Energy

"We’re calling it a ready and release plan. This allows us to move quickly to prevent oil price spikes and respond to international events"

"Sweet oil, the fragrance of the gods, mixed oil, pressed oil, aromatic oil, cedar oil for offerings are mine."

"Enki sets up for you the lustration rituals created in his abzu; Kusu establishes the lustration rituals created in their specific house -- the oven for oxen, sheep and bread beside the interior of the bathing chamber, those sacred lustration rituals beside the shrine! Kusu purifies the oil for the house. It is placed in readiness [...] to ensure the sacred lustration rituals are not neglected, from the majestic marshes, the vast, sacred bathing chamber, this destiny emerges: the E-kic-nu-jal, with its majestic, sacred dais, perfects the great, majestic divine powers of heaven and earth. You bathe on the majestic banks by the sacred bathing chamber; you put mountain oil on your sacred body; O Nanna, you are placed upon your majestic dais -- wrapped in majestic linen, with raised head, shining horns and the pectoral of lordship! With the majestic oil of the sacred body, the oil of lordship, oil from your great treasury, lord Ningublaga consecrates the hands on his lapis-lazuli quay, the majestic quay, the sacred quay. But from Eridug the stag of the abzu Enki purifies the oil for those hands. So that you should place sacred hands upon your offering table in the banqueting hall, the great place, your steward Kusu -- she who purifies hands and cleanses hands -- consecrates the hands. But from Eridug the stag of the abzu purifies the oil for those hands."

"[the blockade puts emergency access at risk for more than 500 workers, and threatens] good faith commitments made between the Office of the Wet’suwet’en and the Province of B.C. to develop a new relationship based on respect"

"With the continued deterioration of weather conditions in the region in the coming days, Trans Mountain is closely monitoring the situation to ensure our crews can continue to progress safely"

""Anybody who follows the oil industry will tell you that it doesn't make any difference where the oil comes from," says Keith Crane, an energy expert at RAND Corp. Global oil markets are so intertwined, Crane says, that changes in any one part of the system can trigger effects elsewhere. He points out that the U.S. has imposed sanctions on Iran and therefore does not import its oil. But "if Iranian oil goes off the [world] market, it still affects the price in the United States," Crane says."

"To ask the question "What is oil?" is almost like asking "What is love?""

"What he has said is we'll continue to rely on Persian Gulf oil and if necessary sacrifice American lives in a fight for that oil. I don't think we ought to lose American lives fighting for someone else's oil. Because a war in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf - all we'll get is war and we won't get oil. And we'll lose a lot of American lives in the process."

"The world petroleum story is one of the most inhuman known to man: in it, elementary moral and social principles are jeered at. If powerful oil trusts no longer despoil and humiliate our country it is not because these predators have become human, but because we have won a hard-fought battle which has been going on since the beginning of the century."

"Our oil supply is secure, not because our government threatens to use force against those who would make it insecure, but because the world’s oil suppliers want to make money."

"I think Arctic drilling is insane. I think that countries around the world would be very well advised to put restrictions on drilling for oil in the Arctic ocean."

"As one approaches nearer to the country of the Cats, one finds heavy and thick water, which ignites like brandy, and boils up in bubbles of flame when fire is applied to it. It is, moreover, so oily, that all our Savages use it to anoint and grease their heads and their bodies."

"The place where we meet with it is called Ganos; where an officer worthy of credit [Joncaire] assured me that he had seen a fountain, the water of which is like oil and has the taste of iron. He said also that a little further there is another fountain exactly like it, and that the savages make use of its waters to appease all manner of pains."

"In 1991, Landsat captured the devastating environmental consequences of war. As Iraqi forces withdrew from Kuwait, they set fire to over 650 oil wells and damaged almost 75 more, which then spewed crude oil across the desert and into the Persian Gulf. Fires burned for ten months. According to a 2009 study published in Disaster Prevention and Management, firefighting crews from ten countries, part of a response team that comprised approximately 11,450 workers from 38 countries, used familiar and also never-before-tested technologies to put out the fires. When the last one was extinguished in November, about 300 lakes of oil remained, as well as a layer of soot and oil that fell out of the sky and mixed with sand and gravel to form 'tarcrete' across 5 percent of Kuwait's landscape."

"An estimated one to 1.5 billion barrels of oil were released into the environment. After most burned, 25 to 40 million barrels ended up spread across the desert and 11 million barrels in the Persian Gulf, according to a 2012 paper published in Remote Sensing of Environment. For comparison, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill into the Gulf of Mexico is estimated to have released nearly 5 million barrels of oil. Kuwait's landscape has recovered somewhat. Clean up efforts have removed 21 million barrels of oil from the desert, but an estimated 1 million barrels still remain."

"I’ve said many times that there isn’t a country in the world that would find billions of barrels of oil and leave it in the ground while there is a market for it."

"The most important strategic resource during the Cold War was oil. The first half of the twentieth century had seen its rise from a minor source of energy to becoming the substance that made modern states work. Armies depended on it for transport, and civilian economies depended on it for production. The Soviet Union became self-sufficient in 1954, so it was not competing with the West for access to foreign oil for its own sake. But the post-Stalin Moscow leaders knew how dependent US allies were on oil imports for their economic development. In western Europe dependence on oil for energy consumption increased from less than 10 percent in 1945 to over a third in 1960. In Japan the figures were even more striking: from 6 percent to 40. Eight-five percent of western Europe’s imports came from the Middle East already by 1950. For the United States, which up to 1970 relied primarily on its own production for domestic use, controlling access to Middle Eastern oil was therefore still of major strategic importance."

"If two systems are both in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other."

"In a closed system (i.e. there is no transfer of matter into or out of the system), the first law states that the change in internal energy of the system (ΔU) is equal to the difference between the heat supplied to the system (Q) and the work (W) done by the system on its surroundings. (Note, an alternate sign convention, not used in this article, is to define W as the work done on the system by its surroundings): \Delta U_{\rm system} = Q - W."

"When two initially isolated systems are combined into a new system, then the total internal energy of the new system, U, will be equal to the sum of the internal energies of the two initial systems, U1 and U2: U_{\rm system} = U_1 + U_2."

"When two initially isolated systems in separate but nearby regions of space, each in thermodynamic equilibrium with itself but not necessarily with each other, are then allowed to interact, they will eventually reach a mutual thermodynamic equilibrium. The sum of the entropies of the initially isolated systems is less than or equal to the total entropy of the final combination. Equality occurs just when the two original systems have all their respective intensive variables (temperature, pressure) equal; then the final system also has the same values."

"According to the second law, in a reversible heat transfer, an element of heat transferred, \delta Q, is the product of the temperature (T), both of the system and of the sources or destination of the heat, with the increment (dS) of the system's conjugate variable, its entropy (S):"

"A system's entropy approaches a constant value as its temperature approaches absolute zero."

"Every mathematician knows it is impossible to understand an elementary course in thermodynamics."

"In order to consider in the most general way the principle of the production of motion by heat, it must be considered independently of any mechanism or any particular agent. It is necessary to establish principles applicable not only to steam engines but to all imaginable heat-engines, whatever the working substance and whatever the method by which it is operated."

"Machines which do not receive their motion from heat... can be studied even to their smallest details by the mechanical theory. ...A similar theory is evidently needed for heat-engines. We shall have it only when the laws of Physics shall be extended enough, generalized enough, to make known beforehand all of the effects of heat acting in a determined manner on any body."

"The production of heat alone is not sufficient to give birth to the impelling powerː it is necessary that there should also be cold; without it the heat would be useless. And in fact, if we should find about us only bodies as hot as our furnaces... What should we do with it if once produced? We should not presume that we might discharge it into the atmosphere... the atmosphere would not receive it. It does receive it under the actual condition of things only because.. it is at a lower temperature, otherwise it... would be already saturated."

"Heat can evidently be a cause of motion only by virtue of the changes of volume or of form which it produces in bodies. These changes are not caused by uniform temperature but rather by alternations of heat and cold."

"The driving power of heat is independent of the agents used to realize it; its value is uniquely fixed by the temperatures of the bodies between which the transfer of caloric is made."

"A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts."

"The effects of heat are subject to constant laws which cannot be discovered without the aid of mathematical analysis. The object of the theory is to demonstrate these laws; it reduces all physical researches on the propagation of heat, to problems of the integral calculus, whose elements are given by experiment. No subject has more extensive relations with the progress of industry and the natural sciences; for the action of heat is always present, it influences the processes of the arts, and occurs in all the phenomena of the universe."

"Newton and his theories were a step ahead of the technologies that would define his age. Thermodynamics, the grand theoretical vision of the nineteenth century, operated in the other direction with practice leading theory. The sweeping concepts of energy, heat, work and entropy, which thermodynamics (and its later form, statistical mechanics) would embrace, began first on the shop floor. Originally the domain of engineers, thermodynamics emerged from their engagement with machines. Only later did this study of heat and its transformation rise to the heights of abstract physics and, finally, to a new cosmological vision."

"[I]n the nineteenth century, even the could be reduced to mechanics by the assumption that heat really consists of a complicated statistical motion of the smallest parts of matter. By combining the concepts of the mathematical theory of probability with the concepts of Newtonian mechanics Clausius, Gibbs and Boltzmann were able to show that the fundamental laws in the theory of heat could be interpreted as statistical laws following from Newton's mechanics when applied to very complicated mechanical systems."

"The second closed system of concepts was formed in the... nineteenth century... with the theory of heat. Though the theory... could finally be connected with mechanics through... statistical mechanics, it... [was not] a part of mechanics. ...[T]he phenomenological theory of heat uses... concepts that have no counterpart in other branches of physics, like: , specific heat, entropy, free energy, etc. If... one goes... to a statistical interpretation... considering heat as energy, distributed statistically among... many degrees of freedom due to... atomic structure of matter, then heat is no more connected with mechanics than with electrodynamics or other parts of physics. The central concept... is... probability, closely connected with the concept of entropy... [T]he statistical theory of heat requires the concept of energy. But any coherent set of axioms and concepts in physics will necessarily contain the concepts of energy, and and the law that these ...must under certain conditions be conserved. This follows if the coherent set is intended to describe... features of nature... correct at all times and everywhere... [i.e.,] features that do not depend on space and time... [i.e.,] that are invariant under arbitrary translations in space and time, s in space and the Galileo or . Therefore, the theory of heat can be combined with any of the other closed systems of concepts."

"Even the laws of thermodynamics... can be recast in terms of information — Shannon entropy, the laws of bits of information. But this view generates its own paradox at the origin of life. ...Place information at the heart of life, and there is a problem with the emergence of function ...the origin of biological information. There are problems... in understanding why we age and die... diseases... and how experiences can give rise to conscious mind. ...A far better question ...what processes animate cells and set them apart from inanimate matter?"

"The driving force of is thermodynamics. ...[I]n this context ...the chemical need to react (to dissipate energy) in the same way that water needs to flow downhill."

"If the Krebs cycle is ordained by thermodynamics, then it should take place spontaneously in some suitably propitious envirnonment, even in the absence of s."

"The whole science of heat is founded Thermometry and Calorimetry, and when these operations are understood we may proceed to the third step, which is the investigation of those relations between the thermal and the mechanical properties of substances which form the subject of Thermodynamics. The whole of this part of the subject depends on the consideration of the Intrinsic Energy of a system of bodies, as depending on the temperature and physical state, as well as the form, motion, and relative position of these bodies. Of this energy, however, only a part is available for the purpose of producing mechanical work, and though the energy itself is indestructible, the available part is liable to diminution by the action of certain natural processes, such as conduction and radiation of heat, friction, and viscosity. These processes, by which energy is rendered unavailable as a source of work, are classed together under the name of the Dissipation of Energy."

"Heat may be generated and destroyed by certain processes, and this shows that heat is not a substance."

"Isn’t thermodynamics considered a fine intellectual structure, bequeathed by past decades, whose every subtlety only experts in the art of handling Hamiltonians would be able to appreciate?"

"Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don't understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time you go through it, you know you don't understand it, but by that time you are so used to it, it doesn't bother you any more."

"If the water flow down by a gradual natural channel, its potential energy is gradually converted into heat by fluid friction, according to an admirable discovery made by Mr Joule of Manchester above twelve years ago, which has led to the greatest reform that physical science has experienced since the days of Newton. From that discovery, it may be concluded with certainty that heat is not matter, but some kind of motion among the particles of matter; a conclusion established, it is true, by Sir Humphrey Davy and Count Rumford at the end of last century, but ignored by even the highest scientific men during a period of more than forty years."

"Thermodynamics is more like a mode of reasoning than a body of physical law. ...we can think of thermodynamics as a certain pattern of arrows that occurs again and again in very different physical contexts, but, wherever this pattern of explanation occurs, the arrows can be traced back by the methods of statistical mechanics to deeper laws and ultimately to the principles of elementary particle physics. ...the fact that a scientific theory finds applications to a wide variety of different phenomena does not imply anything about the autonomy of this theory from deeper physical laws."

"The Second Law recognizes that there is a fundamental dissymmetry in Nature... All around us are aspects of the dissymmetry: hot objects become cool, but cool objects do not spontaneously become hot; a bouncing ball comes to rest, but a stationary ball does not spontaneously begin to bounce. Here is the feature of Nature that both Kelvin and Clausius disentangled from the conservation of energy: although the total quantity of energy must be conserved in any process (which is their revised version of what Carnot had taken to be the conservation of the quantity of caloric), the distribution of that energy changes in an irreversible manner. The Second Law is concerned with the natural direction of change of the distribution of energy, something that is quite independent of its total quantity."

"The choice (or accident) of s creates a sense of time directionality in a physical environment. The 'arrow' of entropy increase is a reflection of the improbability of those initial conditions which are entropy-decreasing in a closed physical system. ... Everywhere... in the Universe, we discern that closed physical systems evolve in the same sense from ordered states towards a state of complete disorder called . This cannot be a consequence of known laws of change, since... these laws are time symmetric—they permit... time-reverse... The initial conditions play a decisive role in endowing the world with its sense of temporal direction. ...some prescription for initial conditions is crucial if we are to understand... A Theory of Everything needs to be complemented by some such independent prescription which appeals to simplicity, economy, or some other equally metaphysical notion to underpin its credibility. The only radically different alternative... a belief that the type of mathematical description of Nature... —that of causal equations with starting conditions—is just an artefact of our own preferred categories of thought and merely an approximation... At a deeper level, a sharp divide between those aspects of reality that we habitually call 'laws' and... 'initial conditions' may simply not exist."

"The second law of thermodynamics is, without a doubt, one of the most perfect laws in physics. Any reproducible violation of it, however small, would bring the discoverer great riches as well as a trip to Stockholm. The world’s energy problems would be solved at one stroke. It is not possible to find any other law (except, perhaps, for super selection rules such as charge conservation) for which a proposed violation would bring more skepticism than this one. Not even Maxwell’s laws of electricity or Newton’s law of gravitation are so sacrosanct, for each has measurable corrections coming from quantum effects or general relativity. The law has caught the attention of poets and philosophers and has been called the greatest scientific achievement of the nineteenth century. Engels disliked it, for it supported opposition to Dialectical Materialism, while Pope Pius XII regarded it as proving the existence of a higher being."

"If one applies this to the universe in total, one reaches a remarkable conclusion. ...Namely, if, in the universe, heat always shows the endeavour to change its distribution in such a way that existing temperature differences are thereby smoothened, then the universe must continually get closer and closer to the state, where the forces cannot produce any new motions, and no further differences exist."

"The more the universe approaches this limiting condition in which the entropy is maximum, the more do the occasions of further change diminish; and supposing this condition to be at last completely attained, no further change could evermore take place, and the universe would be in a state of unchanging death."

"In the year 1900 Max Planck wrote... E = hv, where E is the energy of a light wave, v is its , and h is... . It said that energy and frequency are the same thing measured in different units. Planck's constant gives you a rate of exchange for for converting frequency into energy... But in the year 1900 this made no physical sense. Even Plank himself did not understand it. ...Now Hawking has written down an equation which looks rather like Planck's equation... S = kA, where S is the entropy of a black hole, A is the area of its surface, and k is... Hawking's constant. Entropy means roughly the same thing as the of an object. ...Hawking's equation says that entropy is really the same thing as area. The exchange rate... is given by Hawking's constant... But what does it really mean to say that entropy and area are the same thing? We are as far away from understanding that now as Planck was of understanding quantum mechanics in 1900. ...[T]his equation will emerge as a central feature of the still unborn theory which will tie together gravitation and quantum mechanics and thermodynamics."

"The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

"The paradox that immediately bothers everyone who learns about the second law is this: If systems tend to become more disordered, why, then, do we see so much order around us? ...It seems to conflict with our "creation myth": In the beginning, there was a big bang. ...no one is saying that the second law of thermodynamics is wrong, just that there is a contrapuntal process organizing things at a higher level."

"Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions."

"Life is nature's solution to the problem of preserving information despite the second law of thermodynamics."

"The reactions that break down large molecules into small ones do not require an input of energy, but the reactions that build up large molecules require an input of energy. This is consistent with the laws of thermodynamics, which say that large, orderly molecules tend to break down into small, disorderly molecules."

"No one has yet succeeded in deriving the second law from any other law of nature. It stands on its own feet. It is the only law in our everyday world that gives a direction to time, which tells us that the universe is moving toward equilibrium and which gives us a criteria for that state, namely, the point of maximum entropy, of maximum probability. The second law involves no new forces. On the contrary, it says nothing about forces whatsoever."

"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?"

"My own introduction to entropy was as an undergraduate mechanical engineering student. Neither I nor any of the other students knew anything about the molecular theory of heat, and I bet that the professor didn't either. The course... was so confusing that I...couldn't make any sense of it. Worst of all was the concept of entropy. We were told that if you heat something a small amount, the change in thermal energy, divided by the temperature, is the change of its entropy. Everyone copied it down but no one understood what it meant. It was as incomprehensible to me as "The change in the number of sausages divided by the onionization is called floogelweiss.""

"Organic evolution has its physical analogue in the universal law that the world tends, in all its parts and particles, to pass from certain less probable to certain more probable configurations or states. This is the second law of thermodynamics. It has been called the law of evolution of the world; and we call it, after Clausius, the Principle of Entropy, which is a literal translation of Evolution in Greek."

"It is impossible by means of inanimate material agency, to derive mechanical effect from any portion of matter by cooling it below the temperature of the coldest of the surrounding objects. [Footnote: ] If this axiom be denied for all temperatures, it would have to be admitted that a self-acting machine might be set to work and produce mechanical effect by cooling the sea or earth, with no limit but the total loss of heat from the earth and sea, or in reality, from the whole material world."

"1. There is at present in the material world a universal tendency to the dissipation of mechanical energy. 2. Any restoration of mechanical energy, without more than an equivalent of dissipation, is impossible in inanimate material processes, and is probably never effected by means of organized matter, either endowed with vegetable life or subjected to the will of an animated creature. 3. Within a finite period of time past, the earth must have been, and within a finite period of time to come the earth must again be, unfit for the habitation of man as at present constituted, unless operations have been, or are to be performed, which are impossible under the laws to which the known operations going on at present in the material world are subject."

"In classical physics, most of the fundamental laws of nature were concerned either with the stability of certain configurations of bodies, e.g. the solar system, or else with the conservation of certain properties of matter, e.g. mass, energy, angular momentum or spin. The outstanding exception was the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics, discovered by Clausius in 1850. This law, as usually stated, refers to an abstract concept called entropy, which for any enclosed or thermally isolated system tends to increase continually with lapse of time. In practice, the most familiar example of this law occurs when two bodies are in contact: in general, heat tends to flow from the hotter body to the cooler. Thus, while the First Law of Thermodynamics, viz. the conservation of energy, is concerned only with time as mere duration, the Second Law involves the idea of trend. Milne developed his cosmology by taking this idea of trend to be fundamental, regarding the expansion of the universe as its supreme manifestation."

"It’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Sooner or later everything turns to shit."

"In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"

"Zeroth: You must play the game. First: You can't win. Second: You can't break even. Third: You can't quit the game."

"Ludwig Boltzmann"

"Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot"

"Rudolf Clausius"

"Entropy (thermodynamics)"

"Josiah Willard Gibbs"

"James Clerk Maxwell"

"Steam engine"

"William Thomson"

"Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern this Nation. This difficult effort will be the "moral equivalent of war," except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not to destroy."

"It is found that the sum of energy of motion and energy of position is always constant. ...Energy is a quantity which can be greater or less but has no direction. ...[E]nergy is conserved, or is indestructible. This form of speech might be applied to other cases of alternate immortality, where one of two things comes into existence on disappearance of the other."

"You will soon be able to tax it."

"It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount."

"We must proceed with our own energy development. Exploitation of domestic petroleum and natural gas potentialities, along with nuclear, solar, geothermal, and non-fossil fuels is vital. We will never again permit any foreign nation to have Uncle Sam over a barrel of oil."

"No national goal today in the domestic area is more important than this one. Yes, energy does mean much more than operate machines of industry or heat our homes or power our automobiles. It fuels our total economy. Energy means jobs. If we increase our energy capability or capacity, there will be more jobs for New Jersey and for every one of our States, including my State of Michigan, which is in a somewhat comparable situation to all of you in this great State. If our domestic source or supply continues to diminish as it is and our dependence on high-priced foreign oil increases, there will be fewer and fewer and fewer jobs and higher and higher unemployment in America. To put it very practically, we must stop exporting American dollars and American jobs. We must keep those jobs in America, in New Jersey, in Michigan, and we must create more and more jobs in this country."

"The real key word that triggers my rage is the word "energy". When people start talking about positive or negative types, for instance, negative energy — what are you talking about? What do you mean? Let's think about it, what does energy mean? Well, we know what it means, you know, energy from petrol when it's burned and moves a car and makes it move, it's like this. "This room has positive energy." Now, where the fuck is it going, then? It's not moving. It's covering up such woolly thinking, such pathetic nonsense."

"If you take a bale of hay and tie it to the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and if you then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the energy expended by yourself in the striking of the match, you will understand the concept of amplification."

"Thus to the plain man there may be no metaphor in...Thomas Young's "kinetic energy" and Michelangelo's figure of Leda. Placed in their customary contexts these present nothing to him but the face of literal truth. To the initiated, however, who are aware of the "gross original" senses as well as the now literal senses, they may become metaphors. There are no metaphors per se...."

"Friend, how can we discuss the Supermundane if energy is not yet realized as the foundation of Existence? Many will not understand at all what is meant by this, while others may think that they understand the significance of fundamental energy, but cannot think about it with clarity. It is necessary to train one’s thought upon the idea of energy until the feeling of it becomes as real as the feeling about any solid object. We speak about feeling, because knowledge alone cannot provide an understanding of energy. (Introduction)"

"Even if man accepts the truth that fundamentally there is only one energy, this alone will not be enough for progress — one must also learn to picture to oneself its innumerable qualities. Man’s customary narrowness of thought limits his perception of the properties of this energy, and thus limits his understanding. Lofty thinking helps one avoid harmful limitation, but it is not easy to establish an appropriate level of beautiful and lofty thought amidst life’s misfortunes, and very few are prepared to understand that it is life’s difficulties themselves that can assist lofty thinking. Goalfitness will help one’s thinking when the properties of the fundamental energy appear to be contradictory. A blind man may be unable to perceive an event visible to others, but everyone can realize the Supermundane by learning to understand the many properties of the fundamental energy."

"Those who think of the Supermundane as the very Highest are correct. “As below, so above.” Let this ancient saying serve as a guide to cognition of the forces of the Supermundane."

"Over the centuries We have become accustomed to the idea that a concentration of energy can be directed to any domain. Energy, like lightning, unites accumulated forces in its discharge. So-called magical phenomena are based on the same principle. In reality, the term “magical” can only mislead. Any electrical apparatus can be called magical. When Urusvati performed levitation or the moving of objects, it was done not through magic but simply by not impeding the energy. The manifested energy was accepted and then projected. It was united with the cosmic energy, and thus could act. Our mirrors cannot be called magical. They simply increase the effectiveness of Our energy. Many appliances can be found that make energy more effective. Strong magnets could hardly be called magical, even though their action is remarkable."

"A whole new science can be developed that will study the dissemination of the energy of word and thought. The confirmation of the influence of word and thought on vegetation and on planetary conditions will depend upon this. We experiment with vibrations, and Our Brother Vaughan is also occupied with them. Many scientists should thank Him for his help. We rejoice when such seeds produce good sprouts. (68)"

"People think that silence is simply not uttering any sound, but true power comes when the whole being is overwhelmed by silence and an energy is generated that permits communion with the Higher World. We know these hours of surging energy, and can affirm that this kind of silence is the highest tension. (89)"

"True inner peace can be likened to Nirvana, in which all the energies are so intensified that they are unified in their ascent... People should strive for inner peace while participating in life... We must remind those who are lost to inaction that by their way of life they may create an illusion of peace, but their spirit will not be strengthened, nor will it succeed."

"I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that."

"Although photosynthesis typically has an energy conversion efficiency below three percent, it is, together with heat from the sun, the main energy source of all living organisms, and the energy source from which biomass and fossil fuels are derived. Each year the earth receives an energy input from the sun equal to 15,000 times the world's commercial energy consumption and 100 times the world's proven coal, gas and oil reserves."

"There is one forecast of which you can already be sure: someday renewable energy will be the only way for people to satisfy their energy needs. Because of the physical, ecological and (therefore) social limits to nuclear and fossil energy use, ultimately nobody will be able to circumvent renewable energy as the solution, even if it turns out to be everybody’s last remaining choice. The question keeping everyone in suspense, however, is whether we shall succeed in making this radical change of energy platforms happen early enough to spare the world irreversible ecological mutilation and political and economic catastrophe."

