Posts Tagged ‘Physics’
“Great inventions are never, and great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step of a progression. . It is not usually a creation, but a growth, as truly so as is the growth of the trees in the forest.”*…
Our old friend (and here and here) Brian Potter thinks deeply about scientific and technological advance. Here, he ponders the pace of progress…
In her book on the history of the laser, historian Joan Bromberg notes that the technological and scientific predecessors of the maser (which itself preceded the laser – two critical technologies whose developmental histories I sketched in this piece two months ago) were in place for decades before physicist Charles Townes had the insight to combine them…
… This sort of decades-long wait between when a technology first becomes possible, and when it actually appears, seems common, or at least seems like it might be common. I’ve previously written about why it took so long for wind power to be widely deployed after it became technologically possible, and people often idly speculate whether inventors in the Roman Empire could have built a steam engine, or why we waited so long to put wheels on luggage.
Knowing how long this gap between when an invention becomes possible, and when it actually appears, is useful, because it tells us something about the nature of technology and technological progress. What factors govern whether some new technology appears? How much does mere technical possibility matter, and how much do things like cross-pollination of knowledge, economic feasibility, and political factors contribute? Knowing more about how long it takes for an invention to appear once it becomes technically possible can help us answer these sorts of questions.
I wanted a better sense of how long it takes for some technology to appear once its necessary predecessors are in place. So I used AI to try and find out…
[Potter explains his method, then unpacks his results…]
We can clearly see a few trends on this graph. One is that for most inventions, the gap between when it could have been invented and when it was actually invented is not particularly large. Of the 166 inventions Claude estimated a date for, 107 of them (64%) had an “earliest plausible” date 50 years or less from the actual date, and 150 of them (90%) had an “earliest straightforward” date 50 years or less from the actual date. For more than half the inventions, the average earliest straightforward date of invention was 10 years or less from the actual date.
Conversely, there were a relatively small number of inventions where the gap between “could have been invented” and “was invented” was very large. 30 inventions (18%) had an average gap of more than 100 years between “earliest plausible” and actually invented, and eight inventions had a gap of more than 1000 years. You can see this clearly on a histogram, which shows a large bump of small time gaps, and a long tail of fewer, larger gaps.
The inventions with the longest period between “could have been invented” and “was invented” are below.
There’re a few interesting trends observable here. Many of the longest-delayed inventions — the hypodermic needle, general anaesthetic, stethoscope — are medical inventions. (You could argue the surgical mask could be in this category as well). For the hypodermic needle, this probably needed to wait until the existence of some substance that needed to be injected (such as morphine, first synthesized in 1804), but for other medical inventions this possibly also reflects folks’ reluctance to do inventive-tinkering in a medical context. For general anaesthetic, for instance, the trial and error of getting the dose right was incredibly dangerous, and the inventor Hanaoka Seishu “crippled his mother and blinded his wife perfecting the dose.”
Several of the longest-awaited inventions are ones where the version in the list is an early, impractical version of the one that actually solved a problem. So the “dandy horse” — a two-wheeled, wooden vehicle that was a predecessor of the bicycle — could have been built in antiquity, but the dandy horse wasn’t particularly practical as a means of transportation, and actually useful bicycles had to wait for the improved manufacturing technology of the later 19th century. Likewise, the version of the ballpoint pen that Claude thinks could have been invented much earlier is John Loud’s 1888 version, but Loud’s pen worked poorly and wasn’t successful. Actually useful ballpoint pens are surprisingly difficult to manufacture (China famously couldn’t manufacture them until very recently), and credit for the “useful ballpoint pen” is usually given to Lazlo Biro in 1938. (Claude correctly notes that “useful” versions of both these inventions would need to wait until much later.) Judson’s early zipper and de Martinsville’s early sound-recording device are also examples of early, not-particularly-useful inventions.
Other inventions on this list seem like they might be a case of the surrounding social or technological conditions needing to be right for the invention to appear. So Otis’ elevator safety brake needed to wait until elevators were in higher demand, which probably didn’t occur until steam engines or some other similar power source came along (though maybe you could have water-driven elevators much earlier). Barbed wire perhaps needed to wait until enclosing very large areas of land for grazing became something people needed to do.
And some inventions seem like they might have been genuinely useful had someone thought of them earlier, and simply nobody did. Blanchard’s pattern-tracing lathe, Neilson’s hot blast, and the safety pin all seem like they fall into this category, though perhaps there were good reasons these didn’t appear earlier.
