Making the sustainable energy colloquy quantitative and accessible to all
- PDF / 67,630 Bytes
- 1 Pages / 612 x 792 pts (letter) Page_size
- 42 Downloads / 200 Views
EDITORIAL Making the sustainable energy colloquy quantitative and accessible to all In memoriam David J.C. McKay FRS The late David McKay, Regius professor at Cambridge University Department of Engineering, helped to create a meaningful dialogue about what sustainability means, what it would take, and what policies would be needed. He always did so in a factual and humorous way. His web page compares his book “Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms” to Harry Potter; of course, his book comes out on top. One of his most defining steps in the energy and sustainability area was the self-publishing of “Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air” in 2008. In this book he discusses renewable/alternative/ sustainable energy in quantitative and practical terms, using straightforward arithmetic to focus arguments. This was written at a level to be accessible to a very broad community and helped define a generation of students’ perspective in this area. He took arguments that had previously been almost by-decree and moved them to a level where a clear methodology could be employed, thereby enabling statements with regard to impact on energy and climate to be based on clear facts and often by numerically backed assumptions, with which calculations can be done to make a point. If one disagrees with the assumptions, one can change them and redo the calculation to see how this would change the outcome, allowing the readers to logically develop their own opinions. While those that work with science and engineering and employ the scientific method think of this as a matter of course, the heavily politically and emotionally loaded areas of energy and sustainability often move more to declarative statements. This makes his approach so much more powerful, providing a foundational understanding accessible to whoever is willing to put in an effort equivalent to what was required to finish elementary school. This and his subsequent work were truly a major step towards creating a sensible dialogue about these critical topics. The book helped to define the whole field by factually and logically presenting information and showing how to perform calculations. The fact that the book was available free to everyone (as was his other book) was a masterstroke making it an indispensible resource. It showed to those afraid of science and engineering that there is nothing to be afraid of as long as one dares to read what
he called the “non-technical” chapters (no arithmetic formulae) and accept use of numbers. In this way he put to practice what Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) stated in his 1883 lecture on “Electrical Units of Measurement,” published in Popular Lectures Vol. I, p. 73: “I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science
Data Loading...