"[The] solar-energy firm known as Solyndra, which the [[w:United_States_Department_of_Energy|[US] Energy Department]] had backed with a $535 million loan guarantee [made the] unexpected announcement last week that it is filing for bankruptcy, leaving hundreds of workers jobless - and taxpayers on the hook for almost all of its government-backed loan. . . . [I]t’s not too early to draw some policy lessons from Solyndra’s ignominious downfall. . . . [G]overnment is no better than the private sector at picking industrial winners - and usually worse. . . . To the extent that government creates jobs by subsidizing particular companies, it does so by shifting resources that might have created jobs elsewhere. Political favoritism, or the appearance thereof, is an inherent risk . . . . When "green jobs" promises don’t pan out, it does the environmental cause more harm than good."

"More solar energy falls on Earth in one hour than all the energy our civilization consumes in an entire year. If we could harness a tiny fraction of the available solar and wind power, we could supply all our energy needs forever, and without adding any carbon to the atmosphere."

"Renewable energy: dumbest phrase since climate change. See the first law of thermodynamics, dumbass."

"Every percentage point increase in homegrown renewable energy makes us that much more energy secure. The progress in electricity is encouraging, but growth is not yet strong enough in renewable heat and transport to meet the government's objectives."

"One of the real breakthroughs is when someone figures out long-term storage capacity."

"The only way you can get to the very positive scenario is by great innovation. Innovation really does bend the curve."

"If you told me that innovation had been frozen and we just have today's technologies, will the world run the climate change experiment? You bet we will. We will not deny India coal plants; we will run the scary experiment of heating up the atmosphere and seeing what happens. The only reason I'm optimistic about this problem is because of innovation. . . . I want to tilt the odds in our favor by driving innovation at an unnaturally high pace, or more than its current business-as-usual course. I see that as the only thing. I want to call up India someday and say, "Here's a source of energy that is cheaper than your coal plants, and by the way, from a global pollution and local pollution point of view, it's also better.""

"Cheaper coal and cheaper gas will not derail the transformation and decarbonisation of the world’s power systems. By 2040, zero-emission energy sources will make up 60% of installed capacity."

"We have long supported a carbon tax as the best policy of those being considered. Replacing the hodge-podge of current, largely ineffective regulations with a revenue-neutral carbon tax would ensure a uniform and predictable cost of carbon across the economy. It would allow market forces to drive solutions. It would maximize transparency, reduce administrative complexity, promote global participation and easily adjust to future developments in our understanding of climate science as well as the policy consequences of these actions."

"Rather than an eyesore on the roof, it becomes actually a feature of the home. People are going to start wanting to put {building-integrated photovoltaics} on the front side of their home to show that they have solar."

"[W]ind and solar power have been rapidly winning market acceptance. Last year, the installed capacity of solar power in the United States nearly doubled. And wind is now being harnessed to produce 5.5 percent of America’s electricity, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration."

"The transition to renewable energy can be greatly accelerated if the world’s governments finally bring the engineers to the fore... I was recently on a panel with three economists and a senior business-sector engineer. After the economists spoke... the engineer spoke succinctly and wisely. “I don’t really understand what you economists were just speaking about, but I do have a suggestion... Tell us engineers the desired ‘specs’ and the timeline, and we’ll get the job done.” This is not bravado.... The next big act belongs to the engineers. Energy transformation for climate safety is our twenty-first-century moonshot."

"A carbon tax offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary. By correcting a well-known market failure, a carbon tax will send a powerful price signal that harnesses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future. . . . A consistently rising carbon price will encourage technological innovation and large-scale infrastructure development."

"Offshore wind's remarkable potential: The global offshore wind market grew nearly 30% per year between 2010 and 2018, benefitting from rapid technology improvements and about 150 new offshore wind projects . . . in active development around the world. . . . Yet today's offshore wind market doesn't even come close to tapping the full potential - with high-quality resources available in most major markets, offshore wind has the potential to generate more than 420,000 [terawatt-hours] per year worldwide. This is more than 18 times global electricity demand today."

"Offshore wind is in a category of its own, as the only variable baseload power generation technology. . . . Offshore wind output . . . hourly variability is lower than that of solar [photovoltaics]. Offshore wind typically fluctuates within a narrower band, up to 20% from hour-to-hour, than is the case for solar [photovoltaics], up to 40% from hour-to-hour."

"The clean energy portfolios of some of the largest corporate buyers rival those of the world’s biggest utilities. These companies are facing mounting pressure from investors to decarbonize - clean energy contracts serve as a way to diversify energy spend and reduce susceptibility to the tangible risks associated with climate change."

"[N]ew renewable power generation projects now increasingly undercut existing coal-fired plants. On average, new solar photovoltaic (PV) and onshore wind power cost less than keeping many existing coal plants in operation, and auction results show this trend accelerating – reinforcing the case to phase-out coal entirely."

"I think it’s clear now that energy has to be clean. . . . And we should do it in ways that give jobs to everybody. . . . There’s so much to do in renewable power, there is so little to do in coal."

"An old proverb states: When the winds of change blow, some build walls . . . others build windmills. So, fellow windmill builders: Let’s push back on doubt and fear. Climate disasters worldwide tell us that the scariest thing we could do is nothing at all. . . . [W]e’ll all gain when we succeed - starting with jobs! We’re looking at a $23 trillion global market in the clean energy transition by 2030. . . . That means we can remake our economies, build new businesses, and put millions upon millions of people to work. . . . For too long, the climate conversation has been viewed as a zero-sum game. One of trade-offs: the climate or the economy. No longer."

"There are two practical ways to create the magic conditions that make fusion happen. One is called magnetic confinement fusion and the other is inertial confinement fusion. There’s gravity too, of course, but for that you need scales bigger than can be created on Earth: you need, quite literally, a star. The magnetic approach is to bind the hot matter in a reactor with an invisible web of magnetic fields. The inertial approach sets matter crashing into itself, thereby both heating and compressing it, and aims to get all the fusion done before the assembled star matter falls apart again. NIF {the National Ignition Facility} uses lasers to do this."

"There’s one aspect of the current fleet of magnetic fusion machines that is holding back progress. It’s a lesson that has been learned time and time again in fusion: . . . fusion works best on big scales. For conventional tokamaks, the confinement of plasma gets better the bigger the machine is. . . . When it is completed, ITER will be the world’s largest tokamak, and one of its key objectives will be to demonstrate net energy gain. It’s a behemoth. . . . ITER will take up 180 hectares (equivalent to 250 soccer fields), and when finished, its structure will have a mass equivalent to three Eiffel Towers."

"Future Outlook: Global offshore wind energy deployment is expected to accelerate in the future, with forecasts from 4C Offshore and Bloomberg New Energy Finance indicating a sevenfold increase in global cumulative offshore wind capacity - to 215 [gigawatts] or more by 2030 (BNEF 2020; 4C Offshore 2021). As part of that predicted surge, the U.S. offshore wind energy market continues to expand, primarily driven by increasing state-level procurement targets in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, an increased number of projects clearing major permitting milestones, as well as growing vessel, port, and infrastructure investments needed to keep pace with development."

"Solving climate change should taste at least as good as carrots, at best ice cream, but it should not be painful. . . . How do we ensure the lowest cost of energy while electrifying everything? First, policymakers have to rewrite the federal, state and local rules and regulations that were created for the fossil-fueled world and which prevent the US from having the cheapest electricity ever. Our country needs to massively scale up the industrial production of technological solutions, just as we did to win World War II. We cannot take our foot off the innovation gas - although I'll argue that we don't need any major breakthroughs, as thousands of little inventions and cost reductions are the key to achieving our end goal. Finally, we must have cheap financing for our transition to a zero-carbon energy system with low-interest "climate loans." Climate change will not be solved if only the richest 10% can afford it; we need mechanisms to bring everyone along for the ride."

"In 2006, I hosted a dinner after a screening of An Inconvenient Truth, former vice president Al Gore's seminal documentary on the climate crisis. We went around the table for everyone's reaction to the film's urgent message. When it came to my fifteen-year-old daughter, Mary, she declared with her typical candor: "I'm scared, and I'm angry." Then she added, "Dad, your generation created this problem. You better fix it." . . . As a venture capitalist, my job is to find big opportunities, target big challenges, and invest in big solutions. I was best known for backing companies like Google and Amazon early on. But the environmental crisis dwarfed any challenge I'd ever seen. . . . Eugene Kleiner, the late cofounder of Kleiner Perkins . . . left behind a set of twelve laws that [included the following:] There is a time when panic is the appropriate response. That time had come. . . . My partners and I made climate a top priority. We got serious about investing in clean and sustainable technologies . . . . Our climate investments were [slow] out of the gate, and many of them failed. . . . But with patience and persistence [by 2019] our surviving cleantech investments began to hit one home run after the next. [However, we currently] have no time for a victory lap. . . . Atmospheric carbon already exceeds the upper limit for climate stability. . . . The effects of runaway global warming are already plain to see: devastating hurricanes, biblical flooding, uncontrollable wildfires, killer heat waves, and extreme droughts. . . . I must warn you up front: we're not cutting emissions fast enough to outrun the damage on our doorstep. I said this in 2007, and I say it again today: what we're doing is not nearly enough. Unless we course correct with urgent speed and at a massive scale, we'll be staring at a doomsday scenario. The melting polar ice caps will drown coastal cities. Failed crops will lead to widespread famine. By midcentury, a billion souls worldwide could be climate refugees. . . . Fortunately, we have a powerful ally in this fight: innovation. Over the past fifteen years, prices for solar and wind power have plunged 90 percent. . . . Batteries are expanding the range of electrified vehicles at an ever lower cost. Greater energy efficiency has sharply reduced greenhouse gas emissions. . . . While a good many solutions are in hand, their deployment is nowhere near where it needs to be. We'll need massive investment and robust policy to make these innovations more affordable. We need to scale the ones we have - immediately - and invent the ones we still need. In short, we need both the now and the new."

"What do we need to build to fight global warming? . . . The answer is actually quite simple and requires no miracle technology: we must electrify everything, fast. That means not just the supply-side sources of energy; we’ve got to electrify everything on the demand-side - the things we use in our households and small businesses every day, including cars, furnaces, stoves, water heaters, and dryers. I’m optimistic because over the last two decades {we've made} advances and cost reductions in electric vehicles, solar cells, batteries, heat pumps, and induction cooking . . . . People who are relying on governments to solve this problem don’t understand the power they have in their own hands and homes to fight global warming. . . . One astounding thing happens when we electrify everything: we would need only one-half of the primary energy that currently powers the economy. . . . The electrification of things you do for climate is good for your health. The air in our homes will be cleaner, our cars zippier and community air quality better, our appliances faster and more high-tech, like smartphones compared to rotary phones. The electrified future can be awesome."

"When it comes to climate change, I know innovation isn’t the only thing we need. But we cannot keep the earth livable without it. Techno-fixes are not sufficient, but they are necessary."

"[W]e’re going to need much more clean electricity in the coming years. Most experts agree that as we electrify other carbon-intensive processes like making steel and running cars, the world’s electricity supply will need to double or even triple by 2050. And that doesn’t even account for population growth, or the fact that people will get richer and use more electricity. So the world will need much more than three times the electricity we generate now."

"Deploying today’s renewables and improving transmission couldn’t be more important. . . . Unless we use large amounts of nuclear energy . . . every path to zero {net emissions} in the United States will require us to install as much wind and solar power as we can build and find room for. It’s hard to say exactly how much of America’s electricity will come from renewables in the end, but what we do know is that between now and 2050 we have to build them much faster - on the order of 5 to 10 times faster - than we’re doing right now. And remember that most countries aren’t as lucky as the United States when it comes to solar and wind resources. The fact that we can hope to generate a large percentage of our power from renewables is the exception rather than the rule. That’s why, even as we deploy, deploy, deploy solar and wind, the world is going to need some new clean electricity inventions too."

"[I]t's . . . possible that some innovation will come along and make [other energy storage] ideas obsolete, the way the personal computer came along and more or less made the typewriter unnecessary. Cheap hydrogen could do that for storing electricity. . . . We could use electricity from a solar or wind farm to create hydrogen, store the hydrogen as a compressed gas or in another form, and then put it in a fuel cell to generate electricity on demand. [This] would solve the location problem; . . . although you can't ship sunlight in a railcar, you can turn it into fuel first and then ship it any way you like."

"Over the past decade, installed wind capacity has grown by an average of 20 percent a year, and wind turbines now provide about 5 percent of the world's electricity. Wind is growing for one simple reason: It's getting cheaper."

"[W]e [must] make this COP 26 in Glasgow the moment when we get real about climate change, and we can. We can get real on coal, cars, cash and trees. . . . But we cannot and will not succeed by government spending alone. . . . [T]he task now is to work together to help our friends to decarbonise using . . . the funds we have in development assistance and working with all the multilateral development banks so that in the key countries that need to make progress, we can jointly identify the projects that we can help to de-risk so that the private sector money can come in . . . . [Let us] in the next days devote ourselves to this extraordinary task. So that we not only continue with . . . a green industrial revolution, that is already creating millions of high wage, high skill jobs in power and technology, taking our economies forward. Let us also do enough to save our planet and our way of life."

"Climate change and biodiversity loss . . . pose an even greater existential threat [than the COVID-19 pandemic], to the extent that we have to put ourselves on what might be called a war-like footing. . . . Putting a value on carbon . . . [is] absolutely critical. . . . [W]e need a vast military style campaign to marshall the strength of the global private sector[, which has] trillions at its disposal . . . . [E]ach sector needs a clear strategy to speed up the process of getting innovations to market [and we] need to align private investment behind these industry strategies. . . . If we can develop a pipeline of many more sustainable and "bankable" projects, at a sufficient scale, it will attract greater investment. . . . CEOs and institutional investors have told me that alongside the promises countries have made, their nationally determined contributions, they need clear market signals, agreed globally, so that they have the confidence to invest without the goal posts suddenly moving. . . . [[w:Charles, Prince of Wales#Natural environment|[W]e are working]] to drive trillions of dollars in support of transition across ten of the most emitting and polluting industries [including] energy, agriculture, transportation, health systems and fashion. . . . I can only urge you, as the world’s decision-makers, to find practical ways of overcoming differences so we can all . . . rescue this precious planet and save the threatened future of our young people."

"Climate change is already . . . costing our nations trillions of dollars [and] we know that none of us can escape the worst that’s yet to come if we fail to seize this moment. . . . But . . . within the growing catastrophe, I believe there’s an incredible opportunity . . . . We have the ability to invest in ourselves and build an equitable clean-energy future and in the process create millions of good-paying jobs [while we] create an environment that raises the standard of living around the world. . . . When I talk to the American people about climate change, I tell them it’s about jobs. It’s about workers [and the] communities that will revitalize themselves around new industries and opportunities. . . . So, let’s get to work."

"We are aware that the industrialised countries have a particular responsibility. . . . The financing is essential if the industrialised countries are to maintain their credibility. . . . Ladies and gentlemen, with government activities alone we will not make progress. For this requires radical transformation of how we live, work and conduct business. I therefore want to take this opportunity to make a very clear appeal for pricing for CO2 emissions. With this form of pricing, which we already have in the European Union, which is to be introduced in China and which needs to be developed together with many others throughout the world, we could get our industries and businesses to find the technologically most effective and efficient ways to achieve climate neutrality. We need to work out how we can best integrate CO2-free mobility, CO2-free industry and CO2-free processes into our lives. My clear call in the Decade of Action, in the decade in which we now live, is for us to become more ambitious at a national level and at the same time to find global instruments that not only make use of taxpayers’ money but are also economically viable. And for me, the answer is CO2 pricing."

"In the midst of this global brainstorming on climate change, on behalf of India, I would like to present five [commitments] to deal with this challenge. First - India will take its non-fossil energy capacity to 500 gigawatts by 2030. Second - India will meet 50 percent of its energy requirements from renewable energy by 2030. . . . And fifth - by the year 2070, India will achieve the target of Net Zero. . . . Today, when India has resolved to move forward with a new commitment and a new energy, the transfer of climate finance and low cost climate technologies have become more important. . . . India also understands the suffering of all other developing countries, shares them, and will continue to express their expectations."

"India is pioneering a new model of economic development that could avoid the carbon-intensive approaches that many countries have pursued in the past - and provide a blueprint for other developing economies. . . . {India's} economic growth has been among the highest in the world over the past two decades {as coal} and oil have so far served as bedrocks of India’s industrial growth and modernisation . . . . India’s annual CO2 emissions have risen to become the third highest in the world {but} India’s CO2 emissions per person put it near the bottom of the world’s emitters . . . India’s sheer size and its huge scope for growth means that its energy demand is set to grow by more than that of any other country in the coming decades. . . . {T}he good news is that the clean energy transition in India is already well underway. . . . Subsidies for petrol and diesel were removed in the early 2010s, and subsidies for electric vehicles were introduced in 2019. . . . {The country is} laying the groundwork to scale up important emerging technologies such as hydrogen, battery storage, and low-carbon steel, cement and fertilisers. . . . A transition to clean energy is a huge economic opportunity {but support} from the international community is essential to help shift India’s development onto a low-carbon path {and} access of low cost long term capital is key to achieve net zero. . . . India aims to become a global hub for green hydrogen production and exports. . . . As a large developing economy with over 1.3 billion people, India’s climate adaptation and mitigation ambitions are not just transformational for India but for the entire planet."

"[T]he solution has to be real economy government regulations to ban or to make higher [the] cost of the brown and polluting industries. That said, there are parts of finance which are longer-term and [evaluate] climate risks . . . and these are asset owners, the pension funds, the wealth funds and the insurance companies who are not so transactional [and] they’re not [as] interested in a deal to be done today. And they are in fact often mandated by their governments to take into account climate risk. So, I think those players will step up in this instance [turmoil in energy markets following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine] and [now who might be] investing for [an electricity generation project with a] 10-year horizon which you have to do with gas they will [say], "Let’s do it with renewables." And we’ve seen movements like that in the UK, where they’re pivoting towards onshore wind, which before the invasion was politically unviable because of the NIMBY factor. . . . [T]he pension funds and the actual asset owners . . . have a longer term of perspective. And they are actually driving the issue to their commercial managers who have to service them and they’re saying, "Look, we want you to act on climate change," and that's a huge driver."

"[A]s an atmospheric scientist and environmental engineer, I focus most on technologies — that’s what we think about most of what we need to be able to clean up electricity, what we need for cleaner cars. But those aren’t going to make it to market and those aren’t going to help cool the climate unless there are policies that get those to be deployed domestically. And what we do domestically isn’t enough because we’re only 1/7th of the world’s emissions, so we need diplomacy to take what we do here in the U.S. and make sure that that starts being applied in other parts of the world as well. . . . [A]s I was looking at the diplomacy [I noticed that what] the United States really gets right is being reciprocal . . . when we do something, we usually insist that our trading partners go along as well. You even hear in Congress talk about if we ever did have a carbon tax, being sure it got applied as tariffs on goods that got brought in."

"Solar has plunged by 90% in cost. Wind has plunged by 80% just in the past 11 or 12 years. . . . Things like wind and solar power really can already out-compete dirtier forms of electricity, and we just need to build more of them quickly; we’re not adding them fast enough. There are other technologies where we really need a big breakthrough. We don’t yet have affordable enough heat pumps. We don’t yet have a next generation nuclear technology that’s cheap enough, if we ever will. Geothermal is really at the cusp of becoming something that I think could really take off. What I also see, though, is that what carries those cutting-edge technologies to the cheaper cost can’t just happen in the lab. We need policies that pull those into the market, that get them adopted more — because if we can adopt them while they’re at that edge; while they’re not quite cheap enough, that can drive the economies of scale; that can drive what technologists call learning by doing."

"The ability to use renewables for the lion’s share of a grid’s supply, coupled with the fact that renewables have been made cheap and are getting yet cheaper, is the basis of a decarbonisation strategy all but universally accepted by those determined to stabilise the climate. Make the power on electric grids emissions-free, cheap and copious. Start electrifying all processes that now require fossil fuels - such as powering cars, or heating homes and steel foundries - where electrification is clearly possible. It does not deliver everything that is needed. But it delivers a lot."

"Even if you're a climate denier, you should be on board with what we're advocating. . . . Our central conclusion is that we should go full speed ahead with the green energy transition because it's going to save us money."

"[[w:Energy storage#Chemical|[Storing energy using] hydrogen]] . . . is getting a lot of play now. You could burn hydrogen in a gas turbine to produce electricity. You could use hydrogen in fuel cells that produce electricity without combustion; still a chemical reaction. Or you could simply use hydrogen to create ammonia, NH3, which is another liquid, as opposed to gaseous, chemical storage medium. . . . [E]xperts say that we could probably convert the grid 80% to renewable - that's wind and solar - without having to deal with [the] long-duration storage problem. We'd still use gas peaker plants for . . . 20% of the electricity that we need. If you want to do the other 20%, you're going to have to solve that problem of . . . long-term storage for the grid, days in a row. And you could do that with gravity storage. You could do that with a chemical energy carrier. It's done with methane now. So we've got to get rid of the methane. But you could have hydrogen or ammonia or another chemical energy medium which is yet to be discovered. That's the challenge. We can get to 80%, but we can't get to 100%."

"The global energy crisis is driving a sharp acceleration in installations of renewable power, with total capacity growth worldwide set to almost double in the next five years, overtaking coal as the largest source of electricity generation along the way and helping keep alive the possibility of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C . . . . Global renewable power capacity is now expected to grow by 2,400 gigawatts (GW) over the 2022-2027 period, an amount equal to the entire power capacity of China today, according to Renewables 2022, the latest edition of the IEA {International Energy Agency}’s annual report on the sector. . . . The amount of renewable power capacity added in Europe in the 2022-27 period is forecast to be twice as high as in the previous five-year period, driven by a combination of energy security concerns and climate ambitions. . . . Beyond Europe, the upward revision in renewable power growth for the next five years is also driven by China, the United States and India, which are all implementing policies and introducing regulatory and market reforms more quickly than previously planned to combat the energy crisis. . . . China is expected to account for almost half of new global renewable power capacity additions over the 2022-2027 period. Meanwhile, the US Inflation Reduction Act has provided new support and long-term visibility for the expansion of renewables in the United States. . . . Utility-scale solar PV [photovoltaics] and onshore wind are the cheapest options for new electricity generation in a significant majority of countries worldwide. Global solar PV capacity is set to almost triple over the 2022-2027 period, surpassing coal and becoming the largest source of power capacity in the world. The report also forecasts an acceleration of installations of solar panels on residential and commercial rooftops . . . . Global wind capacity almost doubles in the forecast period, with offshore projects accounting for one-fifth of the growth. Together, wind and solar will account for over 90% of the renewable power capacity that is added over the next five years. . . . While China remains the dominant player [in photovoltaic supply chains], its share in global manufacturing capacity could decrease from 90% today to 75% by 2027. . . . Total global biofuel demand is set to expand by 22% over the 2022-2027 period. . . . In advanced economies . . . faster growth [in renewable power capacity] would require various regulatory and permitting challenges to be tackled and a more rapid penetration of renewable electricity in the heating and transport sectors. In emerging and developing economies, [faster growth] would mean addressing policy and regulatory uncertainties, weak grid infrastructure and a lack of access to affordable financing that are hampering new projects. . . . Worldwide, the accelerated case requires efforts to resolve supply chain issues, expand grids and deploy more flexibility resources to securely manage larger shares of variable renewables. The accelerated case’s faster renewables growth would move the world closer to a pathway consistent with reaching net zero emissions by 2050, which offers an even chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C."

"We have taken the first tentative steps towards a clean energy source that could revolutionize the world."

"Offshore wind turbines reach even higher and wider than land-based ones. Though twice as expensive as land-based wind, their costs are falling fast. That’s making offshore wind increasingly attractive in coastal regions of Europe and the northeastern United States, where population density is high, land is scarce, and winds over the ocean far outpace those over land."

"[W]e’ll never build enough batteries to back up the grid. Batteries are costly to build and costly to operate, since energy is dissipated each time they are charged and discharged. Transmission moves power more efficiently. Complementary resources smooth out supply. Demand flexibility narrows gaps and surpluses between supply and demand. The more robustly we deploy complementary resources, transmission, and flexibility, the less storage we will need to build and the less often we will have to deploy it, reducing the overall costs of electricity."

"[[w:Hydrogen economy|[H]ydrogen has many potential uses]], including electricity storage, trucking, chemical production, and industrial heat - which means options for producing and distributing hydrogen deserve a closer look. "Hydrogen is hard to make, hard to move, and hard to store, but once you’ve got it, it is a brilliant ingredient," [[w:Michael Webber|[Professor Michael] Webber]] told me."

"The [provisions of the proposed Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, including] expansion of the wind and solar credits, the exciting expansion, or creation, of additional credits in green hydrogen, the inclusion of hydrogen cars in electric car credits, the extension of the electric car credits - all those things are good [but they're] not enough. The question now is, what do we do next?"

"The Inflation Reduction Act calls for spending less than $500 billion over a decade, compared with the American Rescue Plan’s $1.9 trillion in a single year . . . . But if the spending isn’t very large, how can it have such a big impact? The answer is that right now we’re sitting on a sort of cusp. Renewable energy technology has made revolutionary progress, and renewables are already cheaper in many areas than fossil fuels. A moderate push from public policy is all that it will take to transition to a much greener economy. And the Inflation Reduction Act will provide that push."

"[The Inflation Reduction Act] . . . doesn’t solve the climate challenge. This is the beginning . . . and the implementation is going to be everything. This is . . . like a starting gun for a race that's going to . . . hopefully define the coming decade of building something better."

"I’m about to sign the Inflation Reduction Act into law . . . . The [climate component of this legislation] invests $369 billion to take the most aggressive action ever . . . in confronting the climate crisis and strengthening . . . our energy security."

"{The US Inflation Reduction Act of 2022} is really good for a developing economy like Indonesia due to spillover effects because of lower costs {for technologies that help mitigate climate change}."

