Association of EnergyEngineers
New York Chapter www.aeeny.org
May 2011 Newsletter Part 1
52 Years and $750 Million Prove Einstein Was Right
By Dennis Overbye, NYTimes, May 4, 2011
NASA
An artist’s conception of Gravity Probe B orbiting Earth to measure space-time
IN A TOUR DE FORCE OF TECHNOLOGY and just plain stubbornness spanning half a century and costing more than $750 million, a team of experimenters from Stanford University reported on Wednesday that a set of orbiting gyroscopes had detected a slight sag and an even slighter twist in space-time.
The finding confirms some of the weirdest of the many strange predictions — like black holes and the expanding universe — of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity.
“We have completed this landmark experiment of testing Einstein’s universe,” Francis Everitt, leader of the project, known as Gravity Probe B, said at a news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington. “And Einstein survives.”
That was hardly a surprise. Observations of planets, the Moon and particularly the shifting orbits of the Lageos research satellites had convinced astronomers and physicists that Einstein’s predictions were on the mark. Nevertheless, scientists said that the Gravity Probe results would live forever in textbooks as the most direct measurements, and that it was important to keep testing theories that were thought to be correct.
Clifford M. Will of Washington University in St. Louis — who was not part of the team but was chairman of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration advisory committee evaluating its work, and who wrote a book titled “Was Einstein Right?” — said that in science, “no such book is ever closed.”
Einstein’s theory relates gravity to the sagging of cosmic geometry under the influence of matter and energy, the way a sleeper makes a mattress sag. One consequence is that a massive spinning object like Earth should spin up the empty space around it, the way twirling the straw in a Frappuccino sets the drink and the whole Venti-size cup spinning around with it, an effect called frame dragging. Astronomers think this effect, although minuscule for Earth, could play a role in the black hole dynamos that power quasars.
Empty space in the vicinity of Earth is indeed turning, Dr. Everitt reported at the news conference and in a paper prepared for the journal Physical Review Letters, at the leisurely rate of 37 one-thousandths of a second of arc — the equivalent of a human hair seen from 10 miles away — every year. With an uncertainty of 19 percent, that measurement was in agreement with Einstein’s predictions of 39 milliarcseconds.
Likewise, the “sag” should alter the space-time geometry around Earth, warping it from the Euclidean ideal and cutting an inch out of the Gravity Probe’s orbit around it, so that the circumference is slightly less than the Euclidean ideal of pi times the orbit’s diameter, a fact confirmed by the Stanford gyroscopes to an accuracy of 0.3 percent.
For Dr. Everitt, who joined the Gravity Probe experiment in 1962 as a young postdoctoral fellow and has worked on nothing else since, the announcement on Wednesday capped a career-long journey.
The experiment was conceived in 1959, but the technology to make these esoteric measurements did not yet exist, which is why the experiment took so long and cost so much. The gyroscopes, for example, were made of superconducting niobium spheres, the roundest balls ever manufactured, which then had to be flown in a lead bag to isolate them from any other influences in the universe, save the subversive curvature of space-time itself.
Shortly before the probe’s launching, Dr. Francis said the project had been canceled at least seven times, “depending on what you mean by canceled.” It was finally sent into orbit in 2004 and operated for some 17 months, but not all went well. When the scientists began analyzing their data, they discovered that patches of electrical charge on the niobium balls had generated extra torque on the gyroscopes, causing them to drift.
It would take five more years to understand the spurious signals and retrieve the gravity data by dint of an effort that Dr. Will called “nothing less than heroic.”
In the meantime, the NASA grant ran out. Dr. Everitt secured another one from Richard Fairbank, a financier and son of one of the experiment’s founders, William Fairbank, that was matched by NASA and Stanford. When that ran out and NASA turned him down for a new grant, Dr. Everitt obtained a $2.7 million grant from Turki al-Saud, a Stanford graduate and vice president for research institutes at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.
###
Current NY Chapter AEE Sponsors:
New York Chapter of AEE thanks our corporate sponsors who help underwrite our activities. Please take a moment to visit their websites and learn more about them:
Association for Energy Affordability
Constellation Energy
Donnelly Mechanical Corp
Duane Morris
Innoventive Power
LessOil
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Parsons Brinckerhoff
If you or your firm is interested in sponsoring the New York Chapter of AEE, please contact Jeremy Metz at .
Warren Buffett, Delegator in Chief
By Andrew Ross Sorkin,
NYTimes, April 23, 2011
“He picked the chorus line but didn’t attempt to dance.”
John Cuneo
Warren Buffett
THAT IS WARREN BUFFETT’S MANAGEMENT STYLE, as described in a biography by Roger Lowenstein. Mr. Buffett delegates; he empowers his executives. Mr. Buffett, the 80-year-old chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway known as Uncle Warren, has been praised as one of the world’s greatest business managers. He has racked up average annualized returns of more than 20 percent for four decades. Yet in a potential case study for business schools, the question is now being asked: Does Mr. Buffett delegate too much?
Just in time for his company’s annual meeting with 35,000 investors next weekend, Mr. Buffett’s management style is coming under scrutiny.
His heir apparent, David L. Sokol, resigned last month after it emerged that he had bought $10 million worth of stock in Lubrizol, a chemical manufacturer, a day after he began orchestrating a merger with Berkshire, which later acquired Lubrizol for $9 billion — increasing the value of Mr. Sokol’s holding by $3 million.
