One More Epicycle

I like the idea of saving the Earth.  I grew up in a town with lots of parkland and I’ve never quite adjusted to the more urban environments I’ve lived in since.

Unfortunately I’m a natural sceptic, and so when people tell me that separating my papers from my plastics helps I can’t suppress the impulse to ask “how, exactly?”  And when you start thinking about the energy budget involved in recycling, you rapidly come to the conclusion that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

So when I read this article describing how an envirofriendly Toyota Prius was crushed in a miles-per-gallon test by a BMW 520d (!) I wasn’t entirely shocked.  Sure, it wasn’t a scientific test, one data point doesn’t prove anything, and so on.  I know.  Still funny, and probably right.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I understand that it’s not fair that a bunch of science geeks and engineers sitting in offices playing networked FPS games and reading slashdot have done, and will do, more to save the environment than anything you can do, and that a lot of the things you’re encouraged to do are either useless or counterproductive.  (Don’t forget: you can join the Hour of Power response to Earth Hour.  Tim Blair assembles a helpful list of things you can do to participate!)  That they’re going to do it for a paycheque from greedy capitalist exploiters is just the icing on the cake..

Genuine environmental protection requires honest and complete consideration of the tradeoffs involved.  If that means recognizing the silliness of many of our secular sacraments, so be it.

Reynolds links to an article by Paul Boutin in Slate singing the praises of the all-electric Tesla roadster, which sounds pretty cool.

I’m historically sceptical of envirocar technology, partly because I’m sceptical by nature and partly because I know something about physics. (Even though I’m now in a mathematics department, I still loyally trudge over to the physics building to hear their seminars. The one I went to earlier today was by Anthony Kent of Nottingham on SASERs — like lasers, but for sound, with acoustic gains and cavities for phonons to match the traditional optical ones for photons. It looks like they’ve got one working, although the evidence isn’t conclusive yet.)

On environmental subjects, people are, as the saying goes, entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. And it’s simply a fact — an unfortunate fact, but an inescapable one — that economics and the laws of physics combine to make clean use of energy very difficult, and almost everything you can think of won’t work. Steven Den Beste, late of USS Clueless and now full-time anime fan at Chizumatic, wrote several informative posts on the subject. Most of them are referenced in the metapost here.

About the only non-fossil-fuel option which is currently practical and could make a serious contribution to our energy needs is nuclear power, and though the numbers are still small in absolute terms, an increasing fraction of environmentalists are gradually waking up to the fact it’s the best of a limited set of options. (SDB’s comments on nuclear: “Completely practical from an engineering standpoint. Completely useless from a political and economic standpoint, at least in the US.” The latter I expect to change.) Fusion is going to be wonderful when we can get it to work, but it’s not going to be easy, and only a very rich society is going to have the resources to invest/throw away until it does; and only a society with low-cost energy is going to be rich.

Right now, engineers and scientists are working on third- and fourth-generation nuclear reactors, and a bunch of geeks not unlike me sitting in offices not unlike mine are doing more to contribute to the future health of the planet than the combined efforts of everyone in the world who separates their paper from their plastic. Is it fair that the well-intentioned sacrifices of countless people should have less net effect than the earn-a-living brainstorming of a tiny few? I suppose not, but no one ever promised life was fair.

(Random side note: I’ve sometimes mentioned that I’m in a fifth-floor office. Well, that’s true, but it gives a misleading impression about how high up I am. There are “upper” and “lower” floors; for example, I’m on the “lower fifth floor”.. half of the floors in the building can’t be accessed except by the stairs. Moreover, the ground floor and the first floor are distinct, and the ground floor is elevated above street level. So when I say that I’m on the fifth floor, you should think more like I’m on the eleventh. The view of the city is quite impressive.)

So why do I care about the success of electric vehicles, despite the inbuilt inefficiencies? Because I’m confident that eventually the calypso-catchy but environmentally counterproductive sentiment of Harburg will fade away, and we’ll have energy to use for them:

Ever since the apple in the garden with Eve,
Man always fooling with things that cause him to grieve.
He fool with the woman, the rum and hot blood,
And he almost wash out by the forty-day flood.
But not since the doomsday in old Babylon
Did he fool with anything so diabolical as the cyclotron.
So if you wish to avoid the most uncomfortable trip to Paradise,
You will be scientific and take my advice:

Leave the atom alone,
Leave the atom alone,
Don’t get smart-alecksy
With the galaxy,
Leave atom alone.

Here at Queen Mary the astronomers are in with the mathematicians and not the physicists, but we still get invited to the latter’s talks. Today’s sounded interesting, so I trudged over to the physics building.

The seminar was by Peter Barham from the University of Bristol, and he was talking about the science of taste and flavour. He’s officially a polymer physicist, but is also “particularly interested in food and penguins” — suggesting one obvious question, but I didn’t ask it — and, indeed, he was wearing a penguin-themed vest.

(It was kind of funny to watch several of the arriving professors independently decide to make a penguin-related joke, each thinking they were the first one to do so. But this was probably a sign they were good-hearted people.. as Chesterton said, it’s often the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.)

On my table, there was a small white plastic cup, only slightly filled, and a stick of gum. There was a direction on the projector screen saying “Please DO NOT drink the liquid in the cups or eat the gum.” A student behind me suggested that maybe it wasn’t water, but ethanol. Strangely, though several people wondered out loud if it was really water, no one wondered if the gum was really gum.. if I ever want to poison a room full of English physics grads, now I know how to avoid suspicion!

The talk was fun, and interactive, and I think it’s unsporting to spoil it by giving away too many details. I will say that he managed to fool us once, and managed to fool me at least once more by getting me to overthink.. having been once burned, I suspected that he was trying to trick us again later, but he wasn’t..

I don’t mind describing the part that I participated in, though: he asked some of us to chew the gum, and then later to drink the liquid, which turned out to be sugary water. The water succeeded in overcoming ‘palate fatigue’ and restoring the minty taste.. at least for me, which he attributed to my early choice of toothpaste. (!)

He talked about a lot of neat things: the fifth taste, umami, and (maybe) the sixth taste, pain (!); which country in Europe has the highest umami-content cuisine; why our sense of smell has hundreds of associated receptor classes but our sense of taste only a handful; how colour and sound and touch and memory affect how different foods taste to us; how unpublished results suggest that it’s not the strength of a scent or the change in strength with time but the second derivative which may matter the most; why fifteen percent of the population can’t really taste truffles; how he and his friend chef Heston Blumenthal figured out to make cauliflower interesting; and, as promised, why dark chocolate and blue cheese go so well together: it turns out there’s an entirely objective case in favour of combining the two based on their chemistries.

Well worth the hour. Although later, when I was at a pure math talk and the gum suddenly lost all of its gooeyness and became an extremely unpleasant powder in my mouth, I wished I’d thought to get rid of it sooner. Every day you learn something, I guess.