"[T]he analogy [regarding the three recent US climate laws] we’ve been thinking about is the backbone, the brain, and the lungs. So, the backbone being the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law {November 2021} . . . . That law [includes] investment in US infrastructure [such as] roads and bridges, but including significant energy infrastructure. Then there's the brain, the CHIPS and Science Act {August 2022}, and chips being the semiconductors that are in {electric vehicles, energy infrastructure, etc.} . . . and the science part authorizes additional investments from Congress in science {related to grid upgrades, zero emissions research, etc. by the} National Science Foundation and DOE {Department of Energy}. And then the third piece is the lungs. So, [taking a deep breath] breathing into that clean energy economy, the Inflation Reduction Act {August 2022} incentivizes deployment of clean technologies and really focuses on lowering costs for American families."

"Great, that is fantastic . . . . We want to be able to see energy - clean energy - produced in every pocket of the country. Blue states, red states, really it helps to save people money, so it’s all about green."

"[[w:Climate change policy of the United States#Federal policy|[I]f you think about how many times [US] politicians have tried and failed to pass climate legislation]], it's really notable that the Inflation Reduction Act went through. So in the past, basically legislators tried to have sticks: . . . there would be a cap and trade bill; people had debated a carbon tax. The Inflation Reduction Act includes no sticks, it's only carrots. . . . [T]his law is kind of a complicated way to try to go about decarbonizing America, but it proved to be the only politically viable option that American politicians had yet come up with. And so, I think, on those terms, it's absolutely a victory . . . for those who were trying to advance some kind of climate legislation through Washington."

"Climate security goes hand in hand with energy security. Putin’s abhorrent war in Ukraine and rising energy prices across the world are not a reason to go slow on climate change. They are a reason to act faster. Because diversifying our energy supplies by investing in renewables is precisely the way to insure ourselves against the risks of energy dependency. It is also a fantastic source of new jobs and growth."

"[COP27] ended on Sunday morning with researchers largely frustrated at the lack of any ambition to phase out fossil fuels. However, there was one silver lining: delegates from low and middle income countries (LMICs) came away with an agreement on a new 'loss and damage' fund to help them cover the costs of climate-change impacts. . . . Many blamed the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for a lack of progress on fossil fuels."

"[T]he change we need is to put innovation at the heart of everything we do. . . . [M]ajor challenges like energy security and net zero will be solved by innovation. The more we innovate, the more we grow."

"India has to do it for itself. . . . And India needs to do it for the world."

"Last year was a double milestone for decarbonizing the world’s energy system. It was the first year when investment in the energy transition equaled global investment in fossil fuels . . . . [And] 2022 was . . . the first year when investment in decarbonizing energy surpassed $1 trillion. The year-on-year increase of more than $250 billion from 2021 was the largest jump yet."

"[T]he process for the permitting of renewable energy generation and electric transmission projects in the United States is multi-layered and often extremely long. If the U.S. is to achieve its climate ambitions and fully implement transformative legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, Congress will also have to enable a massively accelerated build-out of clean energy infrastructure. At the same time, valuable environmental safeguards, and the established public participatory and related administrative processes used to adopt and implement them, cannot simply be sidestepped. Congress should approach federal permitting reform in a way that maximizes efficiency in government decisionmaking through shorter timelines for regulatory approvals without sacrificing the value of the current process in protecting the environment and local stakeholders. Further, it is essential that reforms are evidence-based in targeting the major sources of current delays."

"Because Australia has {aggressively incentivized adoption of} rooftop solar, the economics are extraordinary. . . . So if we use our cheap sunshine to drive our cars and heat our homes, we're going to save money sooner."

"In the last several months all the key associations looked across the table and realised we were arguing for the same thing. . . . This is Big Wind and Big Solar coming to the table and saying we want to get things done. . . . It will not be possible to achieve anything close to a climate solution with the current {permitting} system in place."

"{H}ydrogen is seen as a way to substitute large amounts of energy that we’re buying now at extremely high costs from countries that we shouldn’t buy this from."

"And it's just the beginning. You know, we also protected the most significant breakthrough ever—ever—in dealing with the existential threat of climate change. Today, new wind and solar power is cheaper than fossil fuel. Since I've been in office, clean energy and advanced manufacturing have brought in $470 billion in private investments. That's going to create thousands of jobs—good-paying jobs—all across this country and help the environment at the same time. And remember, at the beginning of this debate, some of my Republican colleagues were determined to gut the clean energy investments. And I said no, and we kept them all."

"We have a tremendous sense of pride in our history . . . But we also understand that energy is energy, whether it is generated by wind, steam or whatever it might be."

"Solar energy is the most widely available energy resource on Earth, and its economic attractiveness is improving fast in a cycle of increasing investments. . . . [D]ue to technological trajectories set in motion by past policy, a global irreversible solar tipping point may have passed where solar energy gradually comes to dominate global electricity markets, without any further climate policies. Uncertainties arise, however, over grid stability in a renewables-dominated power system, the availability of sufficient finance in underdeveloped economies, the capacity of supply chains and political resistance from regions that lose employment."

"{T}he challenges are great but we have the conviction that by working together - the {European} Commission, the ITER Organization and F4E {Fusion for Energy} - we can overcome them and slowly but steadily bring the ITER project back on its rails."

"Electricity generation. We expect that the 23 gigawatts (GW) in 2023 and 37 GW in 2024 of new solar capacity scheduled to come online will help U.S. solar generation grow by 15% in 2023 and by 39% in 2024. We expect solar and wind generation together in 2024 to overtake electric power generation from coal for the first year ever, exceeding coal by nearly 90 billion kilowatthours."

"We're not interested in a pilot [climate project] just for experimentation. . . . We're interested in proving that they work and that then we can scale them. . . . Utilities [can't afford to] move fast and break things [but they] can be great mechanisms for scaling up innovation."

"I think [it’s] to be determined {whether the post-pandemic, low-interest-rate-fueled investment spike which flowed to non-governmental fusion companies will actually result in commercially viable fusion power}. . . . When interest rates were low, people were willing to make long-term bets. [However, the] level of investment was substantial, and it should yield technological progress."

"If the world is to decarbonise, then more clean energy is needed, fast. [To meet current UNFCCC pledges, countries must] raise global renewable-energy capacity to 11,000 gigawatts (GW) by 2030. [However, supply chain problems and rising interest rates cloud the industry's future. Another obstacle is slow permitting] approval, which delays projects for years and can needlessly tie up capital, lowering returns. [And,] too little development is happening in the global south [because investors require a premium when venturing money in emerging markets]. A last obstacle is protectionism, which raises costs and threatens shortages. . . . Rather than micromanaging production, governments should unleash investment, by acting boldly to strip back permitting rules and ease the risk of projects in the global south [which can come from blending in government money in southern projects that assumes some risk]. They also need to face up to the fact that protectionism frustrates their climate goals. It leads to lower returns, higher prices for power and more broken promises over decarbonisation."

"[D]ata from the World Meteorological Agency show that, as the U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres, told the {COP28} global climate talks in Dubai last week, we can safely say, even with weeks to go, that 2023 will take the title {as the world's hottest year on record}. . . . And yet . . . [a]lmost simultaneous with the breakout in temperature, there was a breakout in the installation of renewable energy, especially solar power, around the world. . . . {T}he cost of clean energy has dropped so far that it is now possible that saving the planet might be a corollary of saving cash. This ongoing drop in price is more than a decade old, but sometime in the past few years it crossed an invisible line, making it cheaper than hydrocarbons, and this was the year when that reality finally translated into dramatic action on the ground. . . . There are plenty of other technologies we’re [currently] spending money on, including small nuclear reactors and giant carbon-sucking machines, that may or may not someday play a role in the climate fight, but, for all the furor they produce, they seem unlikely to make much difference anytime soon. In the next few years, while the planet’s climate system teeters on the edge of breaking, it’s sun, wind, and batteries that matter. They’re cheap, and they’re ready."

"{In 2023 it was the clean economy expansion efforts of} China that blew everyone away. In what may be the single biggest sustainability headline of the year, China’s national oil company, Sinopec, said the country had reached peak gasoline demand (in part by radically increasing sales of EVs). Some analysts believe China may have peaked in total carbon emissions already. The country was on track to add 150 gigawatts of solar this year (versus adding 87 gigawatts in 2022), more than the total capacity in the U.S. And in a rare positive moment in U.S.-China relations, the countries agreed to ramp up renewables. If all the estimates are true, it’s a monumental and fundamental shift in global energy and transportation systems . . . . On the other hand . . . As critics point out, China is permitting more coal plants, but this can get misconstrued. (People say to me that China is building two plants per week when, in reality, many don’t get built.) The new plants are much cleaner, it’s generally backup power, and China is also cancelling and shelving plants rapidly as well."

"It is often heard . . . that efforts to mitigate climate change by reducing the use of fossil fuels and developing cleaner energy sources will lead to a reduction in the number of jobs. What is happening is that millions of people are losing their jobs due to different effects of climate change: rising sea levels, droughts and other phenomena affecting the planet have left many people adrift. Conversely, the transition to renewable forms of energy, properly managed, as well as efforts to adapt to the damage caused by climate change, are capable of generating countless jobs in different sectors. This demands that politicians and business leaders should even now be concerning themselves with it."

"We are edging ever-closer to a fusion-powered reality. And at the same time, yes, significant scientific and engineering challenges exist. . . . Careful thought and thoughtful policy is going to be critical to navigate this."

"{UNFCCC participant countries should transition} away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science[; they should also accelerate] efforts towards the phase-down of unabated coal power[; and triple] renewable energy capacity globally."

"{UNFCCC participant countries should accelerate} zero- and low-emission technologies, including, inter alia, renewables, nuclear, abatement and removal technologies such as carbon capture and utilization and storage."

"No, the Cop28 agreement will not enable the world to hold the 1.5C limit, but yes, the result is a pivotal landmark. This agreement delivers on making it clear to all financial institutions, businesses and societies that we are now finally – eight years behind the Paris schedule – at the true "beginning of the end" of the fossil fuel-driven world economy."

"Tripling {global renewable energy capacity} is a monumental change. . . . We don't have any structures that fit 100% with the new system that is coming."

"This is not a transition that will happen from one day to the other . . . . Whole economies and societies are dependent on fossil fuels. Fossil capital will not disappear just because we made a decision here. [But the COP28 final agreement sends] a strong political message that this is the pathway."

"China's status as the colossus of renewable energy is set to be cemented in the next five years, with the world's second-biggest economy adding more capacity than the rest of globe combined. The International Energy Agency said in its Renewables 2023 report . . . that China will account for 56% of renewable energy capacity additions in the 2023-28 period. . . . There is also a caveat to China's rapid build-out of renewable capacity because at the same time it is still adding substantial coal-fired generation. China is the world's biggest coal producer and importer and has more coal-fired capacity under construction than the rest of the world combined. China is building 136.24 GW of coal-fired generation, and has another 255.5 GW at the announced, pre-permit or permitted stage, according to data compiled by the Global Energy Monitor. . . . It's clear that renewables are increasing their share of China's power generation, but it's equally clear coal-fired power is going to be around for decades to come, and that if China does meet its goal of net-zero emissions by 2060, it will largely be achieved in the final years prior to the deadline."

"A virtual power plant is a system of distributed energy resources - like rooftop solar panels, electric vehicle chargers, and smart water heaters - that work together to balance energy supply and demand on a large scale. They are usually run by local utility companies who oversee this balancing act. . . . VPPs can . . . allow grid operators to control the demand from end users. For example, smart thermostats linked to air conditioning units can [stagger] cooling times [to] help prevent abrupt demand hikes that might overwhelm the grid and cause outages. Similarly, electric vehicle chargers can adapt to the grid’s requirements by either supplying or utilizing electricity. These distributed energy sources connect to the grid through communication technologies like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular services."

"[Batteries are] able to very effectively manage that evening ramp where solar is going down and customer demand is increasing. [Batteries also] made some differences last summer. We were able to meet high load days and wildfire days when we might lose some power lines."

"We have to be able to integrate all {the new} low-cost, renewable energy {flowing into the North American electrical grid} fast . . . . {With reconductoring, you’re} not acquiring a new right of way; you’re not building new towers. So it can be done much faster. . . . In the longer run, newer lines will play an important role{, but reconductoring is an inexpensive, quick way of keeping up with the increasing stresses placed on the electrical grid by changes in both supply and demand.}"

"Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. . . . The benefits [of cheaper energy] start with a boost to productivity. Anything that people use energy for today will cost less - and that includes pretty much everything. . . . Cheap energy can purify water, and even desalinate it. It can drive the hungry machinery of artificial intelligence. It can make billions of homes and offices more bearable in summers . . . . But [the] most consequential [result will be that] cheaper energy will free the imagination, setting [the] wheels of the mind spinning with excitement and new possibilities."

"Something approaching a miracle has been taking place in California this spring. Beginning in early March, for some portion of almost every day, a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower has been producing more than a hundred per cent of the state’s demand for electricity. Some afternoons, solar panels alone have produced more power than the state uses. And, at night, large utility-scale batteries that have been installed during the past few years are often the single largest source of supply to the grid—sending the excess power stored up during the afternoon back out to consumers across the state. It’s taken years of construction—and solid political leadership in Sacramento—to slowly build this wave, but all of a sudden it’s cresting into view. California has the fifth-largest economy in the world and, in the course of a few months, the state has proved that it’s possible to run a thriving modern economy on clean energy."

"Our nation has eight million jobs in clean energy! Can we double it, guys, before the sea levels rise And I'm roommates with a manatee?"

"As summer heat strikes, the US grid increasingly relies on a kind of invisible weapon - the "virtual power plant" - to prevent blackouts. . . . Energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie says the VPPs already deployed or under development in the US will be able to save as much juice as 33 nuclear reactors can produce. . . . The US Energy Department estimates that peak consumption will increase by as much as 200 gigawatts through 2030, and about 80% of that boost could be met through VPPs."

"The International Energy Agency (IEA) . . . reckons that the global installed capacity of battery storage will need to rise from less than 200 gigawatts (GW) last year to more than a terawatt (TW) by the end of the decade, and nearly 5TW by 2050 . . . . Fortunately, though, the business of storing energy on the grid is at last being turbocharged. . . . A plunge in the price of lithium batteries is fuelling their adoption on the grid. . . . Sodium-ion batteries are one promising alternative {and incumbents} are rushing to develop the technology for the grid."

"At this point the {Texas} legislature can’t do anything to stop the growth of solar and wind and batteries . . . . The state desperately needs it."

"With global electricity demand set to grow strongly, new technologies {like enhanced geothermal systems and closed-loop geothermal systems} are opening up the massive potential of geothermal energy to provide around-the-clock clean power in almost all countries around the world, according to a new IEA report. The report, The Future of Geothermal Energy, finds that geothermal energy could meet 15% of global electricity demand growth between now and 2050 if project costs continue to decline. This would mean . . . delivering annual output equivalent to the current electricity demand of the United States and India combined. . . . Importantly, geothermal energy can draw upon the expertise of today’s oil and gas industries by using existing drilling techniques and equipment to go deeper under the earth’s surface . . . . Conventional geothermal remains a location-specific, niche technology today with most of the installed capacity in countries that have either volcanic activity or straddle tectonic fault lines . . . . But new technologies are . . . opening up the potential to benefit from it in nearly all countries. . . . [T]he report finds that costs could fall by 80% by 2035 to around $50 per megawatt hour (MWh). This would make geothermal the cheapest source of dispatchable low-emissions electricity on a par with existing hydropower and nuclear installations. . . . If next-generation geothermal grows strongly in the coming years, employment in the overall geothermal sector could increase sixfold to 1 million jobs by 2030 . . . . Up to 80% of the investment required in geothermal involves capacity and skills that are transferrable from existing oil and gas operations. The oil and gas industry can also benefit {because next-generation geothermal can} serve as a hedge against commercial risks related to projected future declines in oil and gas demand. At a time when the digital economy and artificial intelligence applications are growing strongly {and with} next-generation geothermal offering a stable and essentially inexhaustible power source, large technology companies are already signing power purchase agreements with new projects."

"[1] 2023 saw a step change in renewable capacity additions, driven by China’s solar PV market. Global annual renewable capacity additions increased by almost 50% to nearly 510 gigawatts (GW) in 2023, the fastest growth rate in the past two decades. . . . [2] Achieving the COP28 target of tripling global renewable capacity by 2030 hinges on policy implementation. . . . [C]hallenges [that could prevent reaching the tripling goal] fall into four main categories and differ by country: 1) policy uncertainties and delayed policy responses to the new macroeconomic environment; 2) insufficient investment in grid infrastructure preventing faster expansion of renewables; 3) cumbersome administrative barriers and permitting procedures and social acceptance issues; 4) insufficient financing in emerging and developing economies. . . . [3] The global power mix will be transformed by 2028. . . . In 2028, renewable energy sources [are expected to] account for over 42% of global electricity generation, with the share of wind and solar PV doubling to 25%. . . . [4] China is the world’s renewables powerhouse. . . . China’s role is critical in reaching the global goal of tripling renewables because the country is expected to install more than half of the new capacity required globally by 2030. . . . [5] The US, the EU, India and Brazil remain bright spots for onshore wind and solar PV growth. . . . Supportive policy environments and the improving economic attractiveness of solar PV and onshore wind are the primary drivers behind this acceleration. . . . [6] Solar PV prices plummet amid growing supply glut. . . . Despite unprecedented PV manufacturing expansion in the United States and India driven by policy support, China is expected to maintain its 80‑95% share of global supply chains . . . . [7] Onshore wind and solar PV are cheaper than both new and existing fossil fuel plants. . . . Despite the increasing contribution needs for flexibility and reliability to integrate variable renewables, the overall competitiveness of onshore wind and solar PV changes only slightly by 2028 in Europe, China, India and the United States. . . . [8] The new macroeconomic environment presents further challenges that policy makers need to address. . . . Since 2022, central bank base interest rates have increased from below 1% to almost 5%. . . . The implications . . . are manifold . . . . [I]nflation has increased equipment costs . . . [H]igher interest rates are increasing the financing costs of capital-intensive variable renewable technologies. . . . [And] policy has been relatively slow to adjust to the new macroeconomic environment due in part to expectations that cost reductions would continue . . . . [9] The forecast for wind capacity additions is less optimistic outside China, especially for offshore. . . .The wind industry, especially in Europe and North America, is facing challenges due to a combination of ongoing supply chain disruptions, higher costs and long permitting timelines. . . . [10] Faster deployment of variable renewables increases integration and infrastructure challenges. . . . Although European Union interconnections help integrate solar PV and wind generation, grid bottlenecks will pose significant challenges and lead to increased curtailment in many countries as grid expansion cannot keep pace with accelerated installation of variable renewables. . . . [11] Current hydrogen plans and implementation don’t match. . . . We have revised down our forecasts for all regions except China. The main reason is the slow pace of bringing planned projects to final investment decisions due to a lack of off‑takers and the impact of higher prices on production costs. . . . [12] Biofuel deployment is accelerating and diversifying more into renewable diesel and biojet fuel. . . . Emerging economies, led by Brazil, dominate global biofuel expansion . . . . Biofuels remain the dominant pathway for avoiding oil demand in the diesel and jet fuel segments. EVs outpace biofuels in the gasoline segment, especially in the United States, Europe and China. . . . [13] Aligning biofuels with a net zero pathway requires a huge increase in the pace of deployment. . . . Much faster biofuel deployment is possible through new policies and addressing supply chain challenges. [14] Renewable heat accelerates amid high energy prices and policy momentum – but not enough to curb emissions. . . . [The renewable heat acceleration comes] predominantly from the growing reliance on electricity for process heat – notably with the adoption of heat pumps in non‑energy‑intensive industries – and the deployment of electric heat pumps and boilers in buildings, increasingly powered by renewable electricity."

"The world’s demand for electricity is rising at its fastest rate in years, driven by robust economic growth, intense heatwaves and increasing uptake of technologies that run on electricity such as EVs and heat pumps, according to a new report by the IEA. At the same time, renewables continue their rapid ascent, with solar PV on course to set new records. . . . Global electricity demand is forecast to grow by around 4% in 2024 and {will do so} into 2025, with growth around 4% again . . . . {The} share of global electricity supply {generated by renewables is} forecast to rise from 30% in 2023 to 35% in 2025. The amount of electricity generated by renewables worldwide in 2025 is forecast to eclipse the amount generated by coal for the first time. Solar PV alone is expected to meet roughly half of the growth in global electricity demand over 2024 and 2025 - with solar and wind combined meeting as much as three-quarters of the growth. Despite the sharp increases in renewables, global power generation from coal is unlikely to decline this year due to the strong growth in demand, especially in China and India . . . As a result, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the global power sector are plateauing, with a slight increase in 2024 followed by a decline in 2025. …Some of the world’s major economies are registering particularly strong increases in electricity consumption. Demand in India is expected to surge by a massive 8% this year . . . . China is also set to see significant demand growth of more than 6% . . . . After declining in 2023 amid mild weather, electricity demand in the United States is forecast to rebound this year by 3% . . . . By contrast, the European Union will see . . . growth forecast at 1.7% . . . . In many parts of the world, increasing use of air-conditioning will remain a significant driver of electricity demand. Multiple regions faced intense heatwaves . . . . With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), the electricity demand of data centres is drawing increased attention . . . ."

"{COP29 set} a new annual target for global climate finance {by} reaching a deal for $300 billion a year by 2035. {However,} many developing countries said {this} amount was far too low. They also warned that the deadline for a decade away in 2035 would hold back the world's transition to clean energy. . . . Though he has yet to take office, climate denier Donald Trump's . . . election meant the U.S. could offer little at {the conference. . . . Also, the parties} reached a deal to allow countries to begin establishing {carbon} credits to bring in funding and offset their emissions, or to trade them on a market exchange."

"The current level of climate finance ambition has broadly been preserved. There is no regression, which was a real risk given the current context. . . . While some have argued that no agreement would have been better than a bad one, I fail to see how waiting until next year — or even the year after — would have led to a more favorable outcome."

"And fire a mine in China, here With sympathetic gunpowder."

"Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound."

"Controlling fires is an enormously difficult challenge. Our research has shown that by applying large electric fields we can suppress flames very rapidly. We're very excited about the results of this relatively unexplored area of research."

"We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles."

"In 1881, Edison built electricity generating stations at Pearl Street in Manhattan and Holborn in London. Within a year, he was selling electricity as a commodity. A year later, the first electric motors were driving manufacturing machinery. Yet by 1900, less than 5% of mechanical drive power in American factories was coming from electric motors. The age of steam lingered."

"Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence: or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we dreamed it."

"Without electricity, there can be no art."

"Speed the soft intercourse from soul to soul, And waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole."

"I'll put a girdle round about the earth In forty minutes."

"Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be Ere one can say "It lightens.""

"At the beginning of the Great Depression, the vast majority of rural communities across the United States had little or no access to electricity. The cost of connecting to private electric lines was so prohibitive that many rural communities turned to organizing amongst themselves to find creative solutions to electrification. In 1935, the federal government established the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) to support the formation of rural electric cooperatives. Over the following decades, this initiative thoroughly transformed rural life, extending electricity to rural businesses, farms, schools, and households and establishing a large network of utilities cooperatives that continue to provide services to rural areas today."

"One can prophesy with a Daniel's confidence that skilled electricians will settle the battles of the near future. But this is the least. In its effect upon war and peace, electricity offers still much greater and more wonderful possibilities. To stop war by the perfection of engines of destruction alone, might consume centuries and centuries. Other means must be employed to hasten the end."

"Electric current, after passing into the earth travels to the diametrically opposite region of the same and rebounding from there, returns to its point of departure with virtually undiminished force. The outgoing and returning currents clash and form nodes and loops similar to those observable on a vibrating cord. To traverse the entire distance of about twenty-five thousand miles, equal to the circumference of the globe, the current requires a certain time interval, which I have approximately ascertained. In yielding this knowledge, nature has revealed one of its most precious secrets, of inestimable consequence to man. So astounding are the facts in this connection, that it would seem as though the Creator, himself, had electrically designed this planet just for the purpose of enabling us to achieve wonders which, before my discovery, could not have been conceived by the wildest imagination."

"Go hug your girlfriend! Or if you don't have any, go find one! You won't find the meaning of life with electricity!"

"Stretches, for leagues and leagues, the Wire, A hidden path for a Child of Fire— Over its silent spaces sent, Swifter than Ariel ever went, From continent to continent."

"While Franklin's quiet memory climbs to heaven, Calming the lightning which he thence hath riven."

"And stoic Franklin's energetic shade Robed in the lightnings which his hand allay'd."

"To put a girdle round about the world."

"A vast engine of wonderful delicacy and intricacy, a machine that is like the tools of the Titans put in your hands. This machinery, in its external fabric so massive and so exquisitely adjusted, and in its internal fabric making new categories of thought, new ways of thinking about life."

"Notwithstanding my experiments with electricity the thunderbolt continues to fall under our noses and beards; and as for the tyrant, there are a million of us still engaged at snatching away his sceptre."

"But matchless Franklin! What a few Can hope to rival such as you. Who seized from kings their sceptred pride And turned the lightning's darts aside."

"A million hearts here wait our call, All naked to our distant speech— I wish that I could ring them all And have some welcome news for each."

"An ideal's love-fraught, imperious call That bids the spheres become articulate."

"This is a marvel of the universe: To fling a thought across a stretch of sky— Some weighty message, or a yearning cry, It matters not; the elements rehearse Man's urgent utterance, and his words traverse The spacious heav'ns like homing birds that fly Unswervingly, until, upreached on high, A quickened hand plucks off the message terse."

"Eripuit cælo fulmen, mox sceptra tyrannis."

"Russia is the largest energy power. The country with a unique energy system, one of the leaders in generating electricity and supplying it to the global market. This is the result of your hard work and professionalism. Each of you (energy complex's worker and veteran) does everything to ensure that the country's energy system stays reliable."