Although Mr. Sokol mentioned that he was a shareholder in Lubrizol to Mr. Buffett when he suggested that Berkshire buy the company, Mr. Buffett said he did not ask about “the date of his purchase or the extent of his holdings.” The controversy exposed a paradox: Mr. Buffett may be considered one of the world’s best managers, but he doesn’t actively manage the hundreds of businesses that Berkshire owns.
“Did Sokol’s actions reveal shortcomings in the company’s governance system that need to be addressed?” asked Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business in a paper titled “The Resignation of David Sokol: Mountain or Molehill for Berkshire Hathaway?”
Unlike Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, who spends much of his time on airplanes traveling the world to visit the company’s 287,000 employees and oversees a giant campus and management team in Fairfield, Conn., Mr. Buffett “manages” Berkshire’s 257,000 employees with just 21 people at his headquarters in a small office in Omaha.
Mr. Buffett’s business partner, Charles Munger, once described Mr. Buffett’s day. He spends half of his time just sitting around and reading, Mr. Munger said. “And a big chunk of the rest of the time is spent talking one on one, either on the telephone or personally, with highly gifted people whom he trusts and who trust him.”
And that trust has advantages. “Part of his genius is that he’s created a hands-off culture that encourages entrepreneurs to sell their private companies to Berkshire,” said Larry Pitkowsky, managing partner of GoodHaven Capital Management and a longtime Berkshire shareholder, “and, critically, that they keeping showing up for work every day without worrying that they are going to get a call from headquarters telling them how to run things.” How hands-off is Mr. Buffett? When questioned once about why Berkshire didn’t take a more active role in fixing Moody’s, the troubled credit rating agency, in which he was the largest shareholder, he declared: “I’ve never been to Moody’s. I don’t even know where they’re located.”
“If I thought they needed me I wouldn’t have bought the stock,” he added.
He sees himself less of an activist than as a passive investor, a stock picker with a nose for a good deal. “We don’t tell Burlington Northern what safety procedures to put in or AmEx who they should lend to,” he said at his annual meeting two years ago. “When we own stock, we are not there to try and change people.”
His management approach may be as much a function of his own philosophy as it is a practical preference. He likes to make his investments dispassionately, based on the numbers, rather than let emotions get involved.
Mr. Buffett’s investing antennas may be genius, but some of his critics have suggested that his trust-based management style may have left him too farsighted to quickly spot operational problems. As reported by Carol Loomis of Fortune magazine, when Mr. Buffett was first told in 1991 about indications of a possible scandal at Salomon Brothers that later nearly took down the company (Berkshire was its largest shareholder), he initially did not detect any reason to be particularly alarmed, “so he went back to dinner.” Only after speaking several days later about the matter with his partner, Mr. Munger, “did Buffett get a sense of real trouble.”
###
A 21st-Century Water Forecast
By Felicity Barringer, NYTimes, Apr 25 2011
The broad-brush conclusion of a new federal report on the future impact of climate change on water in the West is a bit familiar. Throughout the West, there will be less snow, and what snow there is will melt faster. The dry Southwest is going to get drier, and the wet Northwest wetter, as a diagram in the report (above) shows.
The 122-page report includes original research — “including state-of-the-art climate modeling,” as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said during a conference call on Monday — but also harks back to peer-reviewed scientific literature on seven river basins: the Columbia, the Klamath, the Sacramento-San Joaquin, the Colorado, the Missouri, the Truckee and the Rio Grande.
The report, jointly produced by the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, offers not just some interesting details on individual basins but a revealing window on how the administration of President Obama, who did not even mention climate change in his last State of the Union address, deals with the subject in general.
The report and the conference call send a clear message: the West is getting warmer, and while the effects vary depending on geography, the places that are feeling water stress now are going to feel more in the future because snow will melt faster, bringing a decline in summertime stream flows.
And as Mr. Salazar observed on Monday, this reordering of natural water supplies “will mean significant potential dislocations to the economy and the environment.”
The focus is largely on the impact of climate change, not the cause; the role of greenhouse gases is mentioned in a by-the-way context, in sentences like this: “It is widely accepted that water demand changes will occur due to increased air temperatures, increased greenhouse gas concentrations and changes in precipitation, winds, humidity, and atmospheric aerosol and ozone levels.”
This could be a coincidence or an early indication of a new administration strategy: deal with the immediate and palpable causes of climate change, like water scarcity, first, and then tackle the overall problem later.
Certainly Mr. Salazar and two subordinates, Anne Castle, the assistant secretary for water and science, and Michael L. Connor, the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, were intent on using the report, delivered in response to a 2009 Congressional mandate, to create or bolster a sense of urgency among Western water managers who are planning for the future.
For instance, while Mr. Salazar said there would be no change in nearly 80 years of compacts and court decisions that make up the what Colorado River water users call “The Law of the River,” he pointed out that the seven states and the federal government, joint managers of that system, “must realize that “on top of that already oversubscribed system you are looking at significant decreases in water supply.”
The report also had warnings for other river basins, noting for example that while the Upper Missouri River could expect a greater inflow of water over all in 60 to 80 years, the South Fork of the Platte River, on which the water-stressed city of Denver depends, is likely to get less.
And while the Columbia River system should be handling more runoff or snow melt over all in the future, in the low-flow summer months, “annual minimum-week runoff is projected to steadily decrease. Lower instream flows and increased summer air temperatures may result in warmer channel flow and possibly significant impacts on aquatic species and those species dependent on them.”
For the Rio Grande system, like the Colorado’s, the news is mostly bad for economies and environments that depend on readily available water. Runoff will increase when it is less needed, from December to March, and decrease in the April-July period when the need is far greater.