Science, Scientists and their debt to Society.

(This post is a crystallization of my thoughts set off by Arko's brilliant post, and its equally lively comments thread. Do visit it http://thrudlukingglass.blogspot.com/2010/06/lets-talk-about-science.html )

What's the exact value of a research done anywhere just now? My answer would be nobody knows, especially if its theoretical, as you would need a technologist to define it and give it a shape. Such answers are sadly not welcomed by several people, from those jhola-kurta liberals who believe all big science wastes money, Ludderites who believe technology is evil, to some scientists themselves keen on classifying some work as trash while others are not. 

One point that scientists agree mostly that the true value of science can never be gauged just now, and especially not by your average layman (no insult to him ) as you might not even know how those works are actually affecting your daily life. Examples abound. Number theory may seem esoteric but it is what underpins a lot of communication and encryption protocols. And half of India's population are cell phone users. Quantum physics may sound foreboding but it is what is making solid state devices exist today. Probability is not just about playing Russian roulette, but is used everywhere from stock markets to weather prediction. As I said, many things or disciplines in science you have no inkling about do actually have enormously practical consequences. Just because you never heard about them, does not mean they shouldn't exist! And science, especially now is even more about "Standing on the shoulders of giants" A new discovery now is built upon so many previous layers of knowledge, that if you start peeling back, you may reach upto Aristotle!

OK, now the second even more underhand attack. We pay taxes, taxes pay science. So what about the social accountability of scientists? And if they are rude enough, "Isn't LHC a big waste??" The answer is no. Many things are a big waste of your money. Free treatment at state-run hospitals. It mostly goes to the people who have never paid a paisa in taxes till now. So why don't we call it a waste? Science has actually provided the technologies to common man. If they are not implemented why blame them? After all why do you elect people? What are they for? What is the entire state machinery and bureaucracy for? When did policy implementation become a scientist's job? My only solution there, in those posts, do not nominate a person with a background of English literature, elect a scientist. However that may not always be best idea too. At least in India, the scientists who lust the most for administrative posts usually have the worst record of original research. But hey they can at least appreciate the work done better. And as for LHC being a waste, how do you know? Have you seen the future? How can you write off something before it's even started? Most, if not all seminal scientific discoveries have pedestrian applications down the road. Subjects often called esoteric like astrophysics are also actually important. Because it is astrophysics that is shining the flashlight in our inconsistencies in our theoretical understanding of physics. That gaps if fulfilled may well help us in harnessing and developing better technologies. In the last decades of the nineteenth century after Maxwell's laws became known physicists thought we almost knew almost everything that was in theoretical physics. Poincare's works must have felt like idle waste of time to some at that time. But they directly led to relativity and quantum mechanics, and today a 100 years on we know how seminal and important they were. So I would not have the temerity to call science a waste, ever. 

I can't resist here from quoting Rahul's awesome comment on Arko's blog

"It really is the desire to know more about nature that drives research. It is a sacred journey, a journey with lots of bumps along the way, but people always march forward with persistence. Only through acquiring more knowledge do you actually realize which ones can be used for the betterment of the human race. You cannot gain directional access to a particular set of knowledge that happens to be useful. Had we known what to discover to benefit us, it would not be a discovery any more; we would be doing a clerk's job. Such a circumstance would have indeed been very nice! But sadly we don't have it. So we need researchers to explore unexplored territory. We don't know in advance what we are going to get or if it is going to be useful or not. If we knew what to research, we might as well have clerks doing it (By the way a clerk does a very important job so that society runs smoothly). Outcome is never the purpose driving research - it is curiosity and a desire to know more about nature's mysteries."

And lastly, or the last vestige of an argument: Surely some work is seminal, some is trash. People often define trash that:

• is not published in a high impact factor journal
• is not path breaking
• essentially is an improvement over a previous technology

Stop for a moment and think about computers you saw in your childhood. Nowadays computers are so much more cheaper, faster, lighter yet consume far less power. And they are getting better by the day. Think about Bardeen's transistor and todays ones in a high performance Intel chip. Are they even remotely comparable? But by our logic of trash, much of this work was incremental, evolutionary rather than revolutionary, a very small step at a time, and most of it not remotely path-breaking. We tend to glorify the explorers, but Columbus did not make America the powerhouse it is today. We need both of them, the pioneers to broaden our horizons and to show us new paths, and also those men and women, the incrementalists to smoothen that path. These are the unsung researchers who finally make theory a reality, but theirs is the most thankless job. Some papers may be published just for the sake of increasing your publishing count, but then no good journal would accept that. We need tighter editing standards, not calling all incremental work trash.