"Col. Olcott, was taken to task for asserting in one of his lectures that Electricity is matter. Such, nevertheless, is the teaching of the Occult Doctrine. "Force," "Energy," may be better names for it, so long as European Science knows so little about its true nature; yet matter it is, as much as Ether is matter, since it is as atomic, though indeed several removes from Ether. p. 136"

"It seems ridiculous to argue that because a thing is imponderable to Science, therefore it cannot be called matter. Electricity is "immaterial," in the sense that its molecules are not subject to perception and experiment; yet it may be — and Occultism says it is — atomic; therefore it is matter. But even supposing it were unscientific to speak of it in such terms, once Electricity is called in Science a source of Energy, Energy simply, and a Force — where is that Force or that Energy which can be thought of without thinking of matter? p. 137"

"Electricity is not only Substance, but that it is an emanation from an Entity, which is neither God nor Devil, but one of the numberless Entities that rule and guide our world, according to the eternal Iaw of Karma. p. 137"

"The Aurora Borealis and Australis (Aurora)... take place at the very centres of terrestrial electric and magnetic forces. The two Poles are said to be the store-houses, the receptacles and liberators, at the same time, of cosmic and terrestrial Vitality (Electricity), from the surplus of which the Earth, had it not been for these two natural safety-valves, would have been rent to pieces long ago. p. 226"

"If, as Sir William Grove says, the electricity we handle is but the result of ordinary matter affected by something invisible, the intimate generating power" of every Force, the "one omnipresent influence," then it only becomes natural that one should believe as the Ancients did; namely, that every Element is dual in its nature. p.508"

"Sir William Grove... in a lecture at the London Institution, in 1842, was the first to show that "heat, light, may be considered as affections of matter itself, and not of a distinct ethereal, 'imponderable,' fluid [a state of matter now] permeating it." Yet, perhaps, for some Physicists... Force and Forces were tacitly "Spirit [and hence Spirits] in Nature." What several rather mystical Scientists taught was that light, heat, magnetism, electricity and gravity, etc., were not the final Causes of the visible phenomena, including planetary motion, but were themselves the secondary effects of other Causes, for which Science in our day cares very little, but in which Occultism believes; for the Occultists have exhibited proofs of the validity of their claims in every age. And in what age were there no Occultists and no Adepts? p. 525"

"The science of electricity, which was not yet in existence when he [Boehme] wrote, is there anticipated [in his writings]; and not only does Boehme describe all the now known phenomena of that force, but he even gives us the origin, generation, and birth of electricity, itself. p. 535"

"We have an important scientific corroboration for one of our fundamental dogmas — namely, that (a) the Sun is the store-house of Vital Force, which is the Noumenon of Electricity; and {b) that it is from its mysterious, never-to-be-fathomed depths, that issue those lifecurrents which thrill through Space, as through the organisms of every living thing on Earth. p. 579"

"The Nasmyth willow leaves, mistaken by Sir John Herschell for "solar inhabitants," are the reservoirs of solar vital energy; "the vital electricity that feeds the whole system; the sun in abscondito ;being thus the storehouse of our little Cosmos, self-generating its vital fluid, and ever receiving as much as it gives out," and the visible Sun only a window cut into the real solar palace and presence, which, however, shews without distortion the interior work. p. 592"

"We are told that Mr. Keely defines electricity "as a certain form of atomic vibration." In this he is quite right; but this is Electricity on the terrestrial plane, and through terrestrial correlations. p. 613"

"Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the Evangelist [and the Kabalist]. Both are electricity — the life principle, the Anima Mundi — pervading the Universe, the electric vivifier of all things. p. 633"

"Everybody “knows” that people who are overweight overeat. Doctors know it. Diet writers know it. The lecturers at Weight Watchers know it. Everybody knows it. And so, if you are overweight, you probably know it, too. But when I approached the problem mathematically, the numbers didn’t know it. And the numbers were clear. Boy, have we been wrong….I computed that each pound of body fat is maintained by less than one extra calorie per hour."

"Never underestimate the power of a calorie. Never underestimate the power of even one calorie. Fatness is not a condition maintained by overeating. Fatness is a condition brought about and maintained by eating a few too many calories, consistently."

"Normally you have to wait for generations to see the effect of the environment on mutations, and most mutant animals are pretty damaged so don’t live long. In a world affected by climate change, we really need to understand nuclear energy as an option, and its potential effects on natural populations. We know that exposure to acute radiation is terrible, but actually low levels are nowhere near as bad as we think. And many of the animals around Chernobyl have actually done very well, because the humans left – and it turns out we are way worse than radiation."

"The general question of nuclear power is not a simple one. It is hardly necessary to stress how dangerous it is after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which has far from ended. Continued use of fossil fuels threatens global disaster, and not in the distant future. The sensible course would be to move as quickly as possible to sustainable energy sources, as Germany is now doing. The alternatives are too disastrous to contemplate."

"As I said, there is some merit in these views [that nuclear power is the "only way to save the planet from cooking"]. More accurately, there would be if limited and short-term reliance on nuclear energy, with all of its extreme hazards and unsolved problems — like waste disposal — was taken as an opportunity for rapid and extensive development of sustainable energy. That should be the highest priority, and very quickly, because severe threats of environmental catastrophe are not remote."

"The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one."

"If reactors were safe, nuclear industries would not demand government-guaranteed, accident-liability protection, as a condition for their generating electricity."

"In reality, the story of nuclear power development in the US over the last 50 years is beyond pitiful and would not pass muster under any “normal” business plan. How the nuclear industry gets away with it remains baffling."

"No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50 thousand years of man's recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight."

"The Green New Deal will need to be subject to constant vigilance and pressure from experts who understand exactly what it will take to lower our emissions as rapidly as science demands, and from social movements that have decades of experience bearing the brunt of false climate solutions, whether nuclear power, the chimera of carbon capture and storage, or carbon offsets. But in remaining vigilant, we also have to be careful not to bury the overarching message: that this is a potential lifeline that we all have a sacred and moral responsibly to reach for."

"Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds. Have no fear for atomic energy, cause none of them can stop the time."

"I happen to be one who believes that we will not get very far in working out a peace program, or in lowering the suspicious fingers which are now being pointed toward America by other nations of the world, until we recognize that, after all, the secret of atomic energy does not belong to America, but that, instead, it belongs to all mankind."

"Nuclear know-how without nuclear infrastructure doesn't get you very much. A racecar driver without a car can't drive. A pilot without a plane can't fly."

"Klaatu: So long as you were limited to fighting among yourselves -- with your primitive tanks and planes -- we were unconcerned. But soon you will apply atomic energy to space ships -- and then you become a threat to the peace and security of other planets. That, of course, we cannot tolerate."

"First, in dealing with those nations that break rules and laws, I believe that we must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to actually change behavior – for if we want a lasting peace, then the words of the international community must mean something. Those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable. Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with increased pressure – and such pressure exists only when the world stands together as one. One urgent example is the effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and to seek a world without them. In the middle of the last century, nations agreed to be bound by a treaty whose bargain is clear: All will have access to peaceful nuclear power; those without nuclear weapons will forsake them; and those with nuclear weapons will work towards disarmament. I am committed to upholding this treaty. It is a centerpiece of my foreign policy. And I’m working with President Medvedev to reduce America and Russia’s nuclear stockpiles. But it is also incumbent upon all of us to insist that nations like Iran and North Korea do not game the system. Those who claim to respect international law cannot avert their eyes when those laws are flouted. Those who care for their own security cannot ignore the danger of an arms race in the Middle East or East Asia. Those who seek peace cannot stand idly by as nations arm themselves for nuclear war. The same principle applies to those who violate international laws by brutalizing their own people. When there is genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo, repression in Burma – there must be consequences. Yes, there will be engagement; yes, there will be diplomacy – but there must be consequences when those things fail. And the closer we stand together, the less likely we will be faced with the choice between armed intervention and complicity in oppression."

"What if Roosevelt and Churchill had accepted the proposals from Bohr, Szilard, and others to internationalize the project? Would an with Russia still have resulted? The answer is probably yes. Bohr's idealistic concept was essentially a free exchange of information internationally. All nations would pool scientific knowledge, rather than keep it secret. An international body consisting mainly of scientists would oversee its exploitation. These ideas harked back to the free flow of information about physics in the fifty years before the Second World War, a period Bohr regarded as a golden age. However, not only times but nuclear physics had changed. Nuclear physics was by then perceived as having not only massive military potential but real commercial value for power generation. But these factors conferred great diplomatic, economic, and political power. For Stalin, possession of nuclear capability had immense importance, both symbolically and practically. Generation of electricity from nuclear power had the potential to achieve his long stated aim to "catch up and overtake" the West in terms of industrialization. Nuclear weapons would give him the ability to rule over his increasing empire in Eastern Europe, while allowing him to appear as, and to act as, the equal or the best of the West elsewhere. Western lack of trust in a totalitarian regime made a race inevitable."

"A paper reactor [new reactor concept] has the following characteristics: it is simple; it is small; it is cheap; it is lightweight; it can be built very quickly; very little development is required and it will use off the shelf components; it is in the study phase and not being built now. By contrast a real reactor has the following characteristics: it is complicated; it is large; it is heavy; it is being built now; it is behind schedule; it requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items; it takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems."

"And Lord, we are especially thankful for nuclear power, the cleanest, safest energy source there is. Except for solar, which is just a pipe dream."

"Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter."

"Thus, the words "nuclear energy" have many interpretations. As they bring to mind the terrifying spectre of a war of exploding A-bombs and H-bombs, they are horrible words. Yet those same words, used to describe the many uses of the atom for man's peaceful progress -- in medicine, agriculture, biology, industry and the production of electric power -- bear no relation of association to the uncontrolled fury of the atom as it might be employed in war. And finally, the words "nuclear energy" as they relate to the controlled testing of nuclear weapons so that we may be assured of the means of defending ourselves, ought not to be confused with the unrestrained use of large numbers of such weapons in actual warfare."

"On May 7, a few weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington. I was there to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous."

"In some sense, nuclear fission is not one of those developments in physics which arose logically and systematically in the course of progress. There was a great deal of accident and surprise in the process."

"Fission is a process of deadly fascination; had nature chosen her constants just a little differently, we should have been deprived of its potential for social good and spared its power for social evil. Despite the former and despite the undeniable fact that the latter is responsible for nuclear and particle physics being decades in advance of what would otherwise have been their time, I know what my own choice for the constants would have been."

"Developments in society influence the energy system in many ways, but the energy system also affects society."

"The way ahead is clear. We must repudiate the false promise of the Bush-Cheney energy plan and select the path of autonomy, self-restraint, and innovation. If we strengthen our resolve, accept a degree of self-discipline, and embrace the new technologies, we will escape the trap of dependency and establish a secure, sustainable, and responsible energy system; if we fail to do these things, we will condemn ourselves to rising bloodshed abroad and hardship at home. The choice is ours. The time of decision is now. It is not too late to abandon our allegiance to oil at any cost and embark on a new energy path. but it might soon be."

"The light-quantum has the peculiarity that it apparently ceases to exist when it is in one of its stationary states, namely, the zero state, in which its momentum and therefore also its energy, are zero. When a light-quantum is absorbed it can be considered to jump into this zero state, and when one is emitted it can be considered to jump from the zero state to one in which it is physically in evidence, so that it appears to have been created. Since there is no limit to the number of light-quanta that may be created in this way, we must suppose that there are an infinite number of light quanta in the zero state..."

"One hopes will soon demonstrate the incorrectness of the hypothesis of zero-point energy, the theoretical untenability of which became glaringly obvious to me soon after the publication of the paper I coauthored with Mr. Stern."

"Zero-point energy is now dead as a doornail."

"In his Theorie der Wärmestrahlung, Planck emphasized that the existence of a zero-point energy was completely foreign to classical physics. However, it seemed to be a ghost-like entity which it was difficult to connect to experiments."

"I fear that your hatred of the zero-point energy extends to the electrodynamic emission hypothesis that I introduced and that leads to it. But what’s to be done? For my part, I hate discontinuity of energy even more than discontinuity of emission."

"We here face a fundamental problem of outstanding importance. Its solution may still require a radical change in our theories beyond our present imagining."

"From quantum theory there follows the existence of so called zero-point oscillations; for example each oscillator in its lowest is not completely at rest but always is moving about its equilibrium position. Therefore electromagnetic oscillations also can never cease completely. Thus the quantum nature of the electromagnetic field has as its consequence zero point oscillations of the field strength in the lowest energy state, in which there are no light quanta in space... The zero point oscillations act on an electron in the same way as ordinary electrical oscillations do. They can change the eigenstate of the electron, but only in a transition to a state with the lowest energy, since empty space can only take away energy, and not give it up. In this way spontaneous radiation arises as a consequence of the existence of these unique field strengths corresponding to zero point oscillations. Thus spontaneous radiation is induced radiation of light quanta produced by zero point oscillations of empty space."

"New carbon-sucking technologies ... are so far from scalability at present that they are best described as fantasies of industrial absolution."

"There are people here who want to just continue business as usual. And the great facade is: 'Oh no, we'll be able to [use carbon capture to] capture everything.' . . . No scientist tells me we can capture it all. Can't do it. Can we capture some? Yes, and by the way, I'm for it. [It's up to the oil and gas industry] to show us they can capture all those emissions, to tell us whether it's really going to be part of the future. But don't lie to people and tell them it's green. And don't pretend to people that that's the main alternative."

"On Christmas Eve, two FBI agents arrived at Olden Manor and seized control of Oppenheimer's remaining classified papers. That same day, Oppenheimer received the AEC's letter of formal charges, dated December 23, 1953. ... The inclusion of Oppenheimer's opposition to the Super reflected the depth of McCarthyite hysteria that had enveloped Washington. Equating dissent with disloyalty, it redefined the role of government advisers and the very purpose of advice. The AEC's charges were not the kind of narrowly crafted indictment likely to bring conviction in a court of law. This was, rather, a political indictment and Oppenheimer would be judged by an AEC review panel appointed by the chairman of the AEC, Lewis L. Strauss."

"The US Atomic Energy Commission, created by Congress in 1946, grew into a uniquely powerful, mission-oriented bureaucracy. One of its main goals was the creation of a flourishing commercial nuclear power program. By the late 1950s, the AEC began to acquire frightening data about the potential hazards of nuclear technology. It decided, nevertheless, to push ahead with ambitious plans to make nuclear energy the dominant source of the nation's electric power by the end of the century. The AEC proceeded to authorize the construction of larger and larger nuclear reactors all around the country, the dangers notwithstanding. The AEC gambled that its scientists would, in time, find deft solutions to all the complex safety difficulties."

"Now, six years after the Commission had assumed responsibility for the nation's atomic energy commission, industry was becoming restive over the delay in realizing the commercial applications of nuclear power. While most of the nation was preoccupied with the election campaign during autumn 1952, a clamor for a greater role in the development of atomic energy was rising among power equipment manufacturers and the electric utility industry."

"The fact is that in Europe, faced with the choice between human rights and gas, many politicians pick gas."

"The interpretation of these tracks as due to protons, or other heavier nuclei, is ruled out on the basis of range and curvature. Protons or heavier nuclei of the observed curvatures could not have ranges as great as those observed. The specific-ionization is close to that for an electron of the same curvature, hence indicating a positively-charged particle comparable in mass and magnitude of charge with an electron."

"In his theory of beta reactivity Fermi introduced a new type of interactions among elementary particles, which today we call "weak interactions". Many new manifestations of weak interactions, which could be interpreted using Fermi's 1933 theory, were found in the following decades. The study of weak interactions has led to surprising discoveries, among which the violation of specular symmetry (known as parity symmetry or P symmetry), and the violation of time reversal symmetry (T symmetry) and of the symmetry between matter and antimatter (CP symmetry)."

"Dear Millikan, I have just received a letter from Rutherford which contains some of Blackett's work which may interest you and Anderson. It is that they have capitulated on the question of positive electrons and agree with Anderson that there are present in large numbers among the tertiary or quartinary (or whatever they are) ionizing particles seen in a Wilson photograph of the effects particles of positive charge and electronic mass. ...I take it that Blackett has collected so many photographs of such tracks as those earlier ones of Anderson that he can no longer resist this devastatingly interesting conclusion. Blackett's photos will come out in P.R.S. (Proceedings of the Royal Society) in March. I have a lecture to deliver."

"The annihilation of positrons with electrons from biological tissues constitutes the basis of Positron Emission Tomography (PET)... widely used in ... [S]ubstances called radiotracers and radiopharmaceuticals are injected into the patient. These are chemical compounds in which one or more atoms have been replaced by short-lived, positron-emitting, radioisotope of elements that are abundant in the body, like Carbon-11... ... Oxygen-15... and Fluor-18... the latter... for the localization and monitoring of tumors... Since these isotopes are short-lived... they must be produced just before being injected... To do this, the corresponding [common] elements are bombarded with protons... from a small accelerator. ...[I]nside the PET scanner ...a series of detector rings ...record the gamma radiation emitted when the positrons are annihilated inside the body. ...[T]he recorded signals are used to make a series of slices that combine to for a 3-D image. ...[T]hey allow doctors to assess the condition of organs and tissues as they can monitor blood flow and many bodily and metabolic processes, including neuronal transmission."

"Kirk: Like Lazarus. Identical, yet both Lazarus. Except one is matter and the other antimatter. If they meet... Spock: Annihilation Jim. Total, complete, absolute annihilation."

"If the Standard Model describes the world successfully, how can there be physics beyond it, such as supersymmetry? There are two reasons. First, the Standard Model does not explain aspects of the study of the large-scale universe, cosmology. For example, the Standard Model cannot explain why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, nor can it explain what constitutes the of the universe. Supersymmetry suggests explanations for both of these mysteries. Second, the boundaries of physics have been changing. Now scientists ask not only how the world works (which the Standard Model answers) but why it works that way (which the Standard Model cannot answer). Einstein asked "why" earlier in the twentieth century, but only in the past decade or so have the "why" questions become normal scientific research in particle physics rather than philosophical afterthoughts."

"In later years, the advent of a new elementary particle would scarcely ruffle the intellectual sensibilities of the world's physicists; in 1932, Anderson's announcement of the ran into a wall of resistance. If the had resolved many long-standing difficulties of nuclear theory, the positron seemed to complicate matters. It is said that Neils Bohr dismissed Anderson's finding out of hand, and when in the fall of 1932 Millikan discussed the positron in a lecture at the Cavendish, various members of the audience suggested that Anderson had doubtless become tangled in some fundamental interpretive error. But not all of Rutherford's physicists were prepared to ignore Anderson's claims, especially not the resident Cavendish expert on s, Patrick M. S. Blackett."

"The Doctor: Here on Zeta Minor is the boundary between existence as you know it and the other universe which you just don't understand. From the beginning of time it has existed side by side with the known universe. Each is the antithesis of the other. You call it "nothing", a word to cover ignorance. And centuries ago scientists invented another word for it. "Antimatter", they called it. And you, by coming here, have crossed the boundary into that other universe to plunder it. Dangerous."

"It was fortunate that Alan Guth did his work at the same time that another idea came into fashion, which was the theory that we could understand why the universe contains matter and not antimatter in terms of some asymmetry, some favoritism for matter over antimatter in the early universe; it's no good having a scheme that can inflate the universe to enormous dimension of it's not possible to create matter to fill that large universe."

"The new quantum mechanics, when applied to the problem of the structure of the atom with point-charge electrons, does not give results in agreement with experiment. The discrepancies consist of "duplexity" phenomena, the observed number of stationary states for an electron in an atom being twice the number given by the theory. ...It appears that the simplest Hamiltonian for a point-charge electron satisfying the requirements of both relativity and the general transformation theory leads to an explanation of all duplexity phenomena without further assumption."

"The wave equation... refers equally well to an electron with charge e as to one with charge -e. If one considers for definiteness the limiting case of large quantum numbers one would find that some of the solutions of the wave equation are wave packets moving in the way a particle of charge -e would move on the classical theory, while others are wave packets moving in the way a particle of charge e would move classically. ...the electron suddenly changing its charge from -e to e ...has not been observed. The true relativity wave equation should thus be such that its solutions split up into two non-combining sets, referring respectively to the charge -e and the charge e. ...The resulting theory is therefore still only an approximation, but it appears to be good enough to account for all the duplexity phenomena without arbitrary assumptions."

"On August 2, 1932, during the course of photographing cosmic-ray tracks produced in a vertical Wilson chamber (magnetic field of 15,000 gauss) designed in the summer of 1930 by Professor R. A. Millikan and the writer, the tracks... seemed... interpretable only on the basis of the existence in this case of a particle carrying a positive charge but having a mass of the same order of magnitude as that normally possessed by a free negative electron."

"In the course of the next few weeks other photographs were obtained which could be interpreted logically only on the positive-electron basis, and a brief report was then published with due reserve in interpretation in view of the importance and striking nature of the announcement."

"[O]ur equations allow of two kinds of motion for an electron, only one of which corresponds to what we are familiar with. The other corresponds to electrons with a very peculiar motion such that the faster they move, the less energy they have, and one must put energy into them to bring them to rest."

"[W]e find from the theory that if we disturb the electron, we may cause a transition from a positive-energy state of motion to a negative-energy one, so that, even if.. all.. electrons in the world.. started.. in positive-energy states, after a time some... would be in negative-energy states. ...[B]ehaviour of these states in an electromagnetic field shows that they correspond to the motion of an electron with a positive charge ...a . One might... assume that electrons in negative-energy states are just positrons, but ...observed positrons ...do not have negative energies."

"We make use of the exclusion principle of Pauli... there can be only one electron in any state of motion. We... make the assumptions that in the world as we know it, nearly all the states of negative energy for the electrons are occupied... any unoccupied negative-energy state, being a departure from uniformity, is observable and is just a ."

"An unoccupied negative-energy state, or hole... will have a positive energy, since it is a place where there is a shortage of negative energy. A hole is... just like an ordinary particle, and its identification with the ... the most reasonable way of getting over the difficulty of... negative energies..."

"On this view the positron is just a mirror-image of the electron, having exactly the same mass and opposite charge. This has already been roughly confirmed by experiment. The positron should also have similar spin properties to the electron, but this has not yet been confirmed..."

"[W]e should expect an ordinary electron, with positive energy, to be able to drop into... and fill up this hole, the energy being liberated in the form of . This would mean... an electron and a positron annihilate one another. The converse... creation of an electron and a positron from electromagnetic radiation, should also be able to take place. Such... appear to have been found experimentally, and are... being more closely investigated..."

"[I]t is probable that negative protons can exist, since as far as the theory is yet definite, there is a complete and perfect symmetry between positive and negative electric charge, and if this symmetry is really fundamental in nature, it must be possible to reverse the charge on any kind of particle. ...[N]egative protons would... be much harder to produce... since a much larger energy would be required, corresponding to... larger mass."

"We must regard it rather as an accident that the Earth (and presumably the whole solar system), contains a preponderance of negative electrons and positive positrons. It is quite possible that for some of the stars it is the other way about... built up mainly of s and negative protons. ...[T]here may be half the stars of each kind. The two... would both show exactly the same spectra... there would be no way of distinguishing them..."

"It seems probable that the interactions between elementary particles can be completely described by symmetry properties and s and by dimensionless numbers representing interaction strengths. Similarly, we might expect that the elementary particles, as quanta of these interactions, may be described in the same in terms... At the present... however, our description... must also include the , and in some cases, the magnetic moment, although in principle these are probably derivable from interaction strengths and symmetries. ...Symmetries usually result in conservation laws. ...Invariance under space inversion results in ...the conservation of parity. Let us also consider invariance under time reversal, and invariance under charge conjugation, the change of particles to antiparticles."

"Invariance of interactions with respect to space inversion restricts observables to those which do not differentiate between a left-handed and a right-handed coordinate system. Time reversal invariance allows only observables which do not depend on the direction of time, and invariance under charge conjugation restricts observables to those which remain unchanged when all particles are changed to antiparticles."

"Consider a motion picture of a fundamental process, perhaps an elementary particle interaction in the presence of electric and s... If the interactions are invariant under space inversion, it will not be possible... to determine if the film has been reversed in the projector or [equivalently] projected by reflection in a mirror. If... invariant under time reversal, and if entropy is not changed in the process, it will not be possible to tell if the film is run backwards, while if... invariant under charge conjugation, it will not be possible to state whether the picture is that of our universe, or an anti-universe where every particle is replaced by its antiparticle."

"These three invariances are not independent. In the framework of local field theory, invariance under proper leads to the invariance of all interactions under combined operations CPT, where C is the charge conjugation operator, changing particles to antiparticles, P, the parity space inversion operator, changing \overline{r} to -\overline{r}, and T is the time reversal operator, changing t to -t. The equality of the masses and lifetimes of the particles and their antiparticles follows from this theorem."

"It appears that the strong interactions and electromagnetic interactions are invariant with respect to C, P, and T separately, while the weak interactions do not conserve P or C. All experimental results are consistent with the assumption the T invariance holds true for all interactions; consequently, from the CPT theorem, weak interactions must be invariant under CP. One could not, then, determine if the photographed scene were a scene of particles viewed normally, or a scene of antiparticles projected in a mirror."

"The theory of the expanding universe, which presupposes a superdense initial state of matter, apparently excludes the possibility of macroscopic separation of matter from antimatter; it must therefore be assumed that there are no antimatter bodies in nature, i.e., the universe is asymmetrical with respect to the number of particles and antiparticles (С asymmetry). In particular, the absence of antibaryons and the proposed absence of baryonic neutrinos implies a nonzero baryon charge (baryonic asymmetry)."

"We wish to point out a possible explanation of С asymmetry in the hot model of the expanding universe... by making use of effects of CP invariance violation... To explain , we propose in addition an approximate character for the baryon conservation law."