Going back to the scatterplot, the other obvious trend on this chart is that the gap between when an invention becomes possible and when it appears has narrowed over time. If we graph the average and median gaps for inventions by 20-year time periods, we can see that they have fallen over time.
For the 60 post-1900 inventions, every one has a “straightforward” invention date of 50 years or less than the actual date, and 75% of them have a straightforward date of 10 years or less before the actual date. Of the 30 inventions with a gap of more than 100 years between when they could have been invented and when they actually appeared, 29 of them were invented before 1900. So the process for creating new inventions seems to be getting more and more efficient — opportunities are getting noticed and exploited sooner and sooner, up through 1970 at least (which is when the list of major inventions extends to).
We can also look at how wait times vary by type of technology. The chart below shows average wait times by different categories, for both inventions overall and for just post-1900 inventions. We can see that medical inventions have the longest wait, while electronic inventions have the shortest wait…
… We can also look at what types of factors tend to be bottlenecks. For some inventions, the bottleneck is primarily scientific: the limiting factor for the transistor is the band theory of quantum mechanics, and the limiting factor for the radio was Hertz’s demonstration of electromagnetic waves. But for other inventions, it’s primarily technological: the turbojet had to wait not for some new physical theory, but until compressor technology and high-temperature steels appeared; likewise the airplane had to wait not for some novel theory of aerodynamics but until a light enough engine appeared. The chart below shows how often “science” or “technology” was the limiting factor for a given invention, for both inventions overall and post-1900 inventions.
In both cases, technology is the bottleneck far more often than science (though of course if you removed enough technological bottlenecks eventually you’d hit a scientific one, and vice versa).
There is of course only so much you can learn from this sort of exercise: at the end of the day, this is based on an AI’s best guess, not a thorough analysis of the various controlling factors by experts. But while I wouldn’t swear to its accuracy, I think the answers are probably mostly pretty good, and enough for us to draw some general (if tentative) conclusions about the nature of technological progress.
My main takeaway is that we mostly don’t wait all that long for new inventions. Since 1800 most inventions have appeared within a few decades of when it was possible to build them, and since 1900 these gaps been even narrower. It also seems likely that medical inventions are more likely to have long wait times than other types of inventions, and that the limiting factor for how early some new technology could appear is most likely to be technological, rather than scientific.
On the (maybe suprisingly) quick– and quickening– pace of progress: “How Long Do We Wait for New Inventions?” from @constructionphysics.skystack.xyz
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As we analyze advance, we might send inventive birthday greetings to William Webster (W. W.) Hansen; he was born on this date in 1909. A physicist and one of the founders of the technology of microwave electronics, he had a central hand in the development of klystron technology (essential to high frequency amplification, thus central to microwave technology, radar, and UHF television transmission), and linear accelerators (he led the development of SLAC), and along with the Varian brothers and Edward Ginzton, co-founded Varian Associates (in 1948)–one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”*…
Particles are nature’s smallest constituents, but that doesn’t mean they’re fundamental. So of what, physicist Felix Flicker asks, does the Universe consist?…
What is the world made of? For centuries, people have believed that matter is constructed from tiny, indivisible parts. Some of the earliest known references come from the Greek philosopher Democritus, who taught that the Universe was composed of atoms the size of dust motes floating in sunlight. Theravada Buddhism developed the concept of kalapas, indivisible bundles of properties fleeting into and out of existence. Alchemy’s description of fundamental ‘corpuscles’, expounded by Isaac Newton and others, derived from translations of Aristotle by mediaeval Islamic scholars. And Hideki Yukawa, winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work developing the modern theory of elementary particles, took inspiration from a passage in the Zhuangzi, a Daoist text written during China’s warring states period, in which fast-moving entities puncture holes within formless chaos. Yukawa saw a parallel to particle collisions.
The concept of a particle, as we now refer to these indivisible parts, has therefore been repeatedly re-introduced in contradictory ways. The modern view continues this tradition. In late-19th-century physics, particles were tiny indivisible objects with well-defined positions and momenta. The advent of quantum mechanics led these clear waters to become muddied. But the basic idea persists: we are taught from a young age that matter is made of atoms, built from particles such as electrons, and electrons are not built from anything else. For this reason, these particles are sometimes said to be fundamental. But are they? Is the Universe really made from the smallest constituents, as a beach is made from sand?
