Coffee for the places I’ve lived or spent a large amount of time.

Amarillo:
Roasters Coffee & Tea
the 806
B&E (RIP)

Austin:
Mozart’s Coffee Roasters
Little City (RIP)

Berkeley:
Brewed Awakening

Capitol Region (Albany, NY):
Professor Java’s Coffee Sanctuary

Chicago Suburbs:
La Spiaza

Seattle:
Cafe Zoka
Cafe Solstice
Bean and Bagel (The College Inn)

State College PA:
Saint’s Cafe

Tags: Coffee

I’m giving a fun talk later this month at Cornell. I am (an invited!) speaker at an x-ray diffraction workshop. This will be a particularly fun meeting as it’s not a presentation of what everyone has been doing. Rather, we’re supposed to give talks about what we would be doing if we had more light! The CHESS facility at Cornell has been pushing the frontier of photon based science with the idea of an Energy Recovery Linac. Should it work (and be built), we could expect an increase in around 1000 times the flux over current continuously operating sources (as opposed to pulse sources such as the LCLS).

There are several good candidates for material to include in such a talk, but some of the most obvious are experiments which we have tried that have *almost* worked.

There’s one particular example that has frustrated me to no end. We attempted to see get a signal from a Pt surface undergoing an oscillating production of CO2 from CO and O2. That system itself is just fascinating and part of the reason Ertl won a Nobel prize in chemistry a few years ago. What we’re trying to do is develop a new tool that could be used to look at similar systems (particularly though those at higher pressure where we current techniques have more difficulty).

We tried the experiment once and got some promising early results. Things looked pretty good for a first attempt. We went back though later and spent a week on this system with limited success. It was hugely disappointing (though that entire run was still a success as we managed to reproduce the initial result of a different experiment). We struggled to understand what went wrong, and I think I largely understand the problem. However in the face of getting it “to sort of work” once and “not to work at all” once, we can’t really write it up and say, “LOOK, COOL SCIENCE!” As often happens with experimental science in general, when we go back to verify and repeat, we end up “experimenting” ourselves right out of a publication instead of into one.

So this all happened 18 months ago. Why am I frustrated now? Well, before I can give a talk really saying, “here’s something we tried that almost worked,” I need to make absolutely certain (AGAIN) that it did in fact not work. So I’m back running over the same old ground trying to repeat the analysis in an independent fashion (obviously just looking at my old notebooks and repeating the process exactly will give the same answer. The point is to approach it fresh and unbiased).

It’s frustrating in that I’m going through all the same emotions as it doesn’t work; frustrating in that it almost worked; frustrating in that you almost see the signal, maybe you do; frustrating that it’s so close, but just beyond what we can do conclusively enough to say, “yes or no.” Frustrating because it’s “MAYBE” and in (good) science that always means NO, NOT YET.

How many times have I repeated, “Science is hard.” on this blog? sigh... Fun, but not easy.

I should go back to posting nice pictures on the blog. We’ve got several new ones.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu (who just happens to be a Nobel prize winning physicist) gave a wonderful talk today at Argonne. I’ve managed to hear him speak 5 times during my career and each time he has been suitably inspiring. I had anticipated that this talk would focus on budgetary aspects of spending, what would be funding, changes to funding opportunities, streamlining to save money, etc... Instead it was mostly about science. I’ll try to summarize his talk below.


----------------

Point #1 : Global warming is real. Temperatures are getting hotter. We have measured the combined energy deposited on the earth from the sun, solar wind, cosmic rays, etc... The energy varies on an 11 year cycle, but we’ve now been measuring for more than 3 full cycles and find that over those 3 cycles the total energy put into our planet each year remains constant.

However, we know that the total energy emitted by the earth has decreased, mostly due to the increased presence of greenhouse gases.

We know that the level of CO2 is increasing. It has increased dramatically since the industrial revolution. It is the highest it has been in at least 800,000 years (and that increase has come in ~ 100 years). That is significant. Most changes to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere occur much more slowly. Not only is our level of CO2 very high (for the last million years), but the rate of change is dramatic.

At points in the more distant past we do know that there were higher levels of CO2 naturally in the atmosphere. But guess what, the temperatures during those times were much, much hotter. In fact, we know quite well exactly how hot we need to make the earth to melt the Antarctic ice. This makes the point in many respects that increasing greenhouse gases really does in fact lead to global warming.

Furthermore, we know that the new CO2 in the atmosphere is man-made. Carbon-14, that great isotope for carbon dating, should be existing “in equilibrium” in the atmosphere (where it is made from cosmic ray interaction with Nitrogen), and on the surface of the earth (where the C-14 is easily mixed). Yet the CO2 we’re seeing in the atmosphere is mostly C-12. This is because the carbon that is contained within fossil fuels has been underground long enough for all (essentially) of the C-14 to have decayed. So, aside from putting additional C-14 in the atmosphere with nuclear explosions, we know that the CO2 increase in the atmosphere must be coming from man made sources.

Constant energy input, lessening energy output due to CO2 increase, CO2 increase being man-made, all of these things point to man made global warming.

Point 2) First the price of oil will increase.

We are lagging behind the rest of the world, most notably China, with regards to developing energy technology. Energy efficient transmission, nuclear energy, sustainable energy sources, efficient buildings and transportation, are all places where we are lagging far behind. And it’s not just China, we’re behind countries such as Spain and Italy. We are, in effect, now consumers not just for foreign energy sources, but also of foreign energy technology.

Point 3) We are at a Sputnik moment. There are significant energy problems on the horizon and the United States is doing far too little to keep pace. We have a huge challenge and need much more than just funding for the immediate problem. We need a long range, long term vision. That vision must include significant investment in science education and in supporting both academic and applied science, particularly that done at universities.

I’ve been in Rochester part of this week to give a talk and meet some people in the RIT physics department. It’s been a great trip and while there’s much I could write about, I’m going to stick to something rather unusual.

As has always been my way, I found a little coffee shop to do some work in. What struck me was... the smell. It’s not a good odor, but it’s not unpleasant. It’s just something from a combination of coffee, wood, water and rock. What’s so unusual about it, is that this particular smell was something I’ve not experience in many years. In fact, despite it being so distant in my past, I immediately recognized it as how the old coffee shop I used to study at in Albany all those years ago as an undergraduate at RPI : Professor Java’s Coffee Sanctuary.

I suppose the climate is about the same and geographically Rochester isn’t *that* far from Albany. And if my memory is correct, there’s exactly the same floor tiling in both. Of course both are coffee houses.

Long ago I transferred mid-year to RPI as an undergraduate. It was early January and I had just arrived in upstate NY. After being there about a week I was driving around one night, a little lost, and feeling very far from home. It was snowing and cold and I was driving slowly down a road hoping to get back to the highway so I could make my way back to campus. Then through the snow I saw it, glowing like beacon of hope and caffeine: a sign for professor Java’s coffee.

It became my home away from my apartment. I did a very large percentage of my undergraduate study in that little coffee shop. It was the first place I found in NY where I felt really welcome.

So now, here I am, in a different part of upstate NY, but feeling very, very nostalgic.