Category: General

In my efforts to educate myself about how new technologies might impact on our economy and society, the author from whom I’ve learnt the most is unquestionably Vaclav Smil. Smil is a Professor in the Department of Environment and Geography at the University of Manitoba, but his writings cover the whole sweep of the interaction of technology and society. What I appreciate about his books is their emphasis on rigorous quantification, their long historical perspective and global span (Smil is an expert on China, among many other things), and their grounding in the things that matter – how we get the food we eat and the energy that underlies our lifestyles.

My introduction to Smil’s work came when I needed a rapid introduction to energy economics. His 2003 book Energy at the Crossroads: global perspectives and uncertainties does this job in an admirably clear-headed and realistic way. It has a particularly sobering view of the poor record of energy forecasting in the past, and of the evolution of linkages between economic growth and output and energy inputs. Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production takes a historical view of the linkage between energy and food. Few people nowadays stop to think about the importance of artificial nitrogen fixation, powered by fossil fuels, in feeding the world. Yet it is clear that without artificial fertilizers more than half of the current population of the earth would not be alive today. We are effectively surviving by eating oil. This theme is developed in Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century, which asks the fundamental question, just how many people could the world feed? After a period of plentiful and cheap food, at least in the West, we’ve forgotten about some of the more apocolyptic visions of mass famine. Yet the world food supply equation is probably more fragile than we’d like to think. This is likely to get worse, as climate change, water shortages, and environmental degradation puts pressure on yields, and increasing demand for biofuels increases demand for non-food uses of crops.

Many of these themes are brought together, with many other trends, in two of Smil’s most recent books, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact and Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences . Taken together, these two volumes offer the best overview of how the world we live in now has developed that I know of. At one level, this is simply a narrative history of modern technology, albeit one that takes a holistic view of the way in which many different inventions come together to make important innovations possible. In this sense, it’s the story of accelerating change, in which one technological development facilitates another. But he is explicitly dismissive of those who are too quick to plot exponential curves and extrapolate from them. The title of his first book makes it clear that in Smil’s view, the true technological revolution took place in the last part of the 19th century, and what we have seen since then is largely the unfolding of the developments that were initiated in this great saltation. And he is by no means certain that the rapid change will continue, noting the degree to which it has been built on a massive, and probably unsustainable, growth in energy consumption. His agnostic outlook is summed up in the last chapter, where he asks:

“have the last six generations of great technical innovations and transformations merely been the beginning of a new extended era of unprecedented accomplishments and spreading and sustained affluence – or have they been a historically ephemeral aberration that does not have any realistic chance of continuing along the same, or a similar trajectory, for much longer?”

There are many debates about nanotechnology; what it is, what it will make possible, and what its dangers might be. On one level these may seem to be very technical in nature. So a question about whether a Drexler style assembler is technically feasible can rapidly descend into details of surface chemistry, while issues about the possible toxicity of carbon nanotubes turn on the procedures for reliable toxicological screening. But it’s at least arguable that the focus on the technical obscures the real causes of the arguments, which are actually based on clashes of ideology. We supposedly live in a non-ideological age, so what are the ideological divisions that underly debates about nanotechnology? I suggest, for a start, these four ideological positions, each of which implies a very different attitude towards nanotechnology.

• Transhuman. Transhumanists look forward to a time in which technology allows humanity to transcend its current physical and mental limits. Radical nanotechnologies are essential to the fulfillment of this vision, so the attitude of transhumanists to nanotechnology in its most radical, Drexlerian form, is that it is not only inevitable but morally mandated.
• Transglobal. Those who accept the current neo-liberal, globalising consensus look to new technologies as a driver for further economic growth. Nanotechnology is expected to lead to changes which may be disruptive to individual business sectors, but which probably won’t fundamentally change global socio-economic systems.
• Deep Green. To radical environmentalists, our current urban, industrial economic system is unsustainable. Technologies are regarded as in large measure responsible for the difficulties we are now in, and a return to more rural, post-industrial, locally based economies is regarded as not only desirable but inevitable. Nanotechnology is, like most new technologies, viewed with deep distrust, as very likely to lead to undesirable and possibly unintended consequences.
• Bright Green. Another strand of environmentalists share with Deep Greens the conviction that the current socio-economic system is unsustainable, but are confident that new technology and imaginative design will make possible an urban culture with a high standard of living that is sustainable. These people look with enthusiasm to nanotechnology for new sustainable energy systems and decentralised, low waste manufacturing processes.

When one sees a debate about nanotechnology start to get heated, it’s perhaps worth asking what the ideological positions of the debaters are, and whether an apparently technical argument is actually a proxy for an ideological one.

There’s a certain amount of anxious anticipation in UK nanotechnology policy circles, as tomorrow sees the publication of the results of a high-level, independent review of the government’s response to the 2004 Royal Society report on nanotechnology – Nanoscience and nanotechnologies: opportunities and uncertainties.

The report was prepared by the Council for Science and Technology, the government’s highest level science advisory committee, which reports directly to the Prime Minister. I wrote earlier about the CST seminar held last autumn to gather evidence, and about the Royal Society’s suprisingly forthright submission to the inquiry. We shall see tomorrow how much of that criticism was taken on board by the CST, and how the Science Minister, Malcolm Wicks, responds to it.

