Posts Tagged ‘magnetism’
“There are things done today in electrical science which would have been deemed unholy by the very men who discovered electricity, who would themselves not so long before have been burned as wizards”*…
Climate change continues. There is broad evidence (and consensus) that our environment, thus our ways of life, our livelihoods— indeed, our lives— are threatened. On the heels of a call from Trump to world leaders to abandon the climate fight, followed by a disappointing COP30 conference, it’s easy to be discouraged. But that, of course, is no answer.
Rather, we have to find ways to mitigate the damage that we’ve already locked in, even as we acclerate a transition to clean energy… which begins by (re-)framing and (re-)focusing the challenge. Ember, a clean energy think tank, suggests a candidate that, while it speaks to the moral obligations addressed by one of the models it means to augment/replace, has a more positive orientation…
Humanity is graduating from burning fossil commodities to harnessing manufactured technologies—from hunting scarce fossils to farming the inexhaustible sun, from consuming Earth’s resources to
merely borrowing them.This isn’t a marginal climate substitution. It’s an energy revolution.
The magnetic centre is the electron: we are revolutionising how we generate, use, and connect
electrons. Solar and wind are conquering electricity supply. EVs, heat pumps, and AI are electrifying major new uses. Batteries and digitalisation are connecting supply and demand.Three reinforcing shifts. One energy revolution. The electrotech revolution.
At its core, this revolution is driven by physics, economics, and geopolitics. After all, the arc of energy
history bends towards solutions that are leaner, cheaper and more secure.Short-terms setbacks matter, but fundamentals matter more. And the fundamentals are stacked in electrotech’s favour.
Physics. Electrotech makes a mockery of setting fossils on fire and losing two-thirds of the energy to heat. Electrotech is three times as efficient.
Economics. Technologies get cheaper with scale. Commodities get more expensive the deeper you dig.
Geopolitics. Three quarters of the world is dependent on fossil imports. 92% of countries have renewables potential over 10x their current demand.
Electrotech has grown exponentially for decades. The difference today is that it’s too cheap to contain and too big to ignore. If current exponentials hold for five more years, global fossil demand will fall off its plateau.
Welcome to the Age of Electrotech…
A long and meaty presentation: “The Electrotech Revolution- the shape of things to come,” from @ember-energy.org.
One notes that the electrification that Ember pushes has other advocates, many of whom have been vocal for years; c.f., e.g., Saul Griffin. Still, another voice in the chorus is welcome.
* Bram Stoker
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As we plug in, we might send charged birthday greetings to Franz Aepinus; he was born on this date in 1724. A mathematician, scientist, and natural philosopher, he is best known for his research, both theoretical and experimental, into electricity and magnetism. Aepinus’ Tentamen theoriae electricitatis et magnetismi (1759; “An Attempt at a Theory of Electricity and Magnetism”) was the first work to apply mathematics to the theory of electricity and magnetism. And his experiments led to the design of the parallel-plate capacitor, a device used to store energy in an electric field.
“It’s peculiar. It’s special. There’s very little of it, but it has this pivotal role in the universe.”*…
One of the oldest, scarcest elements in the universe has given us treatments for mental illness, ovenproof casserole dishes, and electric cars. Increasingly, our response to climate change seems to depend on it. But how much do we really know about lithium? Jacob Baynham explains…
The universe was born small, unimaginably dense and furiously hot. At first, it was all energy contained in a volume of space that exploded in size by a factor of 100 septillion in a fraction of a second. Imagine it as a single cell ballooning to the size of the Milky Way almost instantaneously. Elementary particles like quarks, photons and electrons were smashing into each other with such violence that no other matter could exist. The primordial cosmos was a white-hot smoothie in a blender.
One second after the Big Bang, the expanding universe was 10 billion degrees Kelvin. Quarks and gluons had congealed to make the first protons and neutrons, which collided over the course of a few minutes and stuck in different configurations, forming the nuclei of the first three elements: two gases and one light metal. For the next 100 million years or so, these would be the only elements in the vast, unblemished fabric of space before the first stars ignited like furnaces in the dark to forge all other matter.
Almost 14 billion years later, on the third rocky planet orbiting a young star in a distal arm of a spiral galaxy, intelligent lifeforms would give names to those first three elements. The two gases: hydrogen and helium. The metal: lithium.
This is the story of that metal, a powerful, promising and somehow still mysterious element on which those intelligent lifeforms — still alone in the universe, as far as they know — have pinned their hopes for survival on a planet warmed by their excesses…
[Baynham tells the story of this remarkable element, the development of it many uses (in psychopharmacology, in materials science, and of course in electronics– especially batteries), the rigors of extracting it for those purposes, and the challenges that its scarcity– and its potency– present…]
… Long before cell phones and climate anxiety and the Tesla Model Y, long before dinosaurs and the first creatures that climbed out of the ocean to walk on land, long before the Earth formed from swirling masses of cosmic matter heavy enough to coalesce, back, way back, to the infant universe, to the dawn of matter itself, there were just three types of atoms — three elements in the blank canvas of space. One of them was lithium. It was light, fragile and extremely reactive, its one outer electron tenuously held in place.