"We can visualize that neutral spinless maximons (or photons) are produced at t < 0 from contracting matter having an excess of antiquarks, that they pass "one through the other" at the instant t = 0 when the density is infinite, and decay with an excess of quarks when t > 0, realizing total of the universe. All the phenomena at t < 0 are assumed in this hypothesis to be CPT reflections of the phenomena at t > 0."

"The strong violation of the baryon charge during the superdense state and the fact that the baryons are stable in practice do not contradict each other. ...The baryon charge is violated if the interaction... is supplemented with a three-boson interaction leading to virtual processes ...we find the decay probability ...The lifetime of the proton turns out to be very large (more than 1050 years), albeit finite."

"After Dirac's publication of the electron wave equation in 1928, many people took up its study."

"I felt that writing this paper on the electron was not so difficult as writing the paper on the physical interpretation."

"It was an imperfection of the theory and I didn't see what could be done about it. It was only later that I got the idea of filling up all the states."

"I felt right at the start that the negative energy electrons would have the same rest mass as the ordinary electrons ...I hoped that there was some lack of symmetry somewhere which would bring in the extra mass for the positively charged ones. I was hoping that in some way the Coulomb interaction might lead to such an extra mass, but I couldn't see how it could be brought about."

"It thus appears that we must abandon the identification of the holes with protons and must find some other interpretation for them. A hole, if there were one [in the world], would be a new kind of particle, unknown to experimental physics, having the same mass and opposite charge to an electron. We may call such a particle an anti-electron. We should not expect to find any of them in Nature, on account of the rapid rate of recombination with electrons, but if they could be produced experimentally in high vacuum they would be quite stable and amenable to observation. An encounter between two hard γ-rays (of energy of at least half a million volts) could lead to the creation simultaneously of an electron and anti-electron. This probability [of the creation of a pair] is negligible, however, with the intensities of γ-rays at present available."

"Then on 2 August 1932 there came along the discovery of the by C. Anderson. ...For Dirac it meant the satisfaction that his equation predicted the situation correctly as he had hoped. His work had also provided the first example in the history of physics where the existence of a new particle was predicted on a purely theoretical basis."

"[C]reation and annihilation concepts antedate quantum mechanics. The concept of annihilation of pairs of oppositely charged, elementary particles... dates from the turn of the twentieth century. It became important in astrophysics about 1924... The annihilating pairs were first positive and negative electrons, later protons and electrons, and finally, starting in 1931, electrons and anti-electrons. ...In Dirac's "hole" theory of 1930... pair annihilation was neither novel nor central. Dirac's object was to deal with a difficulty... that the theory allowed electrons to make transitions to . ...interpreting electrons in states of negative energy as unobservable, and empty negative-energy states, or "holes" as protons. As a by-product, when an electron jumped into a vacant negative-energy state, an electron and a proton disappeared together into radiation. Since pair annihilation was already an accepted concept, this... was admissible."

"Dirac's... paper, "A Theory of Electrons and Protons," makes it clear that his primary purpose was to deal with the negative energy difficulty, and his secondary purpose... was to present a theory of protons. ...[T]he chief novelty ...was the identification of the proton with the absence of the electron, whereas the concept of pair annihilation was not a novelty ...He began by stating the difficulty: relativistic theories of the electron all yield solutions in which the electron has a negative total energy, and quantum mechanical relativistic theories... permit the electron to make transitions from states of positive energy to these states of negative energy. He then argued... that these states, and the transistions to them, cannot be disregarded as nonphysical..."

"Since every particle needed to make up atoms has its antiparticle, it is conceivable... to combine s and s to make ... Then one could use s to make heavier forms of antihydrogen such as antideuterium (an antinucleus containing one antiproton and one antineutron, with a positron in orbit) and anti (one antiproton and two antineutrons)."

"A few hundred heavy nuclei of antideuterium, antitritium, and antihelium-3 have been observed... Sadly, they have been unable to keep these antimatter fragments under control long enough to add positrons and make neutral antiatoms..."

"When a matter particle and its mirror antimatter twin are brought into contact, the two annihilate each other. The mass of both is totally converted into energy. The amount of energy... Einstein's E=mc^2... The annihilation of a gram of matter and antimatter would produce the energy of a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb, the size... dropped on Japan."

"The word "antimatter"... Strictly speaking, it's not... accurate... Antimatter is not "negative matter." It does not have negative mass, or negative spin, or negative (anti-) gravity (...scientists are... running experiments to see if antiprotons have the same kind of gravity as protons). ...One researcher has suggested replacing the... "anti-" with "co-,"... co-matter, co-protons,... Another... suggested... "exo-"... "Exo" in Greek means "outside." Other suggestions... "ob-" (obmatter, obproton) and "contra-" (contramatter and contraproton). None... ever caught on... Hannes Alfven in... Worlds-Antiworlds... said... let's coin a new word for "ordinary" matter... the word koinomatter... after the Greek word koinos, meaning common or well-known. ..."Matter will remain "matter" and "antimatter"... "antimatter"... However... "mirror matter" is the most accurate and unbiased term."

"Mirror matter is, first and foremost, matter. ...[A]ll mirror matter is still matter."

"Schrödinger's theory was not relativistic. It only applied to systems of particles like electrons... moving at low velocities... not close to the speed of light. It... did not take into account the electron's spin. ...Paul Dirac set out to remedy these shortcomings. ...to combine the Schrödinger equations for quantum mechanics, the Einstein equations for special relativity, the Maxwell equations for electromagnetism, and his own non-relativistic equations for the behavior of the electron into a single set of equations. This... described the relativistic quantum behavior of the spinning electron. ...Dirac's solution ...was a startling paper ...In the classical physics of Newton, the energy of a particle always has a positive value. ...Dirac's new equations ...had two possible solutions: an electron with positive energy, or an electron with . ...Dirac discovered that an electron with negative energy passing through a magnetic field would act exactly like an electron with positive energy—if the electron had positive instead of negative charge. To Dirac, this implied that for every particle that existed there was a corresponding mirror-image particle."

"A positron, Feynman has written, can... be thought of as an electron moving backwards in time! An electron doing such... would be indistinguishable from an electron moving with a positive charge. This would also be essentially true for any other mirror matter particle or object."

"An even more bizarre extension of the Feynman model has been suggested by John Wheeler. ...[A]ll the electrons and positrons in the universe are just one single electron seen at different portions of a single long electron path! This... explains why all electrons have exactly the same charge."

"In 1932 Millikan and Anderson were investigating cosmic rays, and they had built a large '... When subatomic particles passed through... they left ghostly vapor trails in the supersaturated air... They placed powerful magnets around it to blanket the interior... with a magnetic field. ...[[Cosmic ray|[C]osmic rays]] ...were bent by the field ...[T]he direction and thickness of the paths... revealed the mass of the particles—and their charge. Anderson... noticed that some of the trails were... like... electrons, but were curved by the magnetic field in the opposite direction. At this point Anderson was not aware of Dirac's prediction ...After nearly a year of effort ...he ...identified ...pair production of electrons and antielectrons from the impact of cosmic rays."

"The first results from the magnet in 1931 and 1932 were dramatic and completely unexpected. An approximately equal number of particles of positive and negative charge were observed, whereas, according to the theories known at the time, one would expect to see only ordinary electrons (all of negative charge). The presence of such an abundance of particles of positive charge was perplexing—something new and mysterious must be ocurring."

"joined me... and I assigned him to the task of continuing the curvature measurements... As more data accumulated... practically all of the low-velocity cases of positive charge were particles... whose mass seemed to be too small to permit their interpretation as s. The alternative explanations... were that these particles were either ordinary electrons (of negative charge) moving upward, or some unknown lightweight particles of positive charge moving downward. In the spirit of scentific conservatism I tended... toward the former... [[Robert Andrews Millikan|[T]he chief]]... repeatedly pointed out that cosmic ray particles travel downward, and not upward, except in extremely rare circumstances, and that these... must be downward-moving protons. This point of view was difficult for me to accept... since in nearly all cases the density of the... tracks... was too low for particles of proton mass. To resolve this apparent paradox, a plate was inserted across the center of the ... [A] fine example was obtained in which a low-energy lightweight particle of positive charge was observed to traverse the plate... This particle came in from the bottom of the chamber, passed through the lead plate and went out near the top of the chamber. ...[I]ts track... was more curved above the plate... this meant it was going slower... therefore, it must have passed through the plate traveling upward."

"I knew it could not have been a proton. Since a proton is 1800 times as heavy as an electron it would have produced a much thicker line [trail]... [I]t could not have been a neutron since neutrons have no electric charge and, therefore, are incapable of producing any kind of line... [T]he line was exactly what would have been produced by an ordinary electron except that electrons had always been found to have a negative electric charge and, therefore, should have turned to the right. This one turned to the left... an electron with a positive charge ...a positive electron!"

"Ionization and curvature measurements clearly showed this particle to have a mass much smaller than... a proton... a mass entirely consistent with an electron. ...[D]espite the strong admonitions of the Chief that upward-moving cosmic ray particles were very rare, this... was an example..."

"In the early 1950s... attention was focused on two new unstable, electrically neutral particles... tau and theta. ...[T]he tau and theta were 'strange'—they carried Gell-Mann's additional charge. They decayed in different ways, and had different parities... [T]he tau and theta had the same mass. ...Chen Ning ('Frank') Yang and , thought it was bizarre for two apparently different particles to have the same mass, and suspected... two faces of the same particle, despite... different parities. ...[They] had to throw overboard ...apparently solid ...assumptions about quantum behaviour: ...[1] it would not be basically altered by left-right mirror reflection... [2] behaviour would not be altered by a mirror that reflected particles as antiparticles and vice-versa... [They] re-examined the evidence for both mirror symmetries, which everyone had assumed ...watertight ...showing that for particle decays this had never been proved conclusively."

"Lee and Yang... suggested that the particle-antiparticle mirror could be flawed. ...[T]wo experiments—by , Leon Lederman and Marcel Weinrich... and by Jerome Friedman and Val Telegdi...—looked at multiple particle transformations in which a pion decays into a , which in turn decays into an electron. ...[These] found that ...[f]or a positively charged pion, the muon's spin points backwards, against its direction of motion. [When t]he antiparticle... a negatively charged pion... decays, the muon emerges with its spin pointing in the direction of its motion. Looking in a mirror that changes particles into antiparticles, the antismoke comes down the chimney."

"For the subnuclear world, the ordinary mirror has to be replaced by an extended mirror that carries out three reflections simultaneously—switching particle to antiparticle and vice-versa, changing left to right and vice-versa, and reversing the . ...[R]espectively C (for charge), P (for parity) and T (for time). The CPT mirror changes Alice into a mirror-image Anti-Alice going backward in time."

"Sakharov looked wryly at the composition of an average cubic metre of Universe. ...a billion quanta of radiation, one proton and no antiprotons. Tracking... to just after the Big Bang... [we] should have had... a billion antiprotons, and a billion and one protons. ...Why the odd proton? ...[A]ntimatter had slipped off the map of the Universe ...Sakharov put forward a three-point explanation."

"[1] Big Bang... particle-antiparticle creation briefly got out of hand, more pairs being created than were reabsorbed back into radiation. ...[T]he present Universe is much larger than a sphere of light rays which started out from the Big Bang... Sometime in the past, the Universe... expanded faster than light... Most of the Universe we have not yet seen, despite traveling at [c]... not yet having had time to reach us. ...In the first fraction of a second... the Universe must have 'inflated' faster than the speed of light and particle-antiparticle pairs were produced faster than they could be reabsorbed."

"[2] ...some mechanism had to tilt the balance in favor of matter. With Cronin and Fitch's... implications for the , Sakharov thought he had... the answer. But was the tiny subnuclear effect... enough..? Probably not... But... [h]eavier quarks, more exotic than strangeness, could show larger effects. Making B particles containing the 'beauty' (...'bottom') quark and manufacturing enough of them to probe the has become a major focus of... research."

"[3] The proton... has to be slightly unstable... Sitting still, the -filled proton would have to disintegrate into electrons and other light particles. ...But ...the level of ...instability needed was so small as to be almost undetectable. ...[E]xperiments are trying to capture this effect..."

"The Big Bang should have been matter-antimatter symmetric. But the visible Universe... shows little sign of this primordial antimatter."

"Paul Dirac, the spiritual father of antimatter, probably did not yet know very much about the Big Bang picture when he gave his Nobel lecture... and suggested that the Universe could contain both matter and antimatter without us knowing... If Dirac were right, the whole Universe should be a uniform mix... overall the two halves of the Universe should balance. Where is this antimatter?"

"Light antiparticles... as s, are common in cosmic rays. However, such... are usually from particle-antiparticle pairs produced... as primary cosmic ray particles collide with atmospheric gas or interstellar dust. ...'Fountains' of positrons... seen... peering into the center of our Galaxy... can be explained by violent cosmic processes spitting out... radiation..."

"Any antimatter stars... [w]hen such... died in explosions, their... antinuclei would have been flung out... But the cosmic rays arriving... have revealed no signs of antimatter heavier than s."

"[P]erhaps matter and antimatter are separated into distinct domains. Maybe... there is... an antidomain. ...Wherever and whenever the boundaries... briefly touched, pieces... would have mutually annihilated to give powerful bursts of... s. As the Universe... cooled these... would have... produced a dim but uniform... signal all over the sky."

"If the initial Universe had contained widely space clusters of matter and antimatter, these would have left their... imprint on the Cosmic Background Radiation. The tiny ripples seen by COBE and other detectors are not compatible with separate domains of matter and antimatter... The Universe we can see looks to have been eternally free of nuclear antimatter."

"It became apparent that in a hot early epoch of the big bang there would exist a fully mixed dense state of matter and antimatter in the form of ic and ic pairs in thermal equilibrium with radiation. As the universe expanded and cooled this situation would result in an almost complete annihilation of both matter and antimatter."

"Antinucleons "freeze out" of thermal equilibrium when the annihilation rate becomes smaller than the expansion rate of the universe. This would have occurred when the temperature of the universe dropped below ∼20 MeV. The predicted freeze out density of both matter and antimatter is only about 4×10-11 of the closure density of the universe..."

"Sakharov showed that three conditions are necessary in order to create the appropriately significant concentration of s in the early universe. They are: • Violation of Baryon Number, B • Violation of C and CP • Conditions in which Thermodynamic Equilibrium does not Hold"

"If CPV is predetermined, then only matter will remain in the present universe. We can refer to this case as a "global" matter-antimatter asymmetry. If... CPV is the result of spontaneous symmetry breaking, domains of positive and negative CPV may result. In the case of spontaneous CPV, the Lagrangian is explicitly CP invariant, but at the symmetry breaking phase transition a CP invariant high temperature vacuum state undergoes a transition to a state where the vacuum solutions break CP either way. This mechanism may be compared to the spontaneous formation of ferromagnetic domains when a piece of unmagnetized iron cools below the critical temperature in the absence of a magnetic field. Although there is no preferred direction of magnetization, individual domains acquire random local directions of magnetization."

"If the CP domain structure is stretched to astronomical size by a subsequent period of moderate inflation, then, following , s may survive as galaxies in some regions of the universe and antibaryons may survive as antigalaxies in other regions. In this case, we have a "local" matter-antimatter asymmetry instead of a global one. ...[i.e.,] a "locally asymmetric domain cosmology (LADC)." Following baryogenesis, the walls of the initially CP symmetric vacuum between the positive and negative CP domains must vanish because they are quite massive and could eventually dominate the evolution of the universe, in conflict with observations."

"Antimatter galaxies will look exactly the same as matter galaxies. This is because the photon is its own antiparticle. However, we can look for other clues. Searches have been made for antimatter in the cosmic radiation and for the indirect traces of cosmic matter-antimatter annihilation in the extragalactic γ-ray background radiation."

"properties can play a crucial role in determining the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe if thermal is the correct solution to the problem. Owing to this, the study of Neutrino models goes beyond the mere purpose of generating tiny neutrino masses, and it is natural to incorporate the puzzle of cosmic ."

"One of the most fundamental concepts in the study of physics is the idea of symmetry. Yet, Nature as we know it does not always seem to be perfectly symmetrical. ...[T]he principal theme for this current work is motivated by none other than the apparent between matter and antimatter in the universe. Therefore, along with the appeal of symmetry, a major topic of interest is the mechanism of symmetry breaking or asymmetry creation."

"[I]t is quite fascinating that two seemingly unrelated problems—the tiny masses of light neutrino and the matter-antimatter asymmetry—may be explained by the mere introduction of heavy RH [right-hand] neutrinos to the SM. ...[T]he former may be explained by the Type I seesaw mechanism while thermal leptogenesis provides an attractive solution to the later. This... means that an intricate link between neutrino properties and the baryon asymmetry can be established. Consequently, it has been the purpose of this work to explore the implications of several different neutrino models in the leptogenesis context."

"In the representative models... it has been found that successful leptogenesis is only possible in a very fine-tuned region of the parameter space. Specifically, one must select the f = u case, as well as certain combinations of Dirac and Majorana phases in UPMNS such that a lepton asymmetry can be generated via either resonant of flavoured N2-leptogenesis. Further, it has been shown that although the f = e case can yield a TeV scale RH neutrino, the probability of detecting it at the LHC or a next-generation collider such as the ILC is far too small."

"[W]e investigated the effects of introducing an effective transition electromagnetic dipole moment [EMDM] operator between the LH light and the RH heavy neutrinos. ...As a result, a new scenario for leptogenesis whereby the lepton asymmetry is solely generated by the EMDM-type (instead of the usual Yukawa-mediated) interactions is possible. By exploring the key ingredients leading to , we have shown by explicit computations of the relevant diagrams in a toy model that, in principle, electromagnetic leptogenesis is a viable alternative for creating a lepton asymmetry. ...[T]here is no doubt that transition EMDM interactions between light and heavy neutrinos can have far-reaching consequences in the early universe."

"Sakharov published other papers in cosmology. ...[T]he most far-reaching, innovative, and original... concerned "". "s"... denote collectively not only protons and neutrons but also... unstable particles... created when protons and neutrons collide at extraordinarily high speeds. "Antibaryons"... carry the opposite electrical charge. When baryons and antibaryons collide, they annihilate each other, producing... exotic, unstable particles, such as pi-mesons, which are lighter than baryons, as well as radiation... "quanta"... or photons, which have no mass at all. The "background radiation" cosmologists discovered in the mid-1960s is... a remnant of the... annihilation of baryons and antibaryons... when the universe was created or shortly afterward. Baryons and antibaryons, in other words, are one form of matter and antimatter, respectively; electrons... and their opposite, positrons, are another."

"Sakharov tried to explain why exists... how there came to be a surplus of baryons... The consensus... was that there had to be baryon symmetry when the universe began. But there was no consensus on how symmetry broke down. ...According to Sakharov, for baryon asymmetry... the universe at the quantum level... had to have, in Christopher Korda's words, "an intrinsic ." ...[P]hysicists ...refer to the sequence... Sakharov described as "the Sakharov conditions.""

"Sakharov's conclusion was that ""—the difference between baryons and antibaryons in the universe—was not constant, as most... believed. ...[B]aryons, and in particular protons, can decay, and it was Sakharov's concept of proton decay and how it comes about that proved to be perhaps the most remarkable of all his contributions to cosmology. ...D. S. Chernavski, went as far as to say that, by showing theoretically that the proton can disnintegrate, he revealed "the basis of the universe." Ironically, Sakharov's ideas on the subject did not attract much attention for about a decade. But the development of... gauge theories in the late 1970s sparked new interest... even though proton decay has yet to be confirmed experimentally."

"A nucleus contains two protons and two neutrons. Under suitable circumstances a proton can change into a neutron and emit energy some of which materializes as a positron, similar to what happens in the positron emitters of... medicine."

"The finds itself in the heart of the sun, where there are lots of electrons and is instantly destroyed, turned into s. These try to rush away... but are interrupted by the crowd of electrically charged particles, electrons and protons... [R]epeatedly absorbed by electrons and then emitted with less energy... it will take a hundred thousand years before gamma rays... reach the surface... In doing so the rays lose lots of energy... changing from s to ultra-violet and at last into the rainbow of colours that are visible... So daylight is the result of antimatter being produced in the heart of the sun and, in part, of its annihilation."

"The laws of electricity and magnetism that underlie the existence of bulk matter don't care which bits... carry negative charge, and which... are positive. If we swapped all positives to negative, and all negatives to positive... resulting forces would be the same and the structures they built would... be unchanged. ...[T]o all outward appearances, nothing would appear different. Such a swapping of charges would turn what we know as matter into... antimatter. An anti-atom of would consist of a negative encircled by a positively charged . Paul Dirac... first predicted that such a mirror image of matter should exist."

"[H]ow can an electron with negative electrical charge emerge from the energy in a puff of light, which has no... charge? This is where nature's two forms of matter enter the story. The negatively charged electron has a positively charged form... the . The energy of a photon, a particle of light, becomes trapped in these two complementary pieces of substance. This... can also happen in reverse: an electron and a positron can annihilate one another, their individual energies being taken by the photons that rush from the scene of destruction at the speed of light. The emergence of substance from pure energy... is almost biblical in scope. With antimatter... we make contact with the gods of creation."

"In 1923 ... was investigating s... using a . ...The ...rays would knock electrons out of atoms... whose trails he could see... [I]n addition to knocking electrons out of the gas, they were ejecting them out of the walls of the chamber ...which interfered with the measurements... He... came up with the... idea of sweeping away the unwanted electrons by putting the chamber between the poles of a large magnet. ...[T]he clearer view revealed ...the magnetic forces seemed to make some of the 'electrons' curve 'the wrong way'. Today we know he was seeing s, but... [the] anomalous trails were a distraction from what he was trying to do. ...News about these images spread ...and five years later Skobeltsyn decided to show them at an international conference in Cambridge. ...[N]o one could offer an explanation. It was ironic that [this was]... the same year and... place that Dirac came up with his theoretical prediction of positrons... [A]s no one at the time had any reason to expect... positrons existed, he missed the big prize."

"Blackett had been working with a in Rutherford's group... a chamber that was ready for action every ten seconds or so, and took photos on ordinary film. ...[H]e accumulated ...pictures of trails made by s—a product of radioactive nuclear decays— ...bombarding nitrogen gas in the chamber. ...[I]n 1931 arrived ...His specialty was detecting nuclear radiation using s. ...Their big idea ...put one Geiger counter above a cloud chamber, and another... below. ...By connecting the Geiger counters to a ...a flash of light [and the cinematograph] captured the tracks of the cosmic rays on film. ...They noticed that ...a few tracks that appeared at first sight to be electrons, were ...curved the wrong way in the magnetic field. Blackett talked to Dirac about them... neither aware of the precious truth. ...It was only when they heard of Anderson's discovery that Blackett and Occhialini ...realized what they had."

"[L]uckily... they had more... Many of the pictures showed up to twenty... tracks ...from a copper plate just above the chamber ...roughly half of the particles were negatively charged and the rest positively charged. Blackett and Occhialini realized... the appearance of equal numbers of positrons and electrons must be... the result of s hitting the metal."

"Albert Einstein's equation E = mc^2, implies that energy (E) can be converted into mass (m)—radiation into matter—and Blackett and Ochialini had for the first time demonstrated the creation of matter, and antimatter, from radiation; they had proved that Anderson's new particle was not some weird extraterrestrial interloper."

"An ambitious plan took hold at Berkeley... to build an accelerator that would speed s such that when smashed into a target, there would be enough energy to produce an . ...When energy turns into massive particles they emerge in pairs, a particle... matched with its antiparticle, so the BeVatron was built with enough power to produce an antiproton in conjunction with a proton... Several ideas on how to isolate the antiproton 'needle' from the particle 'haystack' were presented... A small team... of , Emilio Segre, , and won the competition ...their idea worked ...and in 1955 they announced their discovery. One of the other teams led by that had entered the competition also gained success... with the discovery of the in 1957. So thirty years after Dirac['s]... seminal prediction, the basic pieces of the antiworld were in place: , antiproton, and ."

"Since antimatter will destroy any material object, it must be kept in a cage without material walls. The solution... a vacuum that is better than in outer space with magnetic and electric fields that confine the antiparticles, positrons, or antiprotons, as circulating beams. That is in effect what is done at particle physics laboratories such as CERN..."

"Magnetic fields that had been able to focus positrons into stable orbits were unable to control the wild antiprotons... Budker's idea was to pass the antiprotons through clouds of cold electrons. Although electrons are matter and antiprotons are antimatter, they are in no danger to one another: electrons are destroyed by their antiparticle, the positron, while the antiproton is at risk only from protons or neutrons. ...By 1974 Budker... succeeded in making and cooling antiprotons, but not in sufficient numbers to make an intense beam."

"It is just like matter except with a reversal of charges. ...We make it and study it in our laboratories, but find little of it in nature. The laws of physics for antimatter are almost an exact mirror of those for matter."

"For each type of matter particle there is a matching type of antimatter particle. ...[W]e can convert energy from radiation into a matched pair..."

"[T]heories suggest that, at very early times... all possible types of particles and antiparticles, existed equally in a hot, dense, and very uniform . ...[A]s the Universe expanded and cooled... annihilation could still occur whenever a particle met an antiparticle, but the reverse... creation of a particle and an antiparticle, became... rare."

"[H]igh energy laboratories can produce particles with energies similar to those that prevailed in the [very early] Universe... allows us to model the primordial production of small nuclei from collisions starting with s and s, long before stars began to form. Because we know... what energies are required for collisions to take apart... light elements [ less than 11] into... protons and neutrons, we can identify... the time at which the Universe became cold enough that this destruction practically ceased, and... production of elements started in earnest."

"The fate of antimatter to disappear was sealed by the time the Universe was no older than a millionth of a second."