The answer to this question, I will contest, is perhaps a surprising one: yes, the Universe is built from fundamental units – but fundamental need not mean smallest. This view is generally adopted by those physicists, such as myself, who work in the largest discipline within the subject: quantum matter. This is the study of quantum behaviours that manifest on everyday scales: the attraction of iron to a magnet, the flow of electricity along a wire, or the passage of sound through a crystal. In these settings, too, we find particles. But these particles are not elementary, like the electron: they are emergent.
The distinction can be pictured as follows. Imagine a lightbulb, its rays of light travelling to your eyes. We can ask what those rays are made of. Quantum mechanics has an answer: a ray of light is a stream of individual particles called photons. In turn, we can ask what the photons are made of. The answer this time is that they are not made of anything else: they are elementary. Now imagine that this lightbulb is of a vintage sort, and gives off a gentle hum. It emits waves of sound that travel to your ears. We can again ask what those waves are made of. And, once again, quantum mechanics has an answer: a wave of sound can be described by individual particles called phonons. Now, if you are familiar with the Standard Model of particle physics, you will know that it contains photons but not phonons. The reason is that phonons are not elementary. If you ask what a phonon is made of, there is an answer: it is a pattern of vibrations of the atoms in the air. In the study of quantum matter, however, we say it is an emergent particle.
So what are emergent particles? Are they as real as elementary particles? And, perhaps most importantly, can they tell us anything new about the nature of reality?…
[Flicker answers the first two of those questions, then turns to the third…]
… So, are elementary particles emergent? Even if we can ever answer this, we will be faced with the same question, whatever we find. In the end, whether you like the idea comes down to personal taste and, perhaps, a degree of cultural upbringing. The more widely publicised attempts at a ‘theory of everything’ always struck me as suspiciously similar to themes in the Old Testament: the Universe was once describable by a single mathematical formula, but that one, true quantum field spontaneously broke in a cataclysmic event that resulted in the messy collection of particles we find before us. I find that the quantum matter perspective, on the other hand, resonates with me in a similar manner to the Daoist texts such as the Zhuangzi. From this new perspective, it is our current world that is beautiful. It grew from a swamp of possible theories, each ugly in its arbitrariness: it doesn’t matter which way we followed, as they all lead here…
A physicist argues that our universe is more than the sum of its particles: “Reality Emerges,” from @aeon.co.
Resonant: “There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’,” from Carlo Rovelli
Also apposite (and fascinating): “Physicists just found a tiny flaw in time itself,” from ScienceDaily.
* Philip K. Dick
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As we muse on materialization, we might send insightful birthday greetings to Jack Steinberger; he was born on this date in 1921. An experimental physicist, he worked on sub-atomic particles– the “elementary” constituents of matter discussed above– at Columbia, UC Berkeley, and CERN. He shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz) for the discovery of the muon neutrino.
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled”*…
(Roughly) Daily is, in effect, a kind of notebook, a commonplace book. So it will be no surprise that your correspondent found today’s featured piece fascinating.
Jillian Hess, a professor who studies the history of note-taking, shares the lessons she took from her review of the papers of the remarkable Richard Feynman…
Formal education, at its best, prepares us for a life of learning. After all, we are only in school for a fraction of our lives and there is so much to learn!
Richard Feynman (1918-1988) understood the value of self-education. He was a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, a member of the Manhattan Project at the age of 25, and a dynamic public intellectual who never stopped learning.
Often touted as one of history’s greatest learners, Feynman taught himself a dizzying amount of science. I wanted to see his notes for myself—to observe the great autodidact thinking on the page. So, I visited his archives at Caltech in February…
… In the archives, I saw… for myself: Feynman’s notebooks contain imprints of thinking in real-time—the work as it happened. They were instruments for thinking through uncertainty.
What follows is a list of note-taking principles for self-education that I gathered while studying Feynman’s notebooks.
Start with First Principles: Feynman’s “Things I Don’t Know About” Notebook
Discussions about Feynman’s learning process usually draw from this notebook, which he compiled as a Ph.D. student at Princeton. The contents include mechanics, mathematical methods, and thermodynamics. Clearly, he knew something about these topics, but he found his understanding superficial. So, his response was to take the subject apart—to break it down into “the essential kernels” …
[Hess illustrates this principle, then unpacks two others: “create a reading index” and “keep learning.” She continues…]
… Uncertainty is Interesting
This is my biggest takeaway: We should fear certainty more than doubt. Learning to live with uncertainty is an essential aspect of learning, as Feynman said in 1981:
You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
And then, in an echo of his “Notebook of Things I Know Nothing About,” compiled four decades prior, he adds:
…I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I don’t know anything about.
