Thermo**
February 2nd, 2007 by 
Morgan J. Locke
I bet y’all thought I was going to blog about the International Panel on Climate Change‘s fourth assessment report, but I’m not* — though I will say that, to those of us who follow global warming, what’s most significant about it is not its findings themselves — though they are extremely important. What is most significant is that those findings represent a worldwide, conservative, and authoritative consensus of the state of the science.
Thousands of leading scientists from over 130 countries lent their expertise to produce the final report, and scientists are by virtue of their job description, argumentative and nitpicky (in a good way). You can bet your sweet patootie that by the final hours of the final meeting prior to release, very single word in that report was thoroughly vetted, argued over, lobbied against, taken out, put back in, modified with an assortment of adjectives, screamed about, pudding was thrown, phones shattered against walls, people threatened blackmail and suicide, no doubt, behind closed doors. And this is what squeezed out through the cracks into the light of day. The single most authoritative report on global warming to date.
Read it. Grok it. It’s only 21 pages. Nothing in there will surprise you, if you have been following the science — though it will I hope spur you to throw a dose of cold water into the face of anyone who wants to pretend global warming isn’t the dreadful juggernaut it is. The only people who are surprised are the nitwits who have been burying their faces in their pillows, and the thugs who want them to continue to do so.
But what I really wanted to do was share this really cool link about a new and very cool nanomachine. Everybody, meet Maxwell’s Demon. Some significant advances have been being made in the field of nanotech in recent years, and if it’s all it appears to be, this is another important milestone. It’s a molecular-sized device that runs on light, and basically herds other molecules (Unfortunately you can’t always trust tech-sci reports that show up in the popular press; I’ll do some further digging and report back).
Chemist David Leigh of the University of Edinburgh tells CNN:
“It is a machine mechanism that is going to take molecular machines a step forward to the realization of the future world of nanotechnology. Things that seem like a Harry Potter film now are going to be a reality.”
Hmmm. Maybe we could use those little gizmos to herd all the carbon dioxide into a deep subduction zone somewhere…or boot it off into space. Expeliaramus ad astra!
_______________
*OK, maybe I am, just a little.
**OK, I just gotta sprain my arm — I’m so proud of the thermo pun! See, thermo=heat; thermo=thermodynamics; thermo = Maxwell’s Demon… a famous thought experiment developed by physicist James Maxwell back in the late 1800s to test the second law of thermodynamics, which is the heat-death scenario we all know and love — i.e., systems grow more disordered over time. Oh, never mind; I’m geeking again.
Posted in Morgan, People, Politics, Science, Technology | 
17 Comments »
February 3rd, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Fascinating!
Sidebar: Suspect you’ll eventually address the ongoing discussion about the potential risks of nanotechnology (‘unintended consequences’ being a particular interest of mine). Couple of web pages I found:
– http://www.ifs.tu-darmstadt.de/fileadmin/phil/nano/schuler.pdf
– http://www.innovationsgesellschaft.ch/nano_regulation.htm
February 3rd, 2007 at 8:09 pm
The prospect of Maxwell’s Demon being used to herd noxious molecules AWAY into space is indeed cool.
Unfortunately, my natural pessimism leads me to the thought that Maxwell’s Demon could also be used to herd noxious molecules TO any population you wanted to wipe out.
There’s a Brave New World a-comin’, kids. Brace yourselves.
February 3rd, 2007 at 8:32 pm
For sure. Nanotechnology has horrendous power to obliterate everything and everyone. So do nukes. We are already there, in that deadly future.
February 3rd, 2007 at 9:20 pm
I’m in full agreement, Morgan. That’s why I’m cowering under my desk.
February 3rd, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Where are my nano tattoo implants, dammit.
February 3rd, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Did you want those Hi Def or VGA?
February 3rd, 2007 at 10:01 pm
LDA, this is really interesting. You are a time traveller! Your post came first, but did not show up until *after* Steve’s. Weird.
Caroline, so… presuming we could have basically SkinTV… what channels would you want showing? And, er, how many pixels?
February 3rd, 2007 at 10:07 pm
LDA’s post was stuck in moderation because of the number of links. I unstuck it.
February 3rd, 2007 at 10:11 pm
And we talked about this a little bit way back in November right here.
February 3rd, 2007 at 10:19 pm
I should do a serious post about nanotech. It has tremendous promise — and tremendous risks. Of course, by the time we have problems with nano, we will probably be facing the Singularity with regard to AI anyway. Or another dark age, due to the collapse of civilization in an overheated world…or some damn thing. Oh! And I just read that according to some scientists, there is a good likelihood that the Earth only has another half a billion years left before it’s rendered uninhabitable anyway. I HATE when that happens.
February 4th, 2007 at 6:40 am
Always unfashionably late to the party…
February 4th, 2007 at 8:44 am
Definitely fashionable, LDA. Toujour gai
February 4th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Hey, LDA, I wasn’t commenting about your comment as much as saying “here is additional interesting stuff on this topic.”
HyperTextual and all that.
February 4th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
No prob, S-C. I haven’t read thru all the voluminous and knowledgeable posts herein, so I expect I risk running over the same material you’ve previously discussed. Appreciate your pointing me to those posts I’ve neglected to find. Thanks.
Morgan, Thanks, too. And wasn’t ‘Toujour gai’ a Broadway tune from “Shinbone Alley”?
I digress… I’m just thrilled to find a clutch of folks who expound upon relevant issues of interest to me. (Perhaps explains my enthusiasm to post w/o pre-emptive due diligence.) Much to my disappointment, I’ve found many overseas-assigned countrymen to be rigid in their viewpoints. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised. This isn’t a university community where ‘free thinking’ is either valued or encouraged. One of many minor reasons I’ve declined to extend my 2-yr tour; returning home to O’ahu in April. So looking forward to being home…
February 5th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
toujour gai comes from archy and mehitabel, by Don Marquis. It was mehitabel’s fave phrase.
February 5th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
Geez, you’d think I’d have remembered that! OK, I read a&m at A&M my freshman year… But alas, the unused bytes in long term shortage degrade, or are being overwritten the older I become.
February 5th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
This is why (speaking of nano) I want to get a plug-innable memory chip for my head. I never remember anything.
What were we talking about, again?