"[T]he mystery of the missing antimatter... What laws of nature, not yet manifest in experiments and not part of our current Standard Model, were active in the early Universe, allowing the observed amount of matter to persist while all antimatter disappeared from the Universe?"

"There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero. Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year. . . . Zero is what we need to aim for [by the year 2050 to] stop the warming and avoid the worst effects of climate change . . . ."

"I [have become] convinced of three things: 1. To avoid a climate disaster, we have to get to zero {net emissions by the year 2050}. 2. We need to deploy the tools we already have, like solar and wind, faster and smarter. 3. And we need to create and roll out breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way."

"When it comes to climate change, I know innovation isn’t the only thing we need. But we cannot keep the earth livable without it. Techno-fixes are not sufficient, but they are necessary."

"Some companies may go under in the coming years; that comes with the territory when you’re doing cutting-edge work . . . ."

"The reason we need to get to zero is simple. Greenhouse gases trap heat, causing the average surface temperature of the earth to go up. . . . Once greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere, they stay there for a very long time . . . . There’s no scenario in which we keep adding carbon to the atmosphere and the world stops getting hotter, and the hotter it gets, the harder it will be for humans to survive, much less thrive."

"We need to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar. To do it, we need lots of breakthroughs in science and engineering. We need to build a consensus that doesn’t exist and create public policies to push a transition that would not happen otherwise. . . . But don’t despair. We can do this."

"[Question] 1. How Much of the 51 Billion Tons Are We Talking About? . . . Tip: Whenever you see some number of tons of greenhouse gases, convert it to a percentage of 51 billion, which is the world’s current yearly total emissions (in carbon dioxide equivalents)."

"[Question] 2. What’s Your Plan for Cement? . . . [This question] is just a shorthand reminder that if you're trying to come up with a comprehensive plan for climate change, you have to account for much more than electricity and cars."

"Pages 54 and 55"

"[Question] 3: How Much Power Are We Talking About? . . . [A] watt is a bit of energy per second [like] measuring the flow of water out of your kitchen faucet . . . . Watts are equivalent to "cups per second." A watt is pretty small. A small incandescent bulb might use 40 of them. A hair dryer uses 1,500. A power plant might generate hundreds of millions of watts. . . . Because these numbers get big fast, it's convenient to use some shorthand. A kilowatt is 1,000 watts, a megawatt is a million, and a gigawatt . . . is a billion."

"Pages 56 and 57"

"[Question] 5: How Much Is This Going to Cost? . . . Most . . . zero-carbon solutions are more expensive than their fossil-fuel counterparts. . . . These additional costs are what I call Green Premiums. . . . Green Premiums [can help us] decide which zero-carbon solutions we should deploy now [those with low or negative premiums] and where we should pursue breakthroughs because the clean alternatives aren't cheap enough."

"[W]e’re going to need much more clean electricity in the coming years. . . . [B]y 2050 . . . the world will need much more than three times the electricity we generate now."

"Deploying today’s renewables and improving transmission couldn’t be more important. . . . Unless we use large amounts of nuclear energy . . . every path to zero in the United States will require us to install as much wind and solar power as we can build and find room for. . . . [[w:Renewable energy in the United States#Potential resources|[M]ost countries aren’t as lucky as the United States when it comes to solar and wind resources]]. . . . That’s why, even as we deploy, deploy, deploy solar and wind, the world is going to need some new clean electricity inventions too."

"Offshore wind holds a lot of promise . . . ."

"[W]e don’t have a practical way to make [the cement in concrete] without producing carbon."

"[C]ement . . . steel [and] plastics are cheap because fossil fuels are cheap."

"[In discussing solely cement, steel and plastics in this chapter] I'm leaving out fertilizer, glass, paper, aluminum, and many others. . . . We manufacture enormous amounts of materials, resulting in copious amounts of greenhouse gases, nearly a third of the 51 billion tons per year."

"[T]he path to zero emissions in manufacturing looks like this: (1) Electrify every process possible. This is going to take a lot of innovation. (2) Get that electricity from a power grid that’s been decarbonized. This also will take a lot of innovation. (3) Use carbon capture to absorb the remaining emissions. And so will this. (4) Use materials more efficiently. Same."

"With agriculture . . . each year’s emissions of methane and nitrous oxide are the equivalent of more than 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide."

"There’s so much animal poop that it’s actually the second-biggest cause of emissions in agriculture, behind enteric fermentation."

"[W]orldwide, crops take up less than half the nitrogen applied to farm fields. The rest runs off into ground or surface waters, causing pollution, or escapes into the air in the form of nitrous oxide . . . ."

"The most effective tree-related strategy for climate change is to stop cutting down so many of the trees we already have."

"{W}ith transportation, the zero-carbon future is basically this: Use electricity to run all the vehicles we can, and get cheap alternative fuels for the rest. In the first group are passenger cars and trucks, light and medium trucks, and buses. In the second group are long-distance trucks, trains, airplanes, and container ships."

"The path to zero carbon for heating actually looks a lot like the path for passenger cars: (1) electrify what we can, getting rid of natural gas water heaters and furnaces, and (2) develop clean fuels to do everything else."

"In most locations, your overall costs will go down if you get rid of an electric air conditioner and gas (or oil) furnace and replace both with an electric heat pump."

"You already have a heat pump in your home . . . . It's called a refrigerator."

"Just about everyone who’s alive now will have to adapt to a warmer world. As sea levels and floodplains change, we’ll need to rethink where we put homes and businesses. We’ll need to shore up power grids, seaports, and bridges. We’ll need to plant more mangrove forests . . . and improve our early-warning systems for storms."

"As the climate gets warmer, droughts and floods will become more frequent, wiping out harvests more often."

"Rich and middle-income people are causing the vast majority of climate change. The poorest people are doing less than anyone else to cause the problem, but they stand to suffer the most from it. They deserve the world’s help, and they need more of it than they’re getting."

"By the middle of this century, the cost of climate change to all coastal cities could exceed $1 trillion . . . each year."

"There are various ways, including a carbon tax or cap-and-trade program, to ensure that at least some of [the] external costs {associated with greenhouse gas emissions} are paid by whoever is responsible for them. . . . The idea isn't to punish people for their greenhouse gases; it's to create an incentive for inventors to create competitive carbon-free alternatives. By progressively increasing the price of carbon to reflect its true cost, governments can nudge producers and consumers toward more efficient decisions and encourage innovation . . . ."

"[I]f you want a measuring stick for which countries are making progress on climate change . . . don't simply look for the ones that are reducing their emissions. Look for the ones that are setting themselves up to get to zero."

"Technologies needed [to help avoid a climate disaster]: Hydrogen produced without emitting carbon Grid-scale electricity storage that can last a full season Electrofuels Advanced biofuels Zero-carbon cement Zero-carbon steel Plant- and cell-based meat and dairy Zero-carbon fertilizer Next-generation nuclear fission Nuclear fusion Carbon capture (both direct air capture and point capture) Underground electricity transmission Zero-carbon plastics Geothermal energy Pumped hydro Thermal storage Drought- and flood-tolerant food crops Zero-carbon alternatives to palm oil [and] Coolants that don’t contain F-gases."

"To get these [breakthroughs on the "Technologies needed" list] ready soon enough to make a difference, governments need to . . . [q]uintuple clean energy and climate-related R&D over the next decade. . . ."

"It helps to set ambitious goals and commit to meeting them, the way countries around the world did with the 2015 Paris Agreement. It’s easy to mock international agreements, but they’re part of how progress happens: If you like having an ozone layer, you can thank an international agreement called the Montreal Protocol."

"There are markets worth billions of dollars waiting for someone to invent low-cost, zero-carbon cement or steel, or a net-zero liquid fuel. As I’ve tried to show, making these breakthroughs and getting them to scale will be hard, but the opportunities are so big that it’s worth getting out in front of the rest of the world."

"As a Citizen . . . Make calls, write letters, attend town halls. . . . [M]ake clear that this is an issue that will help determine how you vote. . . . Look locally as well as nationally. . . . Run for office."

"As a Consumer . . . Sign up for a green pricing program with your electric utility. . . . Reduce your home's emissions. . . . Buy an electric vehicle. . . . Try a plant-based burger."

"As an Employee or Employer . . . Prioritize innovation in low-carbon solutions. . . . Be an early adopter. . . . Connect with government-funded research."

"We should spend the next decade focusing on the technologies, [governmental] policies and market structures that will put us on the path to eliminating greenhouse gases by 2050. It's hard to think of a better response to a miserable [year of COVID-19 disruptions during] 2020 than spending the next ten years dedicating ourselves to this ambitious goal."

"Gates is right about the scale and urgency of the problem . . . . [He has a] touching, admirable faith in science and reason, [but he also] knows that the solution he seeks is inextricably tied up in political decisions. . . . [T]o operationalise the [[w:Paris Agreement|Paris [COP21] agreement]] – to limit warming to 1.5 degrees – requires countries to halve their CO2 emissions by 2030. So vested interests like big oil will have to be enlisted for change. The . . . rhetoric of irresponsible demagogues will have to be taken head on. And supporters of a stronger set of commitments will have to show why sharing sovereignty is in every nation’s self-interest . . . . Success will come by demonstrating that the real power countries can wield to create a better world is not the power they can exercise over others but the power they can exercise with others."

"[How to Avoid a Climate Disaster] could not be more timely . . . . [W]e are in dire need of solutions to the greatest crisis our species has yet faced. . . . It is a disappointment, then, to report that this book turns out to be a little underwhelming. . . . [The [[w:Swanson's law|price of] solar power has dropped astonishingly in the last decade]] [and] storage batteries are now dropping in price on a similar curve . . . . [Bill Gates is] absolutely right that we should be investing in research across a wide list of technologies because we may need them down the line to help scrub the last increments of fossil fuel from the system, but the key work will be done (or not) over the next decade, and it will be done by sun and wind. . . . Most people, Gates included, have not caught on yet to just [[w:Cost of electricity by source|how fast [the price decline for solar and wind power] is happening]]. So why aren’t we moving much faster than we are? That’s because of politics, and this is where Gates really wears blinders. "I think more like an engineer than a political scientist," he says proudly — but that means he can write an entire book about the "climate disaster" without discussing the role that the fossil fuel industry played, and continues to play, in preventing action. . . . Power comes in many forms, from geothermal and nuclear to congressional and economic; it’s wonderful that Gates has decided to work hard on climate questions, but to be truly helpful he needs to resolve to be a better geek — he needs to really get down on his hands and knees and examine how that power works in all its messiness. Politics very much included."

"Bill Gates [in his] new book, "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster" [asserts that if] humanity is to win the great race between development and degradation . . . green innovation must accelerate. . . . [G]iven the pressing need to decarbonise the global economy, says Mr Gates, "we have to force an unnaturally speedy transition" [to carbon-free energy, and the] linchpin of his argument is the introduction of a meaningful carbon price to account for the externalities involved in using dirty energy. . . . [Some will consider Gates' views on several issues to be] an outmoded mindset. He is an unabashed defender of carbon-free nuclear power, despite the industry's failure to solve serious problems surrounding waste and proliferation. He chastises those who make a fetish out of wind and solar technologies, emphasising the constraints of the intermittent generation they involve. . . . Mr Gates . . . acknowledges the power of the state and a need for intergovernmental co-operation, something not often heard from techno-libertarians; but he also calls for more green ambition and risk-taking by short-termist investors and company bosses. Ultimately his book is a primer on how to reorganise the global economy so that innovation focuses on the world’s gravest problems. It is a powerful reminder that if mankind is to get serious about tackling them, it must do more to harness the one natural resource available in infinite quantity — human ingenuity."

"In his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates takes a technology-centered approach to understanding the climate crisis. . . . [I]n 2015, Gates and several dozen other wealthy people launched Breakthrough Energy, an interlinked venture capital fund, lobbying group, and research effort [that invests] in energy innovation. . . . A parallel effort, an international pact called Mission Innovation [persuades governments to fund] clean-energy research and development. These various endeavors are the through line for [the] book . . . As many others have pointed out, a lot of the necessary technology already exists; much can be done now. Though Gates doesn’t dispute this, his book focuses on the technological challenges that he believes must still be overcome to achieve greater decarbonization. He spends less time on the political obstacles . . . . Yet politics, in all its messiness, is the key barrier to progress on climate change."

"Few climate crisis books give cause for hope. But Bill Gates’s new title does just that as [he] charts a way for private enterprises and governments to stave off the worst of global warming. . . . [He] is convinced that fossil fuels have to be replaced with renewable energy – and as soon as possible. Factories, vehicles and heating systems must all become electrified, and then run on green power. . . . So far, so good! [He also] says nuclear plants will stabilise the smart grids that link our energy systems of the future. . . . Here, however, he’s wrong. . . . [H]e underestimates the expert opinion that better storage – batteries and beyond – together with demand management and smart networks can balance the grid. One cornerstone to this way forward: natural gas would have to be on standby. But why not? This is already the case in Germany. . . . The other bone I have to pick with Gates lies in his contention that our market economies and extravagant lifestyles don’t have to change. . . . [C]riticism aside, this readable and jargon-free book offers valuable nuggets and advice for investors and politicos."

"The choice (or accident) of s creates a sense of time directionality in a physical environment. The 'arrow' of entropy increase is a reflection of the improbability of those initial conditions which are entropy-decreasing in a closed physical system. ... Everywhere... in the Universe, we discern that closed physical systems evolve in the same sense from ordered states towards a state of complete disorder called . This cannot be a consequence of known laws of change, since... these laws are time symmetric—they permit... time-reverse... The initial conditions play a decisive role in endowing the world with its sense of temporal direction. ...some prescription for initial conditions is crucial if we are to understand... A Theory of Everything needs to be complemented by some such independent prescription which appeals to simplicity, economy, or some other equally metaphysical notion to underpin its credibility. The only radically different alternative... a belief that the type of mathematical description of Nature... —that of causal equations with starting conditions—is just an artefact of our own preferred categories of thought and merely an approximation... At a deeper level, a sharp divide between those aspects of reality that we habitually call 'laws' and... 'initial conditions' may simply not exist."

"The first step came from W. Wien, whose displacement law of 1893 is embodied in the shift of the maximum of spectrum energy density, from red to violet, with increasing temperatures. Wien showed that a universal function of the ratio of temperature to frequency must here be in question. The determination of this universal function was the culmination of the insight and consistent labors of Planck (1900), who by postulating the energy quantum, became the creator of modern thermodynamics; for this energy element is a saucy reality, whose purpose is to stay. It not only tells us all we know of the distribution of energy in the black body spectrum in its thermal relations, but it gives us, indirectly, perhaps the most accurate data at hand of the number of molecules per normal cubic centimeter of the gas, of the mean translational energy of its molecules, of the molecular mass, of the Boltzmann entropy constant, even of the charge of the electron or electric atom itself."

"Of the Planck molecular oscillators... If operating continuously under the established electromagnetic laws they lead to the impossible distributions of energy in the spectrum investigated by Rayleigh and Jeans. But if emitting only, when their energy content is a whole number of energy elements, a case thus involving the entropy probability of Boltzmann, Wien's law and the numerical data referred to are deducible with astounding precision."

"We show that it is natural to introduce the concept of black-hole entropy as the measure of information about a black-hole interior which is inaccessible to an exterior observer. Considerations of simplicity and consistency, and dimensional arguments indicate that the black-hole entropy is equal to the ratio of the black-hole area to the square of the Planck length times a dimensionless constant of order unity. A different approach making use of the specific properties of Kerr black holes and of concepts from information theory leads to the same conclusion, and suggests a definite value for the constant."

"For well over a hundred years, a basic antithesis was noticed between inanimate and animate nature. The direction of physical events is prescribed by the second principle of thermodynamics... the general trend of physical happenings is toward most probable states, that is, maximum entropy and progressive destruction of differentiation and order. ...The system will tend toward thermal equilibrium ...a state of most probable distribution of molecules ...disappearance of the temperature gradient and uniform distribution ...maximum entropy. "Higher," directed forms of energy (e.g., mechanical, electric, chemical) are dissipated... progressively converted into the lowest form of energy, i.e., undirected heat movement of molecules; chemical systems tend toward equilibria with maximum entropy; machines wear out owing to friction; in communication channels, information can only be lost by conversion of messages into noise but not vice versa, and so forth."

"If for the entire universe we conceive the same magnitude to be determined, consistently and with due regard to all circumstances, which for a single body I have called entropy, and if at the same time we introduce the other and simpler conception of energy, we may express in the following manner the fundamental laws of the universe which correspond to the two fundamental theorems of the mechanical theory of heat. 1. The energy of the universe is constant. 2. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum."

"All this prompts the question of why, from the infinite rage of possible values that Nature could have selected for the fundamental constants, and from the infinite variety of initial conditions that could have characterized the primeval universe, the actual values and conditions conspire to produce the particular range of special features that we observe. For clearly the universe is a very special place: exceedingly uniform on a large scale, yet not so precisely uniform that galaxies could not form; extremely low entropy per , and hence cool enough for chemistry to happen; almost zero cosmic propulsion and an expansion rate tuned to that energy content to unbelievable accuracy; values for the strengths of its forces that permit nuclei to exist, yet do not burn up all the cosmic , and many more apparent accidents of fortune."

"The fundamental problem about trying to define life in terms of physics is easily explained. If you go to a physics department... you'll be given a definition in terms of matter... force... energy... entropy... free energy, molecular binding affinities, and so on. If you go to a biology department... you'll be given a very different narrative in terms of... instructions, transcription, , translation, coding, signals... Biologists use information-speak... informational qualities... physicists define life in terms of physical quantities."

"Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine (Sep. 7, 2019) 6th International FQXi Conference, "Mind Matters: Intelligence and Agency in the Physical World." A YouTube video source, 4:31."

"I know of no theorem that tells you... the maximum amount of change that agency can achieve in the universe, and what interests me... is agency at the end of the universe. If you end up in , which has a temperature and a horizon entropy, can you do anything with... those thermal fluctuations? Can you mine them... to extract energy?"

"Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine (Sep. 7, 2019) 6th International FQXi Conference, "Mind Matters: Intelligence and Agency in the Physical World." A YouTube video source, 17:22."

"In the year 1900 Max Planck wrote... E = hv, where E is the energy of a light wave, v is its , and h is... . It said that energy and frequency are the same thing measured in different units. Plank's constant gives you a rate of exchange for for converting frequency into energy... But in the year 1900 this made no physical sense. Even Plank himself did not understand it. ...Now Hawking has written down an equation which looks rather like Plank's equation... S = kA, where S is the entropy of a black hole, A is the area of its surface, and k is... Hawking's constant. Entropy means roughly the same thing as the of an object. ...Hawking's equation says that entropy is really the same thing as area. The exchange rate... is given by Hawking's constant... But what does it really mean to say that entropy and area are the same thing? We are as far away from understanding that now as Planck was of understanding quantum mechanics in 1900. ...[T]his equation will emerge as a central feature of the still unborn theory which will tie together gravitation and quantum mechanics and thermodynamics."

"If I took a heavy weight on the floor here and pushed it, it would slide and stop. ... So, a frictional effect seems to be irreversible. ... a frictional effect ... is the result of enormous complexity of the interaction of the block with the wood ... the jiggling of the atoms inside the wood of the block is changed into disorganized irregular wiggle-waggles of the atoms in the wood."

"Newton and his theories were a step ahead of the technologies that would define his age. Thermodynamics, the grand theoretical vision of the nineteenth century, operated in the other direction with practice leading theory. The sweeping concepts of energy, , work and entropy, which thermodynamics (and its later form, statistical mechanics) would embrace, began first on the shop floor. Originally the domain of engineers, thermodynamics emerged from their engagement with machines. Only later did this study of heat and its transformation rise to the heights of abstract physics and, finally, to a new cosmological vision."

"Black holes have the universe's most inscrutable poker faces. ...When you've seen one black hole with a given mass, charge, and spin (though you've learned these thing indirectly, through their effect on surrounding gas and stars...) you've definitely seen them all. ...black holes contain the highest possible entropy ...a measure of the number of rearrangements of an object's internal constituents that have no effect on its appearance. ...Black holes have a monopoly on maximal disorder. ...As matter takes the plunge across a black hole's ravenous , not only does the black hole's entropy increase, but its size increases as well. ...the amount of entropy ...tells us something about space itself: the maximum entropy that can be crammed into a region of space—any region of space, anywhere, anytime—is equal to the entropy contained within a black hole whose size equals the region in question."

"A natural guess is that... a black hole's entropy is... proportional to its volume. But in the 1970s and Stephen Hawking discovered that this isn't right. Their... analyses showed that the entropy... is proportional to the area of its ... less than what we'd naïvely guess. ...Berkenstein and Hawking found that... each square being one by one Planck length... the black hole's entropy equals the number of such squares that can fit on its surface... each Planck square is a minimal unit of space, and each carries a minimal, single unit of entropy. This suggests that there is nothing, even in principle, that can take place within a Planck square, because any such activity could support disorder and hence the Planck square could contain more than a single unit of entropy... Once again... we are led to the notion of an elemental spatial entity."

"[F]or a physicist, the upper limit to entropy... is a critical, almost sacred quantity. ...the Bekenstein and Hawking result tells us that a theory that includes gravity is, in some sense, simpler than a theory that doesn't. ...If the maximum entropy in any given region of space is proportional to the region's surface area and not its volume, then perhaps the true, fundamental degrees of freedom—the attributes that have the potential to give rise to that disorder—actually reside on the region's surface and not within its volume. Maybe... the universe's physical processes take place on a thin, distant surface that surrounds us, and all we see and experience is merely a projection of those processes. Maybe... the universe is rather like a hologram."

"Just like a computer, we must remember things in the order in which entropy increases. This makes the second law of thermodynamics almost trivial. Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases. You can’t have a safer bet than that!"

"The homeostatic principle does not apply literally to the functioning of all complex living systems, in that in counteracting entropy they move toward growth and expansion."

"Because entropy is not really a classical quantity, we must build quantum mechanics into the definition. ... It suffices to define entropy as the logarithm of the number of quantum states accessible to a system."

"As the natural sciences have developed to encompass increasingly complex systems, scientific rationality has become ever more statistical, or probabilistic. The deterministic classical mechanics of the enlightenment was revolutionized by the near-equilibrium statistical mechanics of late 19th century atomists, by quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, and by the far-from-equilibrium complexity theorists of the later 20th century. Mathematical , information theory, and quantitative social sciences compounded the trend. Forces, objects, and natural types were progressively dissolved into statistical distributions: heterogeneous clouds, entropy deviations, s, gene frequencies, noise-signal ratios and redundancies, dissipative structures, and complex systems at the edge of chaos."

"So if we're going to ask... What is life? ...Erwin Schrödinger wrote a famous book on that theme ...Two famous ideas ...emerged ...one ...was ...that genes are a code-script, and that was the first time anybody had used the word "code-script" or really thought in terms of information, in biology. ...This was before DNA was discovered. He was a direct inspiration to Watson and Crick and many others. The second theme... was how life maintains its organization over time, and why don't we just fall to pieces as entropy would tend to suggest... He talked about life feeding on negative entropy, or "negentropy"... [H]e talked about continually sucking order... from its environment. ...[I]t's a wonderful book. ...[H]e said, "If I had been catering for physicists alone I should have let the discussion turn on free energy instead." ...In more modern terms he's saying something like life is the harnessing of in such a way that the energy-harnessing device makes a copy of itself. ...[H]e's linking the two key themes of biology ...information and energy together."

"The new information technologies can be seen to drive societies toward increasingly dynamic high-energy regions further and further from thermodynamical equilibrium, characterized by decreasing specific entropy and increasingly dense free-energy flows, accessed and processed by more and more complex social, economic, and political structures."

"There is nothing supernatural about the process of to states of higher entropy; it is a general property of systems, regardless of their materials and origin. It does not violate the Second Law of thermodynamics since the decrease in entropy within an open system is always offset by the increase of entropy in its surroundings."

"After the invention of the steam-engine... by James Watt, the attention of engineers and of scientific men was directed to... its further improvement. ...Sadi Carnot, in 1824, published Réflexions sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu... [which] examined the relations between and the work done by heat used in an ideal engine, and by reducing the problem to its simplest form and avoiding...questions relating to details, he succeeded in establishing the conditions upon which the economical working of all heat-engines depends. ...Though the proof was invalid, the proposition remained true... Carnot's memoir remained for a long time unappreciated, and it was not until use was made of it by William Thomson... in 1848, to establish an absolute scale of temperature, that the merits of the method proposed in it were recognized. ...[H]e found that Carnot's proposition could no longer be proved by denying the possibility of "the ," and was led to lay down a second fundamental principle... now called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. ...It was published in March, 1851. In the previous year Clausias published a discussion of the same question... in which he lays down a principle for use in the demonstration of Carnot’s proposition, which, while not the same in form as Thomson’s, is the same in content, and ranks as another statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Clausius followed up this paper by others, and subsequently published a book in which the subject of Thermodynamics was given a systematic treatment, and in which he introduced and developed the important function called by him the ."

"The most common way to describe entropy is as disorder... associated with things becoming more mixed, random and less ordered, but... the best way to think about entropy is as the tendency of energy to spread out. ...Most of the laws of physics work... the same... forwards or backwards in time. ...So how does this clear time dependence arise? ...[T]his is where Ludwig Boltzmann made an important insight. Heat flowing from cold to hot is not impossible, it's just improbable. ...In everyday solids there are about 100 trillion trillion atoms and even more energy packets, so heat flowing from cold to hot is just so unlikely that it never happens. ...[I]f the ...tendency is to spread out and for things to get messier, then how is it possible to have ...air conditioning, where the cold interior gets cooler and the hot exterior gets hotter? Energy is going from cold to hot, decreasing the entropy of the house. ...[T]his ...is only possible by increasing the entropy a greater amount ...at a power plant ...heating up the environment ...and creating waste heat in the fans and compressor [of the air conditioner]. ...How is there any structure left on earth? ...[I]f the earth were a the energy would spread out completely, meaning all life would cease, everything would decay and mix, and ...reach the same temperature. But luckily the earth is not a closed system, because we have the sun."