If a man as celebrated for his genius as Feynman felt that way, certainly the rest of us have a lot more to learn…
[And she concludes…]
… Notes on Feynman’s Notes:
Use notes to think: Feynman didn’t think through problems in his head and then turn to his notebooks. Instead, he used his notebooks to think through problems. His thought process required paper.
Start with first principles: “Why” is a very powerful question. And asking why can lead us back to the fundamentals and help us understand them in an entirely new light. This applies to any subject. Feynman has helped me think of note-taking as a kind of expedition. Use your notes to dig deeper into topics you think you already understand.
Never stop learning: How wonderful would it be if we could hold onto the excitement of learning we had as children? After all, the world didn’t get less interesting. It’s worth returning to the note-taking methods you used in school to see if they are still useful in adulthood. I particularly like Feynman’s high school method of taking 30 minutes to understand a subject before he allowed himself to take notes on it.
[Then leaves us with the man himself, “in all his radiant, enthusiastic, brilliance”…]
On “Richard Feynman’s Notes For Self-Education.”
Pair with: “Curiosity Is No Solo Act“: “it gains its real power when embedded in webs of relationship and shared meaning-making”… something that Feynman’s life also demonstrated (as you can see in his autobiography and/or in James Gleick‘s biography, Genius)
* Plutarch
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As we light that fire, we might spare a thought for Jeremy Bernstein; he died on this date last year. A physicist who woked on nuclear propulsion for Project Orion and held research and teaching positions at Stevens Institute of Technology, the Institute for Advanced Study, Brookhaven National Laboratory, CERN, Oxford University, University of Islamabad, and École Polytechnique, he is better remembered as a gifted popular science writer and profiler of scientists.
Bernstein wrote 30 books, and scores of magazine articles for “general readers”– for The New Yorker, where he was a staff writer from 1961 to 1995, and for The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Review of Books, and Scientific American, among others.
Of Feynman, Bernstein wrote “[his] Mozartean genius in physics seemed to be combined with an almost equally Mozartean urge to play the clown.” (in which, of course, Feynman was in the good company of Einstein, Claude Shannon, and others :-)
“For what man in the natural state or course of thinking did ever conceive it in his power to reduce the notions of all mankind exactly to the same length, and breadth, and height of his own? Yet this is the first humble and civil design of all innovators in the empire of reason.”*…
A “theory of everything” (a Grand Unified Theory on steriods)– a (still hypothetical) coherent theoretical framework of physics containing and explaining all physical principles– is the holy grail of physicists. Natalie Wolchover checks in on the most recent front-runner in the hunt…
Fifty-eight years after it first appeared, string theory remains the most popular candidate for the “theory of everything,” the unified mathematical framework for all matter and forces in the universe. This is much to the chagrin of its rather vocal critics. “String theory is not dead; it’s undead and now walks around like a zombie eating people’s brains,” the former physicist Sabine Hossenfelder said on her popular YouTube channel in 2024.
String theory is a “failure,” the mathematical physicist and blogger Peter Woit often says. His complaint is not that string theory is wrong — it’s that it’s “not even wrong,” as he titled a 2006 book. The theory says that, on scales of billionths of trillionths of trillionths of a centimeter, extra curled-up spatial dimensions reveal themselves and particles resolve into extended objects — strands and loops of energy — rather than points. But this alleged substructure is too small to detect, probably ever. The prediction is untestable.
A further problem is that uncountably many different configurations of dimensions and strings are permitted at those tiny scales; the theory can give rise to a limitless variety of universes. Amid this vast landscape of solutions, no one can hope to find a precise microscopic configuration that undergirds our particular macroscopic world.
These issues are profound indeed. Yet in my experience, the typical high-energy theorist in a prestigious university physics department still thinks string theory has a good chance of being correct, at least in part. The field has become siloed between those who deem it worth studying and those who don’t.
Recently, a new angle of attack has opened up. An approach called bootstrapping has allowed physicists to calculate that, under various starting assumptions about the universe, a key equation from string theory naturally follows. For some experts, these findings support the notion of “string uniqueness,” the idea that it is the only mathematically consistent quantum description of gravity and everything else.
