by Eric Flint
Still, many of us presume string theory to be the most promising approach to a Theory of Everything, with implications of blinding originality. To list one of the spotlight prospects on offer, we may have many more dimensions lurking about our universe, unsuspected until now. But as a flashlight for telling us where to step, string theory seems useless. It has made no prediction of a past event not anticipated by conventional, inflated Big Bang theory.
When a bug of this size hits your conceptual windshield, it makes a big splash. The dark energy scandal is that the bug was the size of an eagle. String theory is an idea that functions as the opposite of the Gamow-Alpher-Herman scandal: no predictions, yet widespread acceptance. Theorists can fall in love with mathematical beauty. Philosophical elegance, which Steady State had, is even more glamorous. Gamow-Alpher-Herman had to fight Steady State's shiny splendor, which blinded our field.
What causes such scandals? One can point to possible culprits in our methods. There lurks an unspoken timidity in our close-focus grant approval process— small steps are rewarded as more reliable than conceptual leaps. Possibilities beyond our current conceptual horizons get little attention. In academia, we maximize our publication numbers, rather than originality. This also gets us through the incremental mindset of review committees, which are seldom noted for their leaps of insight. Our review process puts progress on cruise control, so no one gets much beyond the perceived path. Partly this arises from the widespread difficulty of getting the very best people to serve on them.
More ominously, perhaps we show a lack of faith in our own calculations. Maybe we are uneasy with that mysterious precursor of the entire scientific process: formulate a hypothesis, test it against experiment or observation, and look for other implications. The shadowy beginnings of this long march lie in a mystery: how do we have ideas?
Do we suffer from an ill-concealed anxiety over imagination? Rigor is reassuring, but it should come at the end of that powerful chain starting with intuition and proceeding to experimental checks— not at the beginning. To set our work in motion, we reason mostly by analogy, not by rigorous deduction. Imagination is not incremental.
Yet among reviewers, "speculation" is a word mostly deployed as a pejorative. We should not allow it to be.
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1. Ralph Alpher & Robert Herman, Physics Today, August 1988.
2. Stephen Brush, "Prediction and Theory Evaluation: Cosmic Microwaves and the Revival of the Big Bang" Perspectives on Science, vol. 1. #4, pp.565-602.
First published in PHYSICS TODAY, 2005
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Gregory Benford is the author of many novels and short stories, and has edited a number of anthologies.
Fifteen Ways Cheap Solar Cells are going to Change the World
Written by Stephen Euin Cobb
In the next seven to fourteen years your monthly electric bill will drop to zero permanently, and you will drive a car every day which costs you nothing to fuel. Many of the predictions contained in this article will sound just as ridiculous as that first sentence, and yet must be included here since—unless civilization falls—they are very nearly inevitable.
Cheap solar cells are going to alter your life in more ways than can be listed or even anticipated, but some changes are predictable. Exactly when the changes will begin and when they will be completed can be estimated at roughly seven to fourteen years. But this is only an estimate. These events might begin in as little as four years, ending in ten; or might begin in twelve years and end in twenty.
(1) Solar cells made of silicon will continue to achieve increased efficiencies, but these achievements will be meaningless since solar cells made of other materials will drop below one tenth the price of the silicon versions; and then shortly after that, below a hundredth. Prices will continue to drop, but at a pace that is unstable and unforeseeable. Eventually prices will drop below a thousandth, but how long that might take is impossible to estimate.
(2) Solar cells will no longer be an object. Instead they will be a paper-thin coating added to an object after that object has been made. This is one of several reasons they will become so cheap.
(3) Solar cells will no longer be made inside a vacuum chamber (another massive cost savings).
(4) Solar cells will be made using a variety of processes, methods and materials. No company will be able to gain a monopoly on solar cells because each of the dozen or more manufacturers will have their own patents which do not infringe the patents of others. Thus every manufacturers" line of solar cells will compete against those of the others based on efficiency, attractiveness, ease of installation and most especially: price.
(5) All the major home improvement stores like Lowe's, Home Depot, and even Wal-Mart will carry vinyl siding and roofing tiles in the usual colors and styles but with a thin outer coating which transforms the vinyl siding or roofing tile into one big solar cell array.
(6) Siding and roofing tiles with solar cell coatings will cost about ten to twenty percent more than the non-electricity generating variety; but because of the incredible popularity of the solar versions the non solar versions will become difficult to find for several years since many stores will not bother to stock them.
(7) At first, most of the homeowners who install solar siding and solar roofing tiles will have no way to store the electricity for later use. Consequently, this will only reduce the amount of electricity they must buy from the power grid during those hours of the day when the sun is shining on their house. For some people this will cut their electric bill by a third; for others it will cut it in half.