I would like to finish off my rant by telling the story of ISRO. ISRO now earns a handsome amount of foreign exchange for India by hiring out its satellite launching facilities at some of the cheapest rates in the world. Apart from that they are the pride of almost every Indian. But ISRO while being set-up faced stiff opposition, with the phrases elitist, wasteful, we do not need it bandied about. Here's what two ISRO people have to say:

"There are some who question the relevance of space activities in a developing nation. To us, there is no ambiguity of purpose. We do not have the fantasy of competing with the economically advanced nations in the exploration of the moon or the planets or manned space-flight. But we are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society."

-Vikram Sarabhai

"Many individuals with myopic vision questioned the relevance of space activities in a newly independent nation, which was finding it difficult to feed its population. Their vision was clear if Indians were to play meaningful role in the community of nations, they must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to their real-life problems. They had no intention of using it as a mean to display our might."

-A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

The Energy Question - Part 2

In the previous post, I had signed out saying that I preferred nuclear fusion to the solutions being bandied about. Nuclear fusion, even though it has the N-word, and even though it IS a radioactive waste emitter, still trumps as a better energy source. Since I am not a nuclear physicist, so please feel free to correct me if I have made a mistake, but from the literature I have read, I have become convinced that nuclear fusion is the fuel of tomorrow.

First, the statistics. The total water on earth is about 326 million trillion gallons. And lets assume that we will go for the deuterium cycle. Going for the deuterium-deuterium cycle has several advantages. 

1. We do not have to perform tritium enrichment from lithium, which is not a very widely available metal. And as Li-ion batteries gain in prominence, lithium is increasingly expected to become dearer.
2. The emitted radiation spectrum is softer, and can be more easily contained than the deuterium-tritium cycle.

However, the energy yield for deuterium-deuterium cycles are 68% less than that for the deuterium-tritium cycle. Higher pressure and temperature conditions are also needed, making it technologically challenging in the first place, but because of the wider availability of deuterium, more sustainable in the long run. Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen and while the normal, garden variety hydrogen is devoid of neutrons, deuterium on the other hand contains a neutron in addition to the proton and the electron. Tritium is another isotope of hydrogens with two neutron compared to deuterium's one. Deuterium, tritium and hydrogen are almost chemically indistinguishable from each other, so wherever you collect a naturally available sample of hydrogen, expect to find some deuterium atoms in place of hydrogen. Thus water can be an excellent source of deuterium, with 5000 lires of water containing approximately about a liter of D20. Since the total water available on earth is about 326 million trillion gallons, we thus get 65200 trillion gallons of D2O approximately. Even at 10% efficiency the deuterium-deuterium fusion cycle gives 2000 GJ of energy per liter of D2O. At 100 times the current global energy consumption, fusion sources should last us out at least 10000 years. The average person in developed countries consumes around 10 times the energy of an average Indian, and as advanced technologies make processes increasingly fuel efficient, a 50000 year timeline for fusion to last us out is neither an impractical or improbable idea. 

The main bone of contention for environment groups is radiation. First of all remember that the process of fusion itself does NOT produce radioactive wastes. However due to neutron radiation being emitted the material surrounding the fusion core would become radioactive. However quoting Wikipedia,

"The half-life of the radioisotopes produced by fusion tend to be less than those from fission, so that the inventory decreases more rapidly. Unlike fission reactors, whose waste remains radioactive for thousands of years, most of the radioactive material in a fusion reactor would be the reactor core itself, which would be dangerous for about 50 years, and low-level waste another 100. Although this waste will be considerably more radioactive during those 50 years than fission waste, the very short half-life makes the process very attractive, as the waste management is fairly straightforward. By 300 years the material would have the same radioactivity as coal ash." 

In fusion the chance for catastrophic accidents like the Three Mile Island incident is inherently low. Fusion requires delicately calibrated and difficult to achieve conditions of heat, magnetic field and pressure to happen, and a slight change would just kill the reaction. Similarly after the reactor is stopped, the heat production stops immediately, unlike fission where the background reactions would continue for hours, generation heat. The plasma is burnt in near-optimal conditions, so any disruptions or accidents would actually cause the reaction to cool down or cease, instead of heating up. The fusion reactor is loaded with very small amounts of fuel thus making it inherently more safer, than the fission reactor.

And the benefits?

1. Energy deficiency a problem of the past.
2. Energy significantly cheaper
3. Nobody controls the oceans. So nobody controls the deuterium supply. No more oil embargoes or future "Iraq"s over oil.
4. Run cars on electricity, the technology for this is now remarkably developed, with electric cars available in the market. No more pollution too. Deuterium production will generate hydrogen too. Hydrogen technology too is developed enough to be put into production reality.
5. The problem of potable water can be translated to a problem of energy. So a sweet goodbye to water woes.
6. And last but not the least, another sweet goodbye, this time to petro-dollars, which would translate to a goodbye to terrorism, especially of the Salafist kind.