Ball lightning is an odd and obscure phenomenon; reports describe glowing globes the size of footballs, which float along at walking speed, sometimes entering buildings, and whose existence sometimes comes to an end with a small explosion. Observations are generally associated with thunderstorms. I’ve never seen ball lightning myself, though when I was a physics undergraduate at Cambridge in 1982 there was a famous sighting in the Cavendish Laboratory itself. This rather elusive phenomenon has generated a huge range of potential explanations, ranging from the exotic (anti-matter meteorites, tiny black holes) to the frankly occult. But there seems to be growing evidence that ball lightning may in fact be the manifestation of slowly combusting, loose aggregates of nanoparticles formed by the contact of lightning bolts with the ground.

The idea that ball lightning consists of very low density aggregates of finely divided material originates with a group of Russian scientists. A pair of scientists from New Zealand, Abrahamson and Dinnis, showed some fairly convincing electron micrographs of chains of nanoparticles produced by the contact of electrical discharges with the soil, as reported in this 2000 Nature paper (subscription required for full paper). Abrahamson’s theory is also described in this news report from 2002, while a whole special issue of the Royal Society’s journal Philosophical Transactions from that year puts the Abrahamson theory in context with the earlier Russian work and the observational record. The story is brought up to date with some very suggestive looking experimental results reported a couple of weeks ago in the journal Physical Review Letters, in a letter entitled Production of Ball-Lightning-Like Luminous Balls by Electrical Discharges in Silicon (subscription required for full article), by a group from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Brazil. In their very simple experiment, an electric arc was made with a silicon wafer, in ambient conditions. This produced luminous balls, from 1- 4 cm in diameter, which moved erratically along the ground, sometimes squeezing through gaps, and disappeared after 2 – 5 seconds leaving no apparent trace. Their explanation is that the discharge created silicon nanoparticles which aggregated to form a very open, low density aggregate, and subsequently oxidised to produce the heat that made the balls glow.

The properties of nanoparticles which make this explanation at least plausible are fairly familiar. They have a very high surface area, and so are substantially more reactive than their parent bulk materials. They can aggregate into very loose, fractal, structures whose effective density can be very low (not much greater, it seems in this case, than air itself). And they can be made a variety of physical processes, some of which are to be found in nature.

Al Gore visited Sheffield University yesterday, so I joined the growing number of people round the world who have seen his famous Powerpoint presentation on global warming (to be accurate, he did it in Keynote, being a loyal Apple board member). As a presentation it was undoubtedly powerful, slick, sometimes moving, and often very funny. His comic timing has clearly got a lot better since he was a Presidential candidate, even though some of his jokes didn’t cross the Atlantic very effectively. However, it has to be said that they worked better than the efforts of Senator George Mitchell, who introduced him. It is possible that Gore’s rhetorical prowess was even further heightened by the other speakers who preceded him; these included a couple of home-grown politicians, a regional government official and a lawyer, none of whom were exactly riveting. But, it’s nonetheless an interesting signal that this event attracted an audience of this calibre, including one government minister and an unannounced appearance by the Deputy Prime Minister.

Since a plurality of the readers of this blog are from the USA, I need to explain that this is one way in which the politics of our two countries fundamentally differ. None of the major political parties doubts the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and indeed there is currently a bit of an auction between them about who takes it most seriously. The ruling Labour Party commissioned a distinguished economist to write the Stern Report, a detailed assessment of the potential economic costs of climate change and of the cost-effectiveness of taking measures to combat it, and gave Al Gore an official position as an advisor on the subject. Gore’s UK apotheosis has been made complete by the announcement that the government is to issue all schools with a copy of his DVD “An Inconvenient Truth”. This announcement was made, in response to the issue of the latest IPCC summary for policy makers (PDF), by David Miliband, the young and undoubtedly very clever environment minister, who is often spoken of as being destined for great things in the future, and has been recently floating some very radical, even brave, notions about personal carbon allowances. The Conservatives, meanwhile, have demonstrated their commitment to alternative energy by their telegenic young leader David Cameron sticking a wind-turbine on top of his Notting Hill house. It’s gesture politics, of course, but an interesting sign of the times. The minority third party, the Liberal Democrats, believe they invented this issue long ago.

What does this mean for the policy environment, particularly as it affects science policy? The government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir David King, has long been a vocal proponent of the need for urgent action on energy and climate. Famously, he went to the USA a couple of years ago to announce that climate change was a bigger threat than terrorism, to the poorly concealed horror of a flock of diplomats and civil servants. But (oddly, one might think), Sir David doesn’t actually directly control the science budget, so it isn’t quite the case that the entire £3.4 billion (i.e., nearly $7 billion) will be redirected to a combination of renewables research and nuclear (which Sir David is also vocally in favour of). Nonetheless, one does get the impression that a wall of money is just about to be thrown at energy research in general, to the extent that it isn’t entirely obvious that the capacity is there to do the research.