(8) People will drive cars which cost them nothing to fuel. Anyone who has a solar powered home will be able to recharge their electric car for free. By allowing people to drive every day for the rest of their life without paying so much as one penny for fuel, solar homes will finally cause electric cars to become overwhelmingly popular.
(9) Some solar homeowners in America will use a converter to change the DC (direct current) made by their solar home into AC (alternating current) which they can then push out of their house and into the power grid used by the general public. Some of these people will push their electric bill down near zero, and some will push it all the way into negative numbers. Those in negative numbers will receive monthly checks from their local electric company as payment for the power they contributed to the grid during that month. (There are laws in forty U.S. states that require electric companies to do this.)
(10) When rechargeable battery technology also becomes cheap, people will abandon the power grid altogether. Isolated from the power grid, their electric bill will drop to exactly zero, and will remain zero for the rest of their life.
(11) Oil will remain an important commodity since it will continue to be used to make plastics, lubricants, paints and other chemicals. However, since it will no longer be the dominant source of energy for any developed nation, its price will decline steadily over many years and eventually settle to a level that would seem ridiculous today.
(12) Gasoline too will decline in price over many years. Eventually gasoline prices will fall low enough that gasoline powered cars will enjoy a new but much more limited popularity with a new but much smaller segment of the population. This new popularity will not threaten the dominance of electric cars, since gasoline cars will account for only a few percent of all cars.
(13) Solar homes not attached to the power grid will slowly abandon the use of AC (alternating current) and be refitted with lights and appliances that run on DC (direct current). Reasons for this include: (a) Solar cells produce DC. (b) Power is lost in converting DC to AC. (c) AC only became popular because it reduced the loss of electrical power when sending it over long distances. Since long distances are no longer involved, conversion to AC is not needed. (d) Waste heat is generated by the converter; nice in winter, but bad in summer. (e) Converters fail occasionally and replacing them with new converters which will also fail eventually is a waste of money.
(14) Power o
utages will no longer affect an entire town or city or neighborhood. If a tornado hits a house hard enough for it to lose power, that house will probably also lose its roof and maybe its walls.
(15) As more and more sections of the electric power grid are without customers large sections will be torn down and sold for scrap. Eventually it will be gone.
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It's not enough to make a string of predictions, and especially to claim them to be "nearly inevitable," without providing supporting details and some outside references (links) to explain why these predictions are likely to become part of the reality in which we will all live.
These events are foreseeable because so many different technologies, forces and trends are converging from a variety of directions to make them likely.
But the one thing all these many factors have in common is the motivation which drives them: money. All the participants are intensely aware that there is a vast amount of money for whoever gets there first. Just how much money one can make by selling enough solar cells to power all the homes and businesses in every developed country on earth might be difficult to calculate. But if a sizable chunk of it were going into my bank account working out that calculation would be a burden I would be willing to shoulder. New billionaires will be made, and perhaps a few of the old oil-based billionaires will be lost.
Perhaps the most easily seen trend is the frenzied growth in demand for the currently available—which of course means expensive—silicon-based solar cells. New factories have been completed or are under construction to make silicon solar cells in Arnstadt Germany, Frankfurt Germany, Hillsboro Oregon, and dozens of other locations around the world. Already 131 factories exist in China alone. Here's a list of all the major solar cell producers' world wide, which includes contact info and the types of cells they manufacture.
Money for solar cell research is flowing everywhere. The US government and other governments are targeting money for research into advanced solar cell technologies. Major companies which traditionally had no interest in "alternative energy" are researching it such as Honda of Japan. Even the giant oil companies are afraid of being left out (BP and Royal Dutch Shell) although Exxon claims no such fear.
But the most important trend is the amount of money and effort that is being put into research and development of the most advanced forms of solar cells. Some of these are referred to as thin film solar cells or Dye Sensitized Solar Cells (DSSC).
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin provided seed money to Nanosolar which claims to have "developed proprietary technology that makes it possible to simply roll-print solar cells that require only 1/100th as thick an absorber as a silicon-wafer cell, yet deliver similar performance and durability." Nanosolar is building "the largest solar cell factory in the world" in the San Fransico Bay Area.
A company called XsunX describes themselves in their press release as "a developer of advanced manufacturing systems and cell structures for thin film photovoltaic solar energy," and describes as their goal: "to build a multi-megawatt production facility in the United States in order to supply the growing domestic demand for solar cell products that can be easily integrated into buildings and houses."
Additional information on this topic is easily searched. For those who like Wikipedia there are some nice articles such as Solar Cells, Solar Shingles, Solar Power, and especially Dye sensitized solar cells. Listeners to my podcast The Future And You have suggested the following links: Printable solar cells from Discovery News, from Science in Africa, and from Technology Review Cheap Nano Solar Cells.