"You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage."

"The equations of Newtonian mechanics are reversible in time and Poincaré proved that if a mechanical system is in a given state it will return infinitely often to a state arbitrarily close to the given one. Zermelo deduced that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is impossible in a mechanical system. Boltzmann asserted that entropy increases almost always, rather than always. However he believed that Poincaré's result, although correct in theory, was in practice impossible to observe since the time before a system returns to near its original state was too long."

"Let's talk some energy transfer principles. ...My Grandpappy always used to say "hot goes to cold." ...Things of a higher energy intensity state tend to equalize with things at a lower intensity energy state. ...Where there's differences, things tend towards equilibrium... You put a ball on top of a hill and you give it a chance to roll down the hill, that's what's going to happen... If you leave a big pile of sand outside long enough, it's going to flatten out. ...You take an ice cube and hold it in your hand ...heat goes out of your hand and melts the ice cube until that water becomes the same temperature as your hand. ...[V]oltage tends toward equilibrium ...If you have this ...high voltage [or current] ...stored in a battery ...[T]ake a wire and hook it from one side to the other ...It's going to equalize ...and the battery's going to be dead ..."

"Energy in the universe is constant and it can't be destroyed or created. [1st Law of Thermodynamics] ...You've got what's you've got. You've got entropy, which is a state of disorder, so things tend [from] order to disorder, but you're not going to destroy [the energy]. &bull; Energy goes from organized and usable to disorganized and unusable, and it seeks equilibrium. That's the 2nd law and discusses entropy, which is just decay and disorder and death and destruction and... all that good stuff! All the happy stuff! When you get to be my age, you kind of look forward to it so it's not necessarily that bad. &bull; Molecular motion stops, as does entropy, at . [3rd law] So when you get to absolute zero... nothing moves, which is why we can't really get there... because... we always take heat out of things by putting it into something else [at a lower temperature]... &bull; Hot goes to cold. (Energy moves from higher temperature to lower temperature.) &bull; High voltage goes to lower voltage. (Electrical current moves from high potential to low potential.) &bull; High pressure goes to low pressure."

"Investigations of the entropy of substances at low temperatures have produced very important information regarding the structure of crystals, the work of Giauque and his collaborators being particularly noteworthy. For example, the observed entropy of crystalline hydrogen shows that even at very low temperatures the molecules of orthohydrogen in the crystal are rotating about as freely as in the gas; ... subsequent to this discovery the phenomenon of rotation of molecules in crystals was found to be not uncommon."

"Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is."

"My colleague Paul Glansdorff and I have investigated the problem as to if the results of near-equilibrium can be extrapolated to those of far - from-equilibrium situations and have arrived at a surprising conclusion: Contrary to what happens at equilibrium, or near equilibrium, systems far from equilibrium do not conform to any minimum principle that is valid for functions of free energy or entropy production."

"The functional order maintained within living systems seems to defy the Second Law; nonequilibrium thermodynamics describes how such systems come to terms with entropy."

"In an isolated system, which cannot exchange energy and matter with the surroundings, this tendency is expressed in terms of a function of the macroscopic state of the system: the entropy."

"Entropy is the price of structure."

"As far as we know, entropy increases throughout the portion of the universe observable from Earth. It does not seem probable to us, but in any case nothing excludes, that beyond the particle horizon which marks the maximum limit of observations there exist regions in which the arrow of time is reversed compared to ours and in which entropy decreases. I dare not think of the theoretical and observational complications that would arise if the matter contained in one of these anomalous regions began to interact with ours."

"My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'"

"Prigogine was also concerned with the broader philosophical issues raised by his work. In the 19th century the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics, with its prediction of a relentless movement of the universe toward a state of maximum entropy, generated a pessimistic attitude about nature and science. Prigogine felt that his discovery of self-organizing systems constituted a more optimistic interpretation of the consequences of thermodynamics. In addition, his work led to a new view of the role of time in the physical sciences."

"Entropy... we shall use this property in a specific and limited manner. ...The following are two implications of this property: 1. If a gas or vapor is compressed or expanded frictionlessly without adding or removing heat during the process, the entropy of the substance remains constant. 2. In the process implied in implication 1, the change in represents the amount of work per unit mass required by the compression or delivered by the expansion. Possibly the greatest possible use we shall have for entropy is to read lines of constant entropy on graphs in computing the work of compression in cycles."

"Why is entropy at the beginning of time so low, and the entropy in a black hole so high? ...We ...don't know that the entropy was low ...We don't even know if there was a beginning of time. ...[E]ntropy ...is the physicist's measure of how messy things are, so my room ...tends to get higher and higher entropy, messier and messier. Why... eggs fall on the floor and break, and not... fly up and unbreak? People argued about that for a very long time until the shocking insight... that it was very low 13.4 billion years ago at the time when those... baby pictures of our universe were given off... the cosmic microwave background. ...So somehow, our flow of time towards greater messiness has something to do with our origin of our universe? That... we have learned. ...But now the question of why was that is something where many of my colleagues disagree violently... I have written a paper... which... has very little support... anyway, ...if you take seriously the idea of inflation and also this theory that the does not collapse, according to Hugh Everett, you can do some math and get an explanation... but... it's a wonderful mystery, and I'm open to all ideas... and black holes... is something else we know very little... ultimately where there are great truths yet to be discovered."

"One could... safely declare that 'Physics... can be defined as that subject which treats of the transformation of energy.' The philosophical version of Herakleitos and Empedokles... a continual cycle of changes and exchanges, had... crystallized into a quantitative physical theory. But this... picture... was... incomplete. For... there was a second, equally general and fundamental element in Nature—a directional one. This had first been formulated in the 1820s by the Mozart of modern physics, Sadi Carnot. ...Carnot started with the question: What proportion of the in any system is 'available' as a means of producing ? ...Carnot demonstrated ...a one-hundred-per-cent-efficient engine could exploit only a fraction of the heat supplied to it... A 'super-efficient' machine which could exploit all the heat supplied, would be (as Carnot's mathematics proved) a machine... one could get out of it more energy than was supplied... In an ... physical changes could at most be perfectly reversible; [but] in normal cases they would result in the progressive... 'degradation' of mechanical energy by the production of unavailable heat. To characterize this... Clausius coined the word ... [T]he directional principle of Carnot and Clausias (which gave precise expression to Newton's insight that 'motion is more easily lost than got, and is continually upon the decrease') became the Second Law of Thermodynamics."

"The third model regards mind as an information processing system. This is the model of mind subscribed to by cognitive psychologists and also to some extent by the ego psychologists. Since an acquisition of information entails maximization of negative entropy and complexity, this model of mind assumes mind to be an open system."

"It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through . Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus. This complex of behavior is ignored by the average man, and in particular does not play the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just as individual physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the organic responses of society itself. I do not mean that the sociologist is unaware of the existence and complex nature of communications in society, but until recently he has tended to overlook the extent to which they are the cement which binds its fabric together."

"Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape."

"He sat in the window thinking. Man has a for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature . . . the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while."

"Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There is no final revolution, no final number. The social revolution is only one of an infinite number of numbers: the law of revolution is not a social law, but an immeasurably greater one. It is a cosmic, universal law—like the laws of the and of the dissipation of energy (entropy). Some day, an exact formula for the law of revolution will be established. And in this formula, nations, classes, stars—and books—will be expressed as numerical quantities."

"[M]y previous studies on the second law of thermodynamics served me here... in that my first impulse was to bring not the temperature but the entropy of the resonator into relation with its energy, more accurately not the entropy itself but its second derivative with respect to the energy... [T]his differential coefficient... has a direct physical significance for the irreversibility of the exchange of energy between the resonator and the radiation."

"But as I was... too much devoted to pure phenomenology to inquire more closely into the relation between entropy and probability, I felt compelled to limit myself to the available experimental results. Now, at that time... 1899, interest was centred on the law of the distribution of energy... proposed by W. Wien... On calculating the relation following from this law between the entropy and energy of a resonator the remarkable result is obtained that the reciprocal value of the above differential coeffcient... R, is proportional to the energy. This extremely simple relation can be regarded as an adequate expression of Wien's law..."

"I was... occupied with the task of giving it a real physical meaning, and this... led me, along Boltzmann's line... to the consideration of the relation between entropy and probability... after some weeks of the most intense work of my life clearness began to dawn... and an unexpected view revealed itself..."

"Entropy, according to Boltzmann, is a measure of a physical probability, and the meaning of the second law of thermodynamics is that the more probable a state is, the more frequently will it occur in nature."

"[W]hat one measures are only the differences of entropy, and never entropy itself, and consequently one cannot speak... of the absolute entropy of a state. But nevertheless the introduction of an appropriately defined absolute magnitude of entropy is... recommended... by its help certain general laws can be formulated with great simplicity."

"The significant part played in the origin of the classical thermodynamics by mental experiments is now taken over in the quantum theory by P. Ehrenfest's hypothesis of the adiabatic invariance; and just as the principle introduced by R. Clausius, that any two states of a material system are mutually interconvertible on suitable treatment by reversible processes, formed the basis for the measurement of entropy, just so do the new ideas of Bohr show a way into the midst of the wonderland he has discovered."

"Entropy continually increases. We can, by isolating parts of the world and postulating rather idealized conditions... arrest the increase, but we cannot turn it into a decrease. ...The law that entropy always increases—the second law of thermodynamics—holds... the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is... found to be against the second law... I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

"I wish I could convey to you the amazing power of this conception of entropy in scientific research. From the property that entropy must always increase, practical methods of measuring it have been found. The chain of deductions from this simple law have been almost illimitable... equally successful in... theoretical physics and the practical tasks of the engineer. ...It is not concerned with the nature of the individual; it is interested in him only as a component of the crowd. ...[T]he method is applicable in fields of research where our ignorance has scarcely begun to lift ..."

"Thermodynamical Equilibrium. Progress of time introduces more of the random element into the constitution of the world. ...[T]he world contains both chance and design, or... antithesis of chance. ...[O]ur method of measurement of entropy: we assign to the organization or non-chance element a measure... proportional to the strength of our disbelief in a chance origin of it. ...The scientific name for a fortuitous concourse of atoms is "thermodynamic equilibrium". ...Thermodynamic equilibrium is the... case... in which no increase in the random element can occur... [i.e.] shuffling is... as thorough as possible. ...In such a region we lose time's arrow. ...[T]he arrow points in the direction of increase of the random element. ...The arrow does not know which direction to point."

"Is the random element... the only feature of the physical world which can furnish time with an arrow? ...Nothing in the statistics of an assemblage can distinguish a direction of time when entropy fails to distinguish one. ...[T]his law was only discovered in the last few years ...It is accepted as fundamental in ...atoms and radiation and had proved to be one of the most powerful weapons of progress in such researches. It does not seem to be... deducible from the second law..."

"Whilst the physicist would... say that the matter of this... [dining] table... is really a curvature of space, and its colour is really an electromagnetic wavelength, I do not think that he would say that the familiar moving on of time is really an entropy-gradient. ...[T]here is something as yet ungrasped behind the notion of entropy—some mystic interpretation... not apparent in the definition... [W]e strive to see that entropy-gradient may really be the moving on of time (instead of vice-versa)."

"The more closely we examine the association of entropy with "becoming" the greater do the obstacles appear. If entropy were one of the elementary indefinables of physics there would be no difficulty. Or if the moving on of time were something of which we were made aware through our sense organs there would be no difficulty. ...Suppose that we had to identify "becoming" with an electrical potential-gradient ...through the readings of a voltmeter."

"[S]uppose that we had to identify force with entropy-gradient. That would only mean that entropy-gradient is a condition which stimulates a nerve, which thereupon transmits an impulse to the brain, out of which the mind weaves its own peculiar impression of force. ...It is absurd to pretend that we are in ignorance of the nature of organisation in the external world in the same way that we are ignorant of the intrinsic nature of potential. It is absurd to pretend that we have no justifiable conception of "becoming"... That dynamical quality... has to do much more than pull the trigger of a nerve. ...a moving on of time is a condition of consciousness. ...It is the innermost Ego of all which is and becomes."

"Consciousness, besides detecting time's arrow, also roughly measures the passage of time. ...but is a bit of a bungler in carrying it out. ...Our consciousness somehow manages to keep ...record of the flight of time ...reading some kind of clock in the material brain ...a better analogy would be an entropy-clock ...primarily for measuring the rate of disorganisation of energy, and only roughly keeping pace with time. ...[I]n forming our ideas of duration and of becoming... [e]ntropy-gradient is... the direct equivalent of the time of consciousness in both... aspects. Duration measured by physical clocks (time-like interval) is only remotely connected."

"[T]he conception associated with entropy... marked a reaction from the view that everything to which science must pay attention is discovered by a microscopic dissection of objects. ...[T]he centre of interest is shifted from the entities reached by the customary analysis (atoms, electric potentials, etc.) to qualities possessed by the system as a whole... The artist... resorts to an impressionist painting. ...[T]he physicist has found ...his impressionist scheme is just as much exact science and even more practical ...than his microscopic scheme."

"Entropy... was discovered and exalted because it was essential to practical applications of physics... But by it science has been saved from a fatal narrowness. ...[T]here would have been nothing to represent "becoming" in the physical world."

"Entropy was not in the same category as the other physical quantities ...and the extension ...was in a very dangerous direction. ...But entropy had secured a firm place in physics before it was discovered that it was a measure of the random element in arrangement. It was in great favour with the engineers. ...[A]t that time it was the general assumption that the Creation was the work of an engineer (not of a mathematician, as is the fashion nowadays)."

"Suppose that we are asked to arrange the following in two categories— distance, mass, electric force, entropy, beauty, melody. [T]here are the strongest grounds for placing entropy alongside beauty and melody... Entropy is only found when the parts are viewed in association... [as are] beauty and melody. All three are features of arrangement. ...The reason why this [entropy] stranger can pass itself off among the aborigines of the physical world is... the language of arithmetic. It has... measure-number... at home in physics."

"It had become the regular outlook of science... that constellations are not to be taken seriously, until the constellation of entropy made a solitary exception. When we analyze the picture into a large number of particles of paints, we lose the aesthetic significance of the picture. The particles... go into the scientific inventory, and it is claimed that everything that there really was in the picture is kept. But this way of keeping... may be... losing ... The essence of a picture... is arrangement."

"I cannot read any significance into a physical world that is held... upside down. For that reason I am interested in entropy not only because it shortens calculations which can be made by other methods, but because it determines an orientation which cannot be found by other methods. ...[T]ime makes a dual entry and thus forms an intermediate link between the internal and the external. This is shadowed partially by the scientific world of primary physics (which excludes time's arrow), but fully when we... include entropy. ...[It] has generally been assumed that the object of the quest is to find out all that really exists. There is another quest... to find out all that really becomes."

"The discrimination between cause and effect depends on time's arrow and can only be settled by reference to entropy."

"Except for action and entropy (which belongs to an entirely different class of physical conceptions) all the quantities prominent in pre-relativity physics refer to the three-dimensional sections which are different for different observers."

"I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. ...I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling twenty miles a second around the sun—a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether... I ought really to look at the problem four-dimensionally as concerning the intersection of my world-line with that of the plank. Then again it is necessary to determine in which direction the entropy of the world is increasing in order to make sure that my passage over the threshold is an entrance, not an exit. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether... barn... or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man... rather than wait til all the difficulties in... scientific ingress are resolved."

"I was interested in the concept introduced by Clausius, entropy.., (in addition to energy,) one of the most important variables of nature."

"Energy remains constant and entropy always grows and can never be reduced... the essence of the second law of thermodynamics... [i.e.,] the entropy of a system of bodies can... only increase."

"In the limiting case, [entropy] stays the same. If it increases.., the process is irreversible. If it remains the same.., the process is reversible... [i.e.,] you can let it run backwards."

"When occurs, entropy has reached... maximum. If entropy can no longer grow.., no change can occur. This... I applied to physical-chemical and to radiation equilibria."

"I did not find the entropy of heat radiation... purely theoretically in the beginning. I only found it by reference to experimental measurements... To interpret these laws... found experimentally.., I was guided by the thoughts of Ludwig Boltzmann.., who was able to interpret the entropy of a from... atomic theory, as the logarithm of the probability of the state of the gas."

"When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on... moving, exchanging material with its environment... When a system... is not alive... all motion usually comes to a standstill... as a result of friction... [T]he whole system fades away into a dead, inert lump of matter. A permanent state is reached, in which no observable events occur. The physicist calls this the state of thermodynamic equilibrium, or of 'maxiumum entropy'."

"What is entropy? ...a measurable physical quantity just like the length ...temperature ...the heat of fusion ...or the specific heat of any given substance. At ... ...the entropy of any substance is zero. When you bring the substance into any other state by slow, reversible little steps ...the entropy increases by an amount computed by dividing every little portion of heat you had to supply ...by the absolute temperature at which it was supplied ...and by summing up all these small contributions."

"[T]he statistical concept of order and disorder... was revealed by... Boltzmann and Gibbs... This too is an exact quantitative connection...entropy = k\log Dwhere k is the... and D is... the atomistic disorder of the body... The disorder... is partly... heat of motion, partly... atoms and molecules being mixed at random... e.g., sugar and water molecules... The gradual 'spreading out' of the sugar over all the water... increases the disorder D, and hence (since the logarithm of D increases with D) the entropy. ...[A]ny supply of heat increases the turmoil of heat motion, that is ...increases D... [W]hen you melt a crystal... you... destroy the neat and permanent arrangement of... atoms or molecules and turn the crystal lattice into a continually changing random distribution."

"If D is a measure of disorder... 1/D... can be regarded as a... measure of order. Since the logarithm of 1/D is... minus the logarithm of D...-(entropy) = k\log 1/D"

"[T]he device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (...low level of entropy) ...consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment."

"[H]igher animals... feed upon... the extremely well-ordered state of... foodstuffs. After utilizing it they return it in a... degraded form—not entirely degraded... for plants can... use... it. (...[Plants] have their most powerful supply of 'negative entropy' in the sunlight)."

"The remarks on negative entropy have met with doubt and opposition from physicist colleagues. ...[I]f I had been catering for them alone I should have let the discussion turn on free energy instead. It is the more familiar notion... [b]ut seemed linguistically too near energy for... the average reader... the concept is a rather intricate one, whose relation to Boltzmann's order-disorder principle is less easy to trace... '[E]ntropy with a negative sign'... is not my invention. It... [is] precisely the thing on which Boltzmann's original argument turned."

"Energy is needed to replace not only the mechanical energy of our bodily exertions, but also the heat we continually give off... And that we give off heat is not accidental, but essential. For this is precisely the manner in which we dispose of the surplus entropy we continually produce in our... life process."

"Nernst's discovery was induced by the fact that even at room temperature entropy plays an astonishingly insignificant role in many chemical reactions."

"Carnot was... wrong about his perception of the steam engine, but... the essence... shone through... his fundamental misconception... that heat is a fluid—caloric—that flows from a hot reservoir [source] to a cold sink... [to] turn an engine... as [does] a waterwheel... by water. ...He ...considered heat ...neither created not destroyed as it flowed ...[H]e was able to prove ...efficiency of an idealized steam engine ...that ignores friction, leaks ...[etc.] is determined only by the temperatures of the ...source and ...sink ...independent of ...pressure and ...working substance [e.g., water, steam or air]. ...[T]he hot reservoir should be as hot as possible and the cold... as cold as possible. All other variables were fundamentally irrelevant."

"Kelvin... formed... the view that... the essential component of the steam engine is the cold sink—the surroundings into which waste heat is discarded. The crucial part of the engine... didn't have to be designed or constructed... inverting common sense. ...Kelvin's conceptual somersault led him to promote ...the central ...cold sink to a universal principle ...all viable engines have a cold sink ...not ...[in] those words but ...[in] essence ...Take away the cold sink and the engine stops ..."

"All viable engines have a cold sink is one statement of the Second Law of thermodynamics. ...[T]his form of words captures its essence."

"Rudolph Clausius... noticed a common feature of nature and had the stature... to publish [in 1850, Über die bewegende Kraft der Wärme (On the motive force of heat)] what others might think a simpleton's observation: heat does not flow from a cooler to a hotter body... [I]n this and subsequent papers he developed this... into a quantitative principle..."

"[T]he law does not prohibit the transfer of heat from cold to hot... [T]o achieve , we have to do work... Clausius's... process... refers to 'natural' or 'spontaneous' changes ...without ...[being] driven by an external agency."

"The quality of stored energy is measured by... entropy. ...[T]he lower the entropy the higher the quality."

"The concept of entropy was... rendered quantitatively precise by Rudolph Clausius in 1856... by defining the change... when energy is transferred to a system as heat. Specifically...Change\;in\;entropy = \frac{energy\;supplied\;as\;heat}{temperature\;at\;which\;the\;transfer\;occurs}[N]ote... temperature... is on the absolute scale..."

"If the same amount of energy is supplied as heat...at a lower temperature... the change in entropy is greater."

"If energy leaves a body as heat... 'energy supplied as heat' is negative, so the change in entropy is negative... the entropy of the body decreases..."

"Work itself does not generate or reduce entropy."

"Clausius proposed... The entropy of an isolated system increases in any spontaneous change."

"[T]he Kelvin statement is equivalent to... 'your engine will work only if you waste some energy'..."

"Suppose we claim... heat flowing in the wrong direction, such as... ice forming in a glass of water... in an oven. ...Energy left the cool... water as heat, so the entropy went down. Because the temperature is low... in the denominator... that decrease in entropy is large. The same energy enters the hot region (...oven), so the entropy of that region increases. However... its temperature is high, [so] that increase in entropy is small. The net effect... a net decrease overall. ...[But] entropy never decreases, so heat cannot flow spontaneously... hot to cold..."

"Clausius... summarized... the First and Second Laws: ...[T]he energy of the world is constant; the entropy strives towards a maximum."

"There was considerable opposition... the Second Law... offended the sensibilities of the age... [H]ow can something increase in abundance? ...Who or what is pouring entropy into the universe..?"

"The [Second] law is... used to predict whether a chemical reaction will run in one direction or another..."

"Ludwig Boltzmann... saw further into the nature of matter than any... contemporaries until... he hanged himself in the face of their incomprehension and rejection of his ideas. Entropy, he showed, is a measure of disorder... A solid... has a lower entropy that the liquid into which it melts. A gas... has a higher entropy than the liquid from which it evaporates. ...When a gas expands to fill an enlarged volume, its disorder and therefore its entropy increases even though we keep its temperature the same... [W]e become less confident... [that] a molecule will be found in a given small region. ...Entropy [also] increases as the thermal disorder of a substance becomes more vigorous, with increasing thermal motion of... atoms... [and] as... positional disorder increases... [the] available positions of... atoms."

"Boltzmann...was driven to his death by the inability of scientists... to come to terms with this profoundly simple insight."

"'[E]nergy supplied as heat' appears in the numerator of Clausius' expression, for the greater the energy... as heat, the greater... increase in disorder and therefore... entropy. The... temperature in the denominator fits... this analogy too... for a given supply of heat... [added to] a cool [little thermal motion] object... will introduce a... [relatively large] disturbance, corresponding to a big rise in entropy... [and the same heat added to a] hot [lots of thermal motion] object has relatively little effect, and the increase in entropy is small."

"The statement that entropy never decreases in any natural change is the same as saying... molecular order never increases on its own... Molecules... will not form... spontaneously into the Statue of Liberty. A gas will not collect spontaneously in one corner of a container."

"Already in 1874, Jules Verne in his novel The Mysterious Island, lets the engineer Cyrus Harding reply when asked what mankind will burn instead of coal, once it has been depleted: water decomposed into its primitive elements. ... and decomposed doubtless, by electricity ... Yes, my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable. Today's energy and transport system, which is based mainly on fossil fuels, can in no way be evaluated as sustainable. In the light of the projected increase of global energy demand, concerns over energy supply security, climate change, local air pollution and increasing prices of energy services are having a growing impact on policy making throughout the world. At present, oil, with a share of more than one third in the global primary energy mix, is still the largest primary fuel and covers more than 95% of the energy demand in the transport sector."

"The medium of energy transport from an atomic reactor to sites at which energy is required should not be electricity, but hydrogen. The term "hydrogen economy" applies to the energetic, ecological, and economic aspects of this concept. The concept envisages reactors held on platforms floating on water. They are in water sufficiently deep to make heat dissipation easy/ The electricity they make would be converted on site to hydrogen and oxygen by hydrolysis. The hydrogen would be piped to distribution stations and thereafter sent to factory and home. Reconversion to electricity would take place in on-site fuel cells, the only side product ebing pure water."

"While industry players have already started the market introduction of hydrogen fuel cell systems, including fuel cell electric vehicles and micro-combined heat and power devices, the use of hydrogen at grid scale requires the challenges of clean hydrogen production, bulk storage and distribution to be resolved. Ultimately, greater government support, in partnership with industry and academia, is still needed to realize hydrogen's potential across all economic sectors."

"Although in many ways hydrogen is an attractive replacement for fossil fuels, it does not occur in nature as the fuel H2. Rather, it occurs in chemical compounds like water or hydrocarbons that must be chemically transformed to yield H2. Hydrogen, like electricity, is a carrier of energy, and like electricity, it must be produced from a natural resource. At present, most of the world’s hydrogen is produced from natural gas by a process called steam reforming. However, producing hydrogen from fossil fuels would rob the hydrogen economy of much of its raison d’être: Steam reforming does not reduce the use of fossil fuels but rather shifts them from end use to an earlier production step; and it still releases carbon to the environment in the form of CO2. Thus, to achieve the benefits of the hydrogen economy, we must ultimately produce hydrogen from non-fossil resources, such as water, using a renewable energy source."