The good news is that several multi-billion dollar projects are underway to exploit fusion as a power source, like ITER, Joint European Torus or the National Ignition Facility. For future world peace and prosperity, we need fusion. Investing in fusion research is thus a must for us now. If due to distorted notions of political correctness or due to an irrational fear of anything nuclear, we do not seize this moment, then neither the history nor our environment will ever forgive us.

The Energy Question - Part 1

If you stay in a moderately big city and just  look around yourself, will understand that we humans are addicted to energy. We need it in almost every step of our life and in fact our whole economy is underpinned by energy. Remove the source of energy and our whole economy will come crashing down like a pack of cards which no amount of bailout packages will be able to revive. At current rates of consumption our oil sources may last us out a hundred years or so. But the problem with fuel burning is the question of greenhouse gases and global warming. We may have the oil, but who is going to take care of the fumes? Several armchair intellectual organisations have proposed quite a wide array of solutions, with a wide range of practicalities, but none in my honest opinion, is practical enough. 

Foremost, among their plans is to decrease the average per capita energy consumption, and that too drastically. All this sounds quite noble but the majority of the world's population is located in the continents of Asia and Africa, and there too a significant proportion live in abject poverty. With an optimistic eye towards the future, I believe this population would within the next fifty or so years reach the status of developed nations. What does this entail? An exponential increase of energy demand. The global projected energy consumption is likely to shoot up by maybe an order of magnitude or more. The currently developed nations have hogged the energy resources of the world for more than three centuries now and even today contribute to the bulk of global pollution and global warming. India, with a population five times that of USA, consumes half as much as energy. This means that the average US citizen consumes almost 10 times as much energy as the average Indian. Most development projects in the modern world are energy dependent. As more and more agriculture will be mechanised to increase productivity, and larger tracts of lands are to come under irrigation, energy demands are bound to increase. Moreover, countries like India have still predominantly a rural agrarian population. This leads to significant underemployment in the agriculture sector. The economic condition of India cannot be improved without creation of a large number of jobs in the secondary, tertiary and quaternary sectors which necessarily entails a shift of the demographics from the rural to the urban, which again requires increased energy. It has been noted by several economists that as per capita income rises, if it outpaces inflation, then consumption also rises. A very poor man does not need anything, but a moderately solvent person will require a fan, while raise the income a bit higher, he demands an AC. Implicit in all these long-winded arguments is the increase of energy consumption. So, asking these nations to suddenly decrease their energy consumption even below their current consumption, smacks of downright neo-imperialism. And why will these countries agree to it also? Why will these countries sacrifice their progress in the altar of global good, when the priests themselves are the worst sinners? Hoping for a decrease in consumption thus to me is pure daydreaming with no grounding in practicality at all.

The second point raised by the green brigade is that we can switch over completely to non-conventional sources of energy. Quoting Greenpeace, "They are abundant, and we can obtain them now only." Both points are technically right, feels politically very correct yet stands on very weak operable principles. Just from the tone of their voice you can feel this was uttered by a history graduate whose knowledge of the energy problem starts and ends with some web surfing and whose contribution has mostly been sloganeering. Even though this solution appears quite practical at first, it however suffers from several fatal flaws in its reasoning. First of all is the implicit point is that non-conventional energy is cheap. This is quite wrong. Yes, they are damn cheap to run, but not to install. They have very high starting costs, and since they give typically far lower yields than most conventional sources you have to operate them for a period of hundred years or so before you can say they are cheaper. Second is another implicit assumption that global energy consumption will remain mostly the same, or will increase slightly. I have already refuted this in the previous paragraph and won't waste time by repeating myself. The third point of abundance is basically a half-truth. Global incident solar energy will cover twice your energy bills if harnessed by current technologies. But people forget that solar energy is a fickle source, that is not available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You would thus need appropriate storage systems, driving up costs and wastage. Also it's energy density per unit area is very low, you would again drive up costs in building elaborate distribution systems, not to mention increased transmission losses. And finally to cover even our current energy bill, we need to cover almost 50% of the surface of the earth with solar cells! Thats almost laughable in its impracticality. Most of these arguments can be extended for wind, tidal and geothermal energy too. Except geothermal, almost all are fickle. And too little in amount to be the primary source. You may shout out "Iceland!" but the population of Iceland and India can never be compared. Such non-conventional sources can never be the primary source for large, populous nations. 

What we need now, even though it ticks all the right boxes, is nuclear fusion, the anathema of Greenpeace. Why we need urgent research on this topic and why the eco-political hijacking of anything nuclear must stop I will expand in my next post.