buddies are in the various other teams this year (neighbors on the street, friends from 3rd grade); the guy he sits next to in class made a third out off Ben's grounder one inning last game, and looked very pleased about it! His little brother, who used to play with Elizabeth's Pirates, is also on the same team.

After a quick trip to DC last week to meet with other publishers and also a brief chat with George Whitesides, I came back with the second installment of Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle", The Confusion. Not quite as long as the first, but a similar mix of piracy, politics, and philosophy... And lots more Leibniz! Now I'm hoping to write a review before Mum gets here to read it

Prelude to interplanetary travel

I'm still in the middle of reading Robert Zimmerman's "Leaving Earth" (review at the above link) but we did get an overview of the book at his talk. By the way, the location, the 56th Fighter Group Restaurant was rather interesting - a reproduction of a World War II British air base, complete with Spitfire's parked outside. The food was pretty good too!

Dad's comments on the transistor

Hi Dad :-)

Having some experience in semiconductor research, he had the following comments:

I worked in the transistor area between 1960 and 1964, and some of
my experiments were with the field effect on the surface of a semicondutor.
My understanding is that the DISCOVERY of transistor action by Shockley and
others was an accident arising from experiments on this surface field
effect. Of course, the investigation of semiconductor properties was
carried out at Bell Labs and at other similar institutions like Philips in
Eindhoven and IBM, Texas Instruments, etc. So one could argue that the
DEVELOPMENT of transistors at A.T & T. was done, as you say, to create
something new. That it was not pure research once the discovery had been
made?
I believe the big breakthrough came when photolithography was
applied to the problem. I believe the first company to do this was
Fairchild (Camera), in California. I don't know what links there are from
that company to Intel etc. But I do know that at the company I was with,
Mullard, a subsidiary of Philips, the view was that microminiaturisation
would be done by evaporating metals onto the surface of a semiconductor.
There was much work going on using diffusion of elements into
semiconductors, but the idea of using photographic techniques was not
seriously entertained.
Another comment, I'd like to make: a 19th century scientist I have
a great deal of admiration for is Michael Faraday. His work was done almost
entirely alone. He had one man to help him, that is all. His investigations
cover large areas of physics, physical chemistry and organic chemistry as
well. He, therefore, had little need for vast funding as is the case today,
partly to pay all the employees on a project. I think a great deal of
funding needs are probably exaggerated these days.
One final thought: with regard to the cost of PV, wouldn't you
agree that further reductions in price will come from much larger scale
manufacture and sales, rather than from new technology

Snow again!

Just as our first (poor, tiny, small mammal-eaten) crocuses were starting to flower. Oh well... I hope the daffodils survive - their leaves were a couple of inches high.

Joshua loves the snow though - he always likes to be outdoors, but I don't remember the other two ever being so excited at such an early age by snowfall. He was out tonight trying to throw snowballs at his big brother, having a blast!

An amazing game

Ben's basketball team won their second straight game yesterday - apparently against the second-best team in the league! Not bad for a team where about half the players had never played before (Ben's previous experience consisted of throwing balls at a 7-foot basket in our driveway - and missing most of the time). As Coach Sweeney had warned, some of the teams were a bit stacked this year, with big experienced players picked out for a select few teams; in this case, all but one or two of the players on the other team was bigger and bulkier than every one of our players.

It didn't look good at the start. The other team scored quickly and repeatedly, with their players hitting the basket on every shot - the score stood at 8-0 after a couple of minutes. A couple of the other parents near me shared a grimace - this was going to be over quickly. But then Ben's team got really tight on defense, got the ball down to the basket, and were fouled on a shot, and had free throws; both of them went in. Suddenly the tables seemed turned - our little guys were getting the ball in the basket, dribbling circles around the big guys - and they were getting too scared to foul us. The score was 9-14 near the end of the first half, when Ben was fouled - and then made one of his free throws, and then shortly after got a rebound to make another basket - 9-17 at the end of the first half!

We got the first basket at the beginning of the second half, and another one not long after, but they had started scoring again and brought it up to 20-21. They were back in the lead at 26-25 briefly, then again at 30-29, but there wasn't much time left then and Ben's team had one more basket in them - final score: 30-31!

Pretty amazing game for a bunch of 9 and 10-year-olds!