"Unlike CH4 and CO2, ammonia is not a greenhouse gas. In the atmosphere, it quickly forms hydrogen bonds to water vapor and returns to the ground in alkaline rain. However, NH3 is toxic, chills its surroundings rapidly on vaporizing, and releases heat on contact with water. Engineering a safe fuel tank for an ammonia-fueled vehicle would be a key priority. Ammonia is an excellent material for hydrogen storage. ... the volume density of hydrogen in liquid NH3 is more than 40% greater than in liquid H2, and the comparison becomes much more favorable when one considers the weight of the required fuel tank and peripherals. Unlike H2 gas, ammonia explodes in air only over a narrow range of concentrations. Shipping ammonia from production site to point-of-use does not require a great deal of cooling or high pressure. Thousands of miles of NH3 pipeline in the US stand as evidence that reliable infrastructure for NH3 transport and storage has been engineered. In sum, liquid NH3 is not just an excellent hydrogen-storage material but also an ideal medium for moving hydrogenic energy from place to place."

"One alternative to fossil fuels is ‘green’ hydrogen, which can be produced through water electrolysis by using an electric current to split water into hydrogen and oxygen with no greenhouse gas emissions, provided the electricity used to power the process is entirely from renewables. Hydrogen’s high mass energy density, light weight, and facile electrochemical conversion allow it to carry energy across geographical regions through pipelines or in the form of liquid fuels like ammonia on freight ships ... Across sectors as it can be used as a chemical feedstock, burned for heat, used as a reagent for synthetic fuel production, or converted back to electricity through fuel cells. Furthermore, hydrogen’s long-term energy storage capacity in tanks or underground caverns ... makes it one of the only green technologies that can store energy across seasons."

"There are three different primary energy-supply system classes which may be used to implement the hydrogen economy, namely, fossil fuels (coal, petroleum, natural gas, and as yet largely unused supplies such as shale oil, oil from tar sands, natural gas from geo-pressured locations, etc.), nuclear reactors including fission reactors and breeders or fusion nuclear reactors over the very long term, and renewable energy sources (including hydroelectric power systems, wind-energy systems, ocean thermal energy conversion systems, geothermal resources, and a host of direct solar energy-conversion systems including biomass production, photovoltaic energy conversion, solar thermal systems, etc.). Examination of present costs of hydrogen production by any of these means shows that the hydrogen economy favored by people searching for a non-polluting gaseous or liquid energy carrier will not be developed without new discoveries or innovations. Hydrogen may become an important market entry in a world with most of the electricity generated in nuclear fission or breeder reactors when high-temperature waste heat is used to dissociate water in chemical cycles or new inventions and innovations lead to low-cost hydrogen production by applying as yet uneconomical renewable solar techniques that are suitable for large-scale production such as direct water photolysis with suitably tailored band gaps on semiconductors or low-cost electricity supplies generated on ocean-based platforms using temperature differences in the tropical seas."

"… once a healthy cell sort of abandons ship and decides that it's going to just be, like, a ravenous, invasive cancer cell, its voltage changes radically. And what you can do with an ion channel drug is change the electrical state of that cell by messing with the ion channels. And in tadpole experiments — and this is early days, but this is moving really fast. In tadpole experiments, they were able to use ion channel drugs to keep cells that had been genetically engineered to be tumors from changing their electrical voltage, right? And without doing any kind of genetic mucking around, they kept these tumors from forming in tadpoles that had been genetically engineered to express tumors."

"The plasma membrane is a heterogeneous structure whose thickness ia around 75 Å and which bounds the cell. An important constituent is lipid, which often represents as much as 70% of the membrane volume (depending on cell type). The membrane lipid readily excludes the passage of ions; it remains for imbedded proteins to form the channels which permit exchange of ions between intracellular and extracellular space. For nerve and muscle, electrical activation is associated with the movement of sodium and potassium (and other) ions across membranes by means of these channels; the proteins not only facilitate the flow of each ion but they control the flow of each giving rise to the ' of the membrane."

"Waste biomass is a cheap and relatively abundant source of electrons for microbes capable of producing electrical current outside the cell. Rapidly developing microbial electrochemical technologies, such as microbial fuel cells, are part of a diverse platform of future sustainable energy and chemical production technologies. We review the key advances that will enable the use of exoelectrogenic microorganisms to generate biofuels, hydrogen gas, methane, and other valuable inorganic and organic chemicals. Moreover, we examine the key challenges for implementing these systems and compare them to similar renewable energy technologies. Although commercial development is already underway in several different applications, ranging from wastewater treatment to industrial chemical production, further research is needed regarding efficiency, scalability, system lifetimes, and reliability."

"Bioelectricity is about the electrical phenomena of life processes, and is a parallel to the medical subject electrophysiology. One basic mechanism is the energy consuming cell membrane ion pumps polarising a cell, and the action potential generated if the cell is excited and ion channels open. The dipolarisation process generates current flow also in the extracellular volume, which again results in measurable biopotential differences in the tissue. An important part of the subject is intracellular and extracellular single cell measurements with microelecroeds. Single neuron activity and signal transmission can be studied by recording potentials with multiple microelectrode arrays. In addition to measure on endogenic sources, bioelectricty also comprises the use of active stimulating current carrying (CC) electrodes. Since bioelectricity is about life processes the experiments are per definition in vivo or ex vivo."

"The fundamental scientific purpose of the LHC is to explore the inner structure of matter and the forces that govern its behavior, and thereby understand better the present content of the Universe and its evolution since the Big Bang, and possibly into the future. The unparalleled high energy of the LHC, which is designed to be 7 TeV per proton in each colliding beam, and its enormous collision rate, which is planned to attain about a billion collisions per second, will enable the LHC to examine rare processes occurring at very small distances inside matter. It will be a microscope able to explore the inner structure of matter on scales an order of magnitude smaller than any previous collider. The energies involved in the proton-proton collisions will be similar to those in particle collisions in the first trillionth of a second of the history of the Universe. By studying these processes in the laboratory, the LHC experiments will, in a sense, be looking further back into time than is possible with any telescope."

"… The relied not on the detection of photon pairs with a certain energy but on the detection of more of those pairs than expected. That reliance on probabilities is why the L.H.C. and other major collider experiments often have independent teams, working with separate detectors, analyzing the same types of collisions—to avoid biasing each other. It is also the reason for the ."

"With the discovery of the Higgs boson, the next burning question at the LHC is why its mass is so low. Nobody knows the answer to that question, but it is definitely the next hot topic for LHC physicists ..."

"On July 4, scientists working with data from ongoing experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced the discovery of a new particle "consistent with" the Higgs boson — a subatomic particle also colloquially referred to as the "God particle." After years of design and construction, the LHC first sent protons around its 27 kilometer (17 mile) underground tunnel in 2008. Four years later, the LHC's role in the discovery of the Higgs boson provides a final missing piece for the Standard Model of Particle Physics — a piece that may explain how otherwise massless subatomic particles can acquire mass. Gathered here are images from the construction of the massive $4-billion-dollar machine that allowed us peer so closely into the subatomic world."

"Once this (grid energy storage) construction is put into operation, the independence of the central power system will reach a new level. In the context of energy recovery, renewable energy sources, including the construction of hydropower plants, will be made a priority, and we will make every effort to complete the construction of the Erdeneburen Hydropower Plant and start the Eg River Hydropower Plant project. Also, construction projects such as the expansion of Thermal Power Plant 3 to increase its capacity by 75 MW and upgrade to 250 MW, Tavantolgoi Thermal Power Plant, Baganuur Power Plant and Choibalsan Thermal Power Plant to increase capacity by 50 MW will be kicked off without delay. Most recently, the construction of the 116 MW Amgalan Thermal Power Plant, which will provide thermal energy for the eastern region of Ulaanbaatar City, has been started."

"Mongolia is rich in energy resources, but economic progress has been stifled for 34 years due to a lack of energy transition. We are now addressing this gap with a series of reforms, and the results are beginning to show."

"In 2024, we set a goal to increase Ulaanbaatar's energy capacity by 200 MW, and we achieved this goal within one year. Moreover, we managed to supply energy to the Central System ahead of schedule. This accomplishment ensures there will be no electricity restrictions during peak winter loads. Additionally, the Baganuur 50 MW Battery Storage Power Station began supplying energy to the Central System on 13 December 2024. This 50 MW Battery Storage Power Station operates in an energy-efficient manner, storing surplus electricity generated during night time and distributing it during peak hours."

"has not been generally used as a feedstock in simple thermal cracking... because the decomposition temperature is too high and yield of useful products too low. Nevertheless... pyrolysis of methane has been used for the production of acetylene and ... Diamonds can be formed... under suitable conditions... [E]arly stages of...decomposition are... well understood... but... details of later stages are not... clear... All oxidation reactions, including oxidative pyrolysis, have been excluded."

"[A]n overall model for the simulation of pyrolysis reactors should... include the heat, momentum, s differential equations, physicochemical properties (specific heats, enthalpies, thermal conductivities, etc.) firing-box patterns, and sometimes fluid dynamic characterization (as in advanced cracking reactors)."

"Flash pyrolysis has the potential of producing maximum yields of gases and liquids from coal and organic solid wastes such as municipal refuse, tree bark, cow manure, rice hulls and grass straw using simple process equipment. The main features of the process are near ambient pressure, no requirement for added chemicals, low capital investment, high feed throughput flexibility of feedstock, variability of temperature, and minimum feed pretreatment."

"The pyrolysis of and is often the process of choice for the production of . ...Marketing of the products of from ethane pyrolysis is greatly simplified by the low yield of by-products. ...Pyrolysis of ethane and propane produces the lowest yield of byproducts, which... minimizes the size of downstream units... as the depropanizer, debutanizer, and compressors."

"Fire, as the agent for , was a favorite tool of the alchemist. Although the general prevalence... of pyrolysis has long been recognized... in the last six decades... the subject has assumed a scientific basis. Since many... data on have been incidental observations... the information is widely scattered... [T]hat ...records of many melting-point determinations are accompanied by ..."It melts with decomposition" is ...evidence ...the subject ...has ...an unorganized past."

"The transformation of a compound into another substance, or... substances, through... heat alone is... pyrolysis."

"Frequently, pyrolyses are s, but... "Pyrolysis" is... broader... [and] more concise. In "decompositions", there is... formation of at least two simpler substances. In pyrolyses... not always... [R]earrangements may be caused by heat alone. ...[F]ormation of large molecules ...is often effected by heat. Both ...are pyrolytic ...but it would be awkward to classify them as decompositions."

"Some compounds decompose at the temperature of boiling water... others require red heat. ...[C]ompounds may be stable at -40° but not at 0°. All... if caused by temperature alone, are... pyrolysis."

"[T]he great majority of pyrolyses occur at "high" temperatures, but this only means... familiarity with compounds which cannot exist at ordinary temperatures is... extremely limited."

"Occasionally... it will be helpful to note the effect of catalysts... Frequently in s, it is difficult to distinguish between the catalytic and the non-catalytic. ...Glass, or surfaces are the ones which are most used in laboratory pyrolyses. Their catalytic action is, at the best, very slight."

"In larger scale work... metallic surfaces [are usually necessary]. Wilson and Bahlke... reported that in cracking stills... -steels ("stainless" steels) [are best], or aluminum or calorized iron. Copper and some s are not satisfactory, neither... [is] ... These authors were interested in ..."

"Franz Fischer... performed... pyrogenic experiments in a tinned-iron tube, which would have failed in an iron tube because of deposition or other causes. ...[He] has shown that a ferrous sulfide inner lining [formed by passing through] in an iron tube also prevents carbon deposit[s] ..."

"The subject of wood distillation has... been treated in... this series. ...[W]ood is not a compound."

"[S]ubstances... identified among... products of wood distillation may be arranged... in a few groups of related compounds. Much of the accurate knowledge... is due to the work of Klason."

"The groups from [wood distillation] are 1. s; formic to caproic, especially . Also, furoic, angelic, s, and valerolactone. For different woods, the total acid, calculated as acetic acid, varies between 4.3 and 6.8[%]... In vacuum distillation... formic acid may be... as high as 35[%] of the acetic acid, but in ordinary distillation at atmospheric pressure, it varies from 10-20[%] of the acetic acid. Only these two acids appear to be formed in appreciable amounts. 2. Alcohols; especially and , but also isoamyl and isobutyl alcohols, and buten-3-ol-2. The content is usually... 1.3-2[%]. 3. Esters; formed by interaction of the above acids and alcohols. 4. Ketones; ... and... its homologs... [plus] small quantities of , methyl cyclopentanone, and . The acetone is not a primary [distillation] product... but is formed secondarily from the acetic acid... homologs of acetone have a similar history. 5. Aldehydes; , , methylal and dimethyl acetal, valeric aldehyde, and methyl furfural. The pentosans are... the source of the furfural and other... homologs of furan... 6. Phenols and phenol methyl ethers [only about 1 percent of the wood distilled], mostly s of di- and tris. ...These substances come largely from the . 7. [< 0.2 percent of the total] , methyl amine, and methyl pyridine... 8. , , melene, etc. 9. es; the yields of , and vary with the maximum temperature of distillation, but at 350-400° the yields from s are about 8, 4 and 1.5[%], respectively. 10. Water; the yield... varies... 22.3-27.8[%]. 11. '. ...30-45[%] ...depending on the wood, and on the maximum temperature."

"The of mineral or organic material was one of the few preparative methods available to the alchemists and the first chemists. That materials could undergo profound changes at high temperatures became a well-recognized principle... emphasized by... landmarks as the formation of by heating ferrous sulfate (copperas) described by ... Brandt's discovery of in 1669 by destructive distillation of residues from ... isolation of benzene from oil gas by Faraday in 1825 and of pyrrole from bone oil by Runge in 1834."

"s, alkalis, and many other inorganic reagents were available... in the early nineteenth century... [T]heir use often added to... descriptive organic chemistry... without clarifying structural relationships. ...[V]igorous pyrolysis of organic compounds, involving no addition of further groups, remained a common technique until about the end of the nineteenth century. ...[M]any high-temperature reactions are fragmentations which produce simple products ...[D]irect of ...carboxylic acids and ...similar decomposition of carboxylic salts by heating with lime or are... examples."

"Mitscherlich prepared benzene as early as 1834 by vigorous distillation of and lime."

"Prompted by the need of non-petroleum-based fuels, coal research has reemerged... Pyrolysis research... has gained... momentum because of its close connection to combustion, hydropyrolysis and liquification. Spectroscopic and other instrumental techniques are... producing... information about coal structure and pyrolysis mechanisms, while modeling efforts are breaking new ground in sorting out chemical and physical phenomena... [P]ostulates and assumptions of current work provide a meaningful starting point in... theoretical descriptions of greater validity and applicability."

"[T]he survey of experimental results will be confined to flash pyrolysis at the exclusion of slow pyrolysis or ."

"Flash pyrolysis poses three experimental difficulties..: (i) control and measurement of the temperature-time history of the coal particles (ii) suppression of secondary reactions (iii) quantitative collection of products."

"[M]easurement of the coal particles' temperature is not trivial. In many cases the temperature... must be calculated from a model. The other two experimental problems, the suppression of secondary reactions and the collection of products, depend on the reactor geometry and flow pattern..."

"[P]roduct distribution is the most essential information relative to the commercial utilization of pyrolysis and... sheds considerable light on reaction mechanisms."

"[P]roducts can be classified into two groups relative to the temperature dependence of the yields. , water and evolve at lower temperatures with ultimate yields that are essentially independent of temperature above 700°C. The second group... of gaseous hydrocarbons, and evolve at higher temperatures. The ultimate yield of these... continues increasing... up to 1,000°C or higher."

"In s, makes up 50-80% of the weight loss, the remaining consisting of gases, water and ."

"We are... concerned with the evolution of tar and gases during the plastic state of coal. In this... consists of two processes in series: diffusion through the molten coal to some internal surface, that of a bubble or a pore; and transport with the bubble or through the pore to the surface of the particle. The role of preexisting pores is not well understood. ...[A] certain fraction of preexisting pores (< 60 Å) collapse during pyrolysis perhaps due to effects. Pores... 60-300 Å were preserved... but one could not distinguish preexisting pores and pores generated by the evolution of bubbles. It appears likely... the major... mass transfer occurs via bubbles while preexisting bubbles play a... minor role."

"Fast pyrolysis is a new technology that shows... potential for producing... liquid... for fuel applications or as a source for... chemicals."

"Wood and biomass can be used in a variety of ways to provide energy: &bull; by direct combustion... for... heating.., steam production and hence electricity generation. &bull; by gasification to provide fuel gas... for heat, or in an engine or turbine for electricity generation. &bull; by fast pyrolysis to provide a liquid fuel... for fuel oil in... static heating or electricity generation... [and] to produce... chemicals."

"Fast pyrolysis is a high temperature process in which biomass is rapidly heated in the absence of oxygen. ...[I]t decomposes to generate mostly vapours... s and some . After cooling and condensation, a... liquid is formed which has a heating value about half... conventional . ...Fast pyrolysis ...is carefully controlled to give high yields ..."

"[E]ssential features... &bull; high heating and heat transfer rates... usually requires finely ground biomass feed &bull; carefully controlled... reaction temperature... [~]500C... vapour phase... short vapour residence typically [<]2 sec... &bull; rapid cooling of pyrolysis vapours to give... bio-oil product."

"[M]ain product, bio-oil... in yields up to 80%... with byproduct char and ... used within... process so no waste..."

"Pitch is a highly viscous residue remaining from wood pyrolysis... In the days of s, pitch was extremely valuable to seal the wood planking and for... where a tightly sticking, water-resistant material was needed."

"Eventually it was understood that the residue from a fire came from... insufficient oxygen (air) to consume the wood completely. From that... came... recognition of making charcoal deliberately by heating wood in the absence of air, or burning under severely air-limited conditions. ...[I]t was [later] realized ...volatile materials "cooked" out ...during conversion... also had valuable uses."

"Production of ... with [other] chemical products... involves pyrolysis, i.e. decomposition of compounds through application of heat."

"Because pyrolysis converts wood to highly ... charcoal... [it] is also known as . Since volatile compounds are driven off, but... residual non-volatile[s are] altered.., another name... is ."

"[T]hermal decomposition of wood begins [≈]250°C. Industrial carbonization... at ≈500°C."

"Carbonization drives off moisture... with... low molecular weight organic compounds... from extractives and... pyrolysis of ... s. Condensing vapors from carbonization produces... ... a dilute solution of up to 50 small, polar (...[i.e.] water soluble) organic compounds. ...[M]ost important ...are , , and ."

"Condensable non-aqueous ...wood tars ...[are] produced by pyrolysis and destructive distillation. Tars can be fractionated into [1] light oils, boiling below 200°C... [2] heavy tars, boiling above that... and [3] pitch. Light tars tend to be mixtures of aldehydes, carboxylic acids, esters, and ketones. Heavy oil contains... phenol derivatives; one of its uses... a wood preservative... wood tar creosote..."

"In fuel chemistry... we deal with several kinds of bond, and mixtures of... different compounds. At temperatures high enough to drive pyrolysis of... one kind of bond... other kinds... break... [I]mmediate products may undergo... subsequent reactions. As a result, pyrolysis... give[s] complex mixtures of products... of little utility if the intent is to produce a single product..."

"With... ... sealed within layers of inorganic ... long... geological processes can operate. Assuming typical s... [b]urial to 10 km would be equivalent to... 100-300°C. These... seem too low to drive... pyrolysis reactions... significant at... [≈]350°C. But... time is on our side... in geological time, tens of millions of years for catagenesis of humic kerogen."

"Like their aliphatic counterparts, the smaller phenols are also water-soluble. Phenol... has... solubility...[≈]82 g/kg water. ...Phenols are produced in coal and wood pyrolysis. Any water used in such processes becomes contaminated with phenols (as well as other compounds) and requires processing before being released... into the environment."

"The organic material in oil shales requires pyrolysis to force the catagenesis of ... This can be done above ground in kilns, or underground with the shale still in place."

"Gasification of coal... [goes] back to the 1790s at least. Before World War II, the United States... had... [≈20,000] small coal gassifiers... a popular fuel gas until... the interstate natural gas pipeline network... after World War II. Many... were simple pyrolysis or steam-carbon reactions in... crude equipment having serious environmental problems."

"Groundwater could become contaminated by organic compounds during coal pyrolysis, and by various inorganic compounds liberated as the coal is consumed. Some... pose problems for environmental quality or human health."

"To a large extent, biomass resembles gasification, with some distinctions... The kinds... considered... include wood, wood wastes (e.g. sawdust), and s. Some... grass, such as switchgrass... grown as energy crops might also serve... [R]elative to coal, biomass usually has lower calorific value... and sulfur... higher moisture, higher... and oxygen, and produces a higher yield of volatiles on pyrolysis. ...Generally biomass chars are more reactive than coal chars, so... may[be]... less and oxygen are needed for... [its] gasification."

"[L]iquids can be produced from coal by... pyrolysis... by dissolution... [i.e.] solvent extraction... or by reaction of coal with or with solvents... donating hydrogen (hydroliquification). All... constitute... coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology."

"Pyrolysis of biomass, heavy petroleum fractions, , , and usually produces some amount of liquid product. Pyrolysis... without an externally added... [source] is constrained... Pyrolysis produces liquids, but leaves a residue of carbonaceous char or coke. Usually... gases also form. The... proportions of solid, liquid, and gas depend on the... feedstock and... reaction conditions."

"[L]arge particles may not be heated uniformly... consequently pyrolysis yields are less. Heating rate is also important. During slow heat-up as... in simple... s most coals begin to decompose [≈]350-400°C. ...[L]iquid and gaseous products ...peak ...[≈]425-475°C. This phase of pyrolysis ends ...[≈]500-550°C. ...[V]ery rapid heating [e.g.] in entrained flow gasifiers ...quickly by-passes this stage, so... evolution of liquids is nil."

"pyrolysis is... complicated... by the fact... primary pyrolysis products... are... able to react among themselves... with ... from the moisture in the coal... with char or coke, or... several of these. The products... often called secondary... may differ... from the primary... Primary products can be studied... if... quench[ed]... rapidly or... [fed] directly into a suitable... instrument... [e.g.] a gas chromatograph."

"In industrial practice... design of the pyrolysis reactor affects... composition of liquid products, because... [it] determines how long... primary products are exposed to pyrolysis temperatures..."

"Commercial... applications of pyrolysis have been to produce... a eous fuel... or a char... Liquids... directly are unsuitable... as fuels... Some... downstream operations would be required... Nevertheless, low-temperature s can be refined... into or ."

"Possibly, future events on the world energy scene will revive interest... Pyrolysis offers... simplicity of process and equipment design relative to gasification and hydroliquification. ...[But] competing technologies usually provide high yields of a single type... gas, liquid or solid... which may offset the added complexity and cost..."

"[R]ules change when an external supply of is... available. Hydropyrolysis, i.e. pyrolizing coal in a hydrogen atmosphere, increases the yields of liquids and gases... [H]ydrogen... stabilizes radicals by hydrogen capping before... termination by recombination reactions that... lead to char... Despite this advantage... hydropyrolysis has never been commercialized."

"[S]tories... about "free oil" from coal pyrolysis, often in reference to a low-temperature ... by ... [≈]80 years ago. Many... accompanied by... conspiracy theories... The , and similar carbonization processes... produce a liquid. Presumably, a... clever accountant could figure out how this... could be "free," provided... markets existed for... large amounts of char and gas produced at the same time, and... could be sold... high enough to compensate for giving away the liquid. Then there's the cost of refining the low-temperature into specification-grade marketable fuel..."

"Often... terms carbonization and pyrolysis are used almost interchangeably. Pyrolysis has the broader meaning: breaking... molecules by... heat or thermal energy. ...[P]yrolysis ...could be run to make gases and liquids rather than solids as the primary product. ... narrowly defined, refers to conversion of a starting material into carbon, or a carbon-rich solid. ...[One can] pyrolyze a hydrocarbon feedstock for the purpose of carbonization, but carbonization is not... pyrolysis by another name. Carbonization can be effected without heat as... primary driving force... Carbonization driven by thermal energy usually requires >500°C."

"Pyrolysis of an oil product or natural gas leads to thermal blacks. ...Acetylene black is made by of acetylene. ...[P]reheated to 800°C ...acetylene is introduced and... because the pyrolysis is exothermic, the temperature... reaches ~2500°C. formation takes place... [800°C-~]2000°C. ...2000-2500°C induces partial of the carbon black. Due to... partial graphitic nature, acelylene blacks have... applications where good [electrical and thermal] conductivity... or... very low chemical reactivity is desirable."

"Almost all pyrolysis reactions are endothermic because they involve breaking bonds in stable compounds."

"Pyrolysis of fossil or s... is... accompanied by char formation. In some cases, this is the point... being an example. ...[I]f pyrolysis were ...done to make gaseous or liquid fuels, and no... market existed for the char, it would be possible to... bury the char... [which] would sequester carbon..."

"[P]yrolysis of biomass to produce char for carbon sequestration has multiple benefits... The product... is... called or Agri-char, sometimes (dark earth)... Trials in Australia have produced a doubling... or tripling of crop production... [C]har is likely to retain some... , , and ... Biochars are very porous... taking up and holding moisture. ...By ...stimulating plant growth, biochar has a double impact... First, it... sequesters carbon. Second... increased growth of plants removes CO, from the atmosphere..."

"Annual production of worldwide amounts to some four gigatonnes. A pyrolysis... that yielded only ten percent could produce enough to fertilize some forty million hectares..."

"s are... ancient technology. Biomass pyrolysis would be "low tech." Farmers could build and install their own... Alternatively, a biochar kiln could be mounted on... a truck... and taken from farm to farm..."

"A comprehensive program..: harvesting and shipping biomass to a centralized biomass or plant within the economically limiting radius, and beyond... converting biomass to biochar in small, decentralized units."