Everything we have done with lithium, all its wondrous applications in energy, industry and psychiatry, somehow hinges on this basic structure, a sort of magic around which we’re increasingly engineering our future. Lightness is usually associated with abundance on the periodic table — almost 99% of the mass of the universe is just the lightest two elements. Lithium, however, is the third lightest element and still mysteriously scarce…
That most elemental of elements: “The Secret, Magical Life of Lithium,” from @JacobBaynham in @noemamag.com.
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As we muse on materials, we might send densely-packed birthday greetings to Philip W. Anderson; he was born on this date in 1923. A theoretical physicist, he shared (with John H. Van Vleck and Sir Nevill F. Mott) the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physics for his research on semiconductors, superconductivity, and magnetism. Anderson made contributions to the theories of localization, antiferromagnetism, symmetry breaking including a paper in 1962 discussing symmetry breaking in particle physics, leading to the development of the Standard Model around 10 years later), and high-temperature superconductivity, and to the philosophy of science through his writings on emergent phenomena. He was a pioneer in the field that he named: condensed matter physics, which has found applications in semiconductor and laserr technology, magnetic storage, liquid crystals, optical fibers, nanotechnology, quantum computing, and biomedicine.
“Magnetism, you recall from physics class, is a powerful force that causes certain items to be attracted to refrigerators”*…
Concentric incision on a jar handle from Ramat Rahel, in modern-day Israel
Of all the environmental amenities that this hospitable planet provides, the magnetic field is perhaps the strangest and least appreciated. It has existed for more than three and a half billion years but fluctuates daily. It emanates from Earth’s deep interior but extends far out into space. It is intangible and mostly invisible—except when it lights up in ostentatious greens and reds during the auroras—but essential to life. The magnetic field is our protective bubble; it deflects not only the rapacious solar wind, which could otherwise strip away Earth’s atmosphere over time, but also cosmic rays, which dart in from deep space with enough energy to damage living cells. Although sailors have navigated by the magnetic field for a millennium and scientists have monitored it since the eighteen-thirties, it remains a mysterious beast. Albert Einstein himself said that understanding its origin and persistence was one of the great unsolved problems in physics…
Direct measurements of the magnetic field now span almost two hundred years, and iron-rich volcanic rocks on the ocean floor provide a lower-fidelity chronicle of its erratic behavior—including wholesale reversals in polarity—back about a hundred and fifty million years. But reconstructing the field’s behavior between these two extremes has been difficult. The trick is to find an iron-bearing object that locked in a record of the magnetic field at a well-constrained time in the past, in the way that wine of a given vintage preserves an indirect record of that year’s weather conditions…
Last Monday, in a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of Israeli and American archeologists and geophysicists reports the most detailed reconstruction yet of the magnetic field in pre-instrumental times, using a set of ceramic jars from Iron Age Judea…
In the geophysical community, the tales told by the Judean jars may cause unrest. Both the height and the sharpness of the spike they recount push up against the limits of what some geophysicists think Earth’s outer core is capable of doing. If the eighth-century-B.C. geomagnetic jeté is real, models for the generation of the magnetic field need significant revision. Given the importance of a stable magnetic field to our electricity-dependent, communications-obsessed culture, these questions are of more than academic interest…
More on these befuddling fields at “Earth’s mysterious magnetic field, stored in a jar.”
* Dave Barry
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As we look for True North, we might send undulating birthday greetings to George Fitzgerald Smoot III; he was born on this date in 1945. An astrophysicist and cosmologist, Smoot discovered the signature of gravitational waves– ripples in space-time were first predicted by Albert Einstein– in his study of the cosmic microwave (“background”) radiation that originated with the Big Bang. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006; three years later he became the second person to run the board on the quiz show Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?, and took home the $1 million grand prize.
That Obscure Object of Definition…
Via friend P deV, the “obscure unit of the week: Bohr magnetons per angstrom”…
In explaining their (pretty remarkable) findings that magnetism can, in some circumstances, behave like electricity— “magnetricity” if one will– scientists from the London Centre for Nanotechnology invoked evidence denominated in what has to one of the rarer metrics around: Bohr magnetons per angstrom.
But worth understanding, as the observation suggests that it may be possible to create units of digital storage one magnetic monopole large– that’s to say, about the size of an atom. As lead investigator Steven Bramwell said (with typical British understatement), “monopoles could one day be used as a much more compact form of memory than anything available today.”
Individual magnetic ‘charges’ – equivalent to the north and south poles of a magnet – have been observed inside a crystalline material called spin ice (Image: STFC)
See the New Scientist report here; and more on the discovery at Next Big Future, here.
As we practice our scales, we might recall that it was on this date in 1948 that the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to T.S. Eliot, who undermined the need for more storage when he observed that “the most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.”
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