Responding to one bootstrap paper on her YouTube channel, mere weeks after the “undead” comment, Hossenfelder said it was “string theorists do[ing] something sensible for once.” She added, “I’d say this paper strengthens the argument for string theory.”
Not everyone agrees, but the findings are reviving an important question. “This question of ‘Does string theory describe the world?’ has just been so taboo,” said Cliff Cheung, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and an author of the paper discussed by Hossenfelder. Now, “people are actually thinking about it for the first time in decades.”
Getting wind of this work, I wanted to drill down on the logic and examine how the string hypothesis is faring these days…
And so she does: “Are Strings Still Our Best Hope for a Theory of Everything?” from @nattyover.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
Compare/contrast with: “Where Some See Strings, She Sees a Space-Time Made of Fractals.”
* Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub
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As we grapple with Godel, we might spare a thought for Hermann Rorschach; he died on this date in 1922. A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, his education in art helped to spur the development of a set of inkblots that were used experimentally to measure various unconscious parts of the subject’s personality. Rorschach knew the human tendency to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli and believed that the subjective responses of his subjects enabled him to distinguish among them on the basis of their perceptive abilities, intelligence, and emotional characteristics. His method has come to be known as the Rorschach test, iterations of which have continued to be used over the years to help identify personality, psychotic, and neurological disorders.
Perhaps his insight that we humans tend “to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli” can inform our understanding of physicists trying to construct mental/conceptual models of our reality, which they’ve been doing for a very long time, and of the limitations of that quest.
“What is really amazing, and frustrating, is mankind’s habit of refusing to see the obvious and inevitable until it is there, and then muttering about unforeseen catastrophes”*…
One of the effectively-secret ingredients in the world’s economic growth over the last couple of centuries has been insurance. The ability to insure against catastrophic loss has underwritten (pun intended) the trillions and trillions of dollars of loans that have funded the construction and acquisition that has enabled the growth of both commercial endeavor and the the accumulation of personal wealth (directly through home ownership and indirectly through equity ownership in those commercial endeavors or participation in pension schemes that own that equity).
But in a way that was enitrely predictable, climate change is rendering a growing portion of the world uninsurable. Gavin Evans ponders what that might mean…
The Florida peninsula looks like a sore thumb. It juts into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, where the water is getting warmer year on year, prompting fiercer hurricanes that can blow down houses like collapsing decks of cards. Climate scientists are convinced all hell will break loose sooner or later when a monster-sized, property-destroying storm makes a direct hit on Miami or Tampa-St Petersburg. Given three near-misses in the recent past, the experts view such a calamity as inevitable. It’s a huge risk for anyone living there – they stand to lose everything – but also for those bearing the financial side of this risk, the insurance companies. Some in the industry are seeing this as a portent for their future – an impending existential threat with profound implications for the economic system.
There are no easy solutions for people still paying off mortgages and those who want to buy property along the Florida coast, because the potential payout on the back of a mammoth storm is so high that the reinsurers (who insure the insurers against catastrophe) are refusing to underwrite their clients and, with no reinsurance, there’s no insurance; and with no insurance, no mortgages; and with no mortgages, no property market. Insurance protects investments against loss and is therefore a pillar of the economic system. If it goes, economies are destabilised.
Many panicked homeowners have rushed to make their houses less risky for insurance companies by reinforcing their roofs with hurricane clips, installing impact-resistant windows, doors and shutters, and strengthening their foundations. But it’s not just storms and higher, warmer seas that concern insurers. Rising temperatures mean that the frequency, range and ferocity of wildfires are also on the rise.
So far this year, 3,374 wildfires have burned an area of Florida totalling 231,172 acres (at the time of writing), and it is even worse in California where 7,855 blazes have killed at least 31 people, destroyed more than 17,000 houses and devoured 525,208 acres of land, at an estimated cost of more than $250 billion. Here, too, homeowners rushed to make their properties more palatable to cold-footed insurers – clearing their surroundings of anything flammable, covering yards with gravel, sheathing houses with fire-resistant stucco, and replacing wooden roofs with steel.
But, even for the most diligent, insurance companies have turned tail, dumping existing clients and abandoning fire-prone and storm-prone areas altogether. On the Californian fire front, 2024 was a turning point as several insurers ceased issuing new policies because of fire-associated risks, including the United States’ biggest property insurer, State Farm, which cancelled policies in parts of Los Angeles. It is all too easy to view this cynically, but it’s happening because property insurers have been reporting year-on-year losses from climate change-related payouts.