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You can learn more about Stephen Euin Cobb here or here.
Or about his podcast The Future And You here, or here or even here.
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Straitjackets
Written by Mike Resnick
I've received some interesting comments over on Escape Pod, an audio site where they read one of my stories every now and then. To date they have read two Hugo winners and a Hugo nominee—and each time someone, or a few someones, write in to say that the stories are all well-written and moving and all that crap, but they clearly aren't real true-blue science fiction.
Which gave me my topic for this issue's editorial, because people have been trying to put science fiction in a straitjacket for close to a century now, and it just doesn't work.
The first guy to define it was Hugo Gernsback, the man who created the first all-science-fiction magazine ( Amazing Stories, back in April, 1926). He's the guy our most prestigious award is named after, even though he had some difficulty speaking English, clearly couldn't edit it, and usually refused to pay for it except on threat of lawsuit.
Hugo declared that "scientifiction" (his first term for it) existed solely to interest young boys in science. (Young girls, presumably, were too busy playing with their dolls.) The science had to be reasonably accurate, and central to the story.
Now, at about the same time Hugo was creating science fiction, H. P. Lovecraft was perfecting a fantasy fiction that rarely involved science (although he did sell a few pieces to Astounding in the 1930s), and clearly wasn't meant for the impressionable young boys Hugo saw as his audience.
Okay, move the clock (the calendar?) ahead eighty years. Lovecraft is just about a household name. Eleven of his books are still in print. You'd need extra fingers and toes to count the movies adapted from or suggested by his work. Science fiction is happy to claim him as one of us, at least a close cousin if not a wandering son.
And Papa Gernsback of the rigid definition? Not a single word he wrote in his entire life—and that includes novels, editorials, non-fiction, the whole shebang—is still in print.
The first major critic to come along was Damon Knight. Damon knew that science fiction was the pure quill. It annoyed him when science fiction writers didn't know the craft of writing, and it annoyed him even more when they got their science wrong.
But what really drove him right up a tree was when they didn't even try to make the science accurate. When, for example, they put the key in the ignition and the spaceship started up just like a car. When, for example, they put an oxygen atmosphere on Mars.
When, for example, they were Ray Bradbury.
Damon acknowledged that what Bradbury did was Art; he knew his craft too much to argue with that. But Art or not, it sure didn't fit his notion of science fiction, and his criticisms and essays left no doubt that Ray Bradbury was a gifted imposter who should either mend his ways or stop posing as a science fiction writer.
The result? Almost every word Ray Bradbury has written for the past sixty years is still in print, and the Pulitzer committee just honored him for a lifetime devoted to science fiction. Of all the dozens of pure science fiction books Damon Knight wrote or edited, only two are in print today.
The next major critic was James Blish, not quite the writer Knight was and a hell of a lot nastier, but he knew his stuff, and that meant he knew science fiction was Important (note capital I), that no practitioner dared take it lightly, that it was just this side of sinful to be flip and flippant, and that the greatest offender was Robert Sheckley. How dare he make fun of the honored tropes and traditions of science fiction?
Okay, move the clock ahead a quick sixty years and (you saw this coming, right?) there are eleven Sheckley books in print. Of all the books, fiction and non-fiction, that James Blish wrote, only two remain available. Even his Star Trek books have gone the way of the dodo.
But more to the point, no one argues any longer that humor cannot be valid science fiction (and indeed, such humorous stories as Eric Frank Russell's "Allamagoosa" and Connie Willis's "Even the Queen" have won the Hugo). No one says that the science is more important than the emotional impact of a story, by Bradbury, by Zelazny, by anyone. And no one denies horror and supernatural fiction (perhaps excepting vampire novels that are thinly-disguised category romances and outsell science fiction ten-to-one) a place in our family tree.
Now you would think that after the origi
nator of our field and our first two major critics all fell on their faces trying to keep science fiction within their rigid definitions, future generations of self-appointed Keepers of the Flame (or the Definition) would have slunk off into the shadows. But they didn't.
At the midpoint of the twentieth century, everyone knew that sex had no place in science fiction. Our field was like a George Bernard Shaw play, which is to say that an alien, reading (or watching) it could learn everything there was to know about human beings except that we come equipped with genitals and an urge to use them. Then along came Philip Jose Farmer with "The Lovers" and its sequels, and when God didn't strike him dead, all the writers who had been avoiding Topic Number One for years, even such traditionalists as Heinlein and Asimov, began making up for lost time . . . and by 1960 it was never again suggested that sex had no place in science fiction.
J. G. Ballard got a lot of grief, because clearly you couldn't fool with the actual form of the science fiction novel. But after he did it, so did dozens of others, experimenting every which way as the New Wave was born, fought for its right to exist, and was finally incorporated into the body of the literature.