Insurance companies survive by making more money from covering risk than they lose from these risks, which is why they prefer clients less likely to claim (insofar as they can predict the risk involved) and require them to pay substantial excess to discourage claims. When payouts rise above the premium intake, insurance companies either hike up these premiums or withdraw. But when that risk is considered catastrophic, potentially affecting many thousands of clients, as with Floridian storms and Californian fires, it is the reinsurers who are the first to retreat because they will ultimately bear most of the cost.
Reinsurers aggregate payout patterns to establish the likelihood of having to make huge payouts from future natural catastrophes. They do this by gathering exposure data from existing insurers in a geographical area, and by examining catastrophe models (computer simulations that estimate potential losses from natural perils). When they put all this together with detailed analysis of conditions within the area, they come up with a figure for their total potential loss if a catastrophic event strikes.
This is why reinsurers focus so intensely on climate change. Take a glance at the websites of big ones like Swiss Re and Munich Re and you get a sense of how central this is to their calculations – a concern that has spread to property insurers who are starting to hire climate consultants. Even more than market volatility, climate is their biggest headache. ‘You won’t meet a single insurance or reinsurance CEO who doesn’t believe in climate change,’ the insurance investor and former Lombard Insurance CEO James Orford told me. ‘They see it in the numbers – a combination of more extreme, less predictable events, combined with big losses of sums insured. All the modelling suggests these are uninsurable risks.’…
[Evans recaps the history of insurance, starting in Genoa, in the mid-14th century, with the insuring of maritime expeditions; examines the current state of play; examines the efforts (and gauges the weaknesses) of state’s efforts to step up with coverage when insurers step away; then considers another role for states…]
If states do withdraw from insurance and reinsurance, some of the most lucrative areas of the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia will be devastated: no mortgages and no banks, leading to more ghost towns and villages. ‘It ends with depopulation and abandonment,’ said Agarwala. ‘Climate change reduces the operating space for humanity.’ In the UK, rising sea levels and coastal erosion could literally reduce operating space, putting 200,000 British homes at risk by 2050. There’s no coastal-erosion insurance, which puts more burden on the state, mainly to pay for new defences, but also to help people move.
Governments can take action in other ways, by investing greater sums in risk-prevention and management. There are signs of this happening such as the ‘fire-hardening’ and storm-prevention efforts in Florida, and improved flood defences in the UK; meanwhile, the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility is being used in several countries to build and renovate operations centres to cope with wildfires, and to buy firefighting helicopters.
In future, it is likely that voters will demand that their state and national governments do far more, regardless of the cost. They will want tougher building codes, including limitations on building in risky areas; expensive fire-prevention and fire-fighting schemes; better flood and storm defences; improved early catastrophe management, involving relocating people from risky areas and, when disaster strikes, rapid life-saving interventions such as large-scale emergency evacuations. If the insurance industry is forced to retreat by the climate crisis, all of this infrastructural investment will require vast chunks of taxpayers’ money. It is hard to avoid the feeling that this is part of our destiny, and that the sore thumb of the Florida peninsula is pointing us to the future…
Whole regions of the world are now uninsurable, bringing radical uncertainty to the economy: “The insurance catastrophe,” from @aeon.co.
See also: “An Uninsurable Country” (a report form NRDC), “The Insurance Crisis Is So Desperate People Are Turning Socialist” (a gift article from Bloomberg), and “The Uninsurable Future: The Climate Threat to Property Insurance, and How to Stop It” (from Yale Law Review)
* Isaac Asimov
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As we cover up, we might send highly-charged birthday greetings to a man who made foundational contributions both to the detection of climatic conditions and to a technology that may help allieviate climate change: John Frederic Daniell was born on this date in 1790. Named the first professor of chemistry at the newly founded King’s College London in 1831, he was an avid meteorologist. He invented the dew-point hygrometer known by his name and a register pyrometer; in 1830 he erected a water-barometer in the hall of the Royal Society.
But Daniell is better remembered as a chemist (and physicist), especially for his invention of the Daniell cell, an element of an electric battery much better than voltaic cells, the standard before him. Indeed, the Daniell cell is the historical basis for the contemporary definition of the volt (the unit of electromotive force in the International System of Units). All advances in battery technology since then were “from” the base that Daniell laid.
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