Science Friday: the Physics and Economics Nobel Prizes

Science Friday comes to you rather late today because the esteemed author spent last night watching UNC pull defeat to an entirely pathetic, stupid, penalty-ridden, embarrassing, unprofessional, sorry-ass Florida State football team from the jaws of victory. Not that I'm bitter. Today's post: the Physics and Economics Nobel Prizes.

The Physics prize was awarded to three scientists for two unrelated projects, both of which have spawned technological revolutions. The first is Charles Kao's fiber optics work in the 1960s. The basis of his work is refraction of light, which is the process that makes lenses work and make things underwater look farther away to observers on land. The basic concept behind it is that light travels at different speeds in different materials, traveling, for example, 180,000 miles per second through a vacuum but only 140,000 miles per second through water. When light hits a boundary between different materials, it bends: if the speed is faster in the material it's entering, it bends away from the perpendicular to the surface—and closer to the surface. If the angle at which it strikes the boundary is shallow enough, it actually bends to run along the boundary surface, trapped there until it hits the end. Surfaces that do that well are called waveguides, because they trap a wave and guide it for long distances. (By the way, light isn't the only kind of wave that does that—seismic waves do too, and the Earth's surface can act as a waveguide for them.)

Scientists had known about that for a long time—the first demonstration was in the 1840s. They had also considered the possibility that fibers made of glass--“fiber optics” could act as waveguides over very long distances, which could be used instead of wires to transmit information. However, they also knew that glass was horribly inefficient at transmitting light, and tended to absorb it fairly quickly—too quickly to be economically feasible.

Kao didn't discover refraction, think of using fiber optics for communication, or produce the first efficient fiber optics. But he did make the crucial discovery that made it all possible: that the inefficiency of glass in transmitting light was due to impurities in the glass, and was not an intrinsic quality of it. Four years afterwards, Kao was proven right when fiber optics made of pure glass were produced and worked spectacularly.

Who cares? Well, the internet wouldn't exist without these things—copper wire cannot carry anywhere near enough information to sustain it, and is nowhere near as efficient as fiber optics.

The second half of the prize was awarded to the inventors of charge-coupled devices (CCDs), Willard Boyle and George Smith. The CCD isn't really a household term—the first time I ever heard of one was in Astronomy 101 when the professor made a passing remark about them making astronomical imaging much easier—but you've almost certainly used one. Modern photography is based on CCDs, and they're used in nearly all electronic cameras around today.

The science behind them is based on the photoelectric effect—the ability of some materials to produce electricity when struck by light. A CCD is a grid of millions of sensors whose sole purpose is to tell a computer how much light is falling on them. The computer associated with the CCD takes input from all the millions of sensors and converts the information into an image file. So, if you're a 12 year old kid, you can make stupid home videos and post them on Youtube. Or, if you're a spy satellite, you can take pictures of enemy bases and transmit them home without having to drop a roll of film into the atmosphere so a plane can catch it.

All the work for these technologies was done in the 1960s. It is now 2009. Talk about delayed gratification.

The Economics prize (technically called the Svergies Riksbank Prize, not the Nobel) was also awarded to two separate projects. The first was Elinor Ostrom's (the first female winner of the Economics prize) work on common property—property controlled by groups, as opposed to private or governmental ownership. The tragedy of the commons is a common issue with societal or group resources: each member has no incentive to not take as much of the resource for him/herself as possible, so the resource is quickly depleted. One great example of this is the depletion of fisheries around the world due to overfishing. Or, defined more broadly, essentially every environmental issue ever.

What Ostrom found, however, is that in some cases, group ownership does work well, sometimes even better than government or private management. One of her case studies was of a lobster fishery off the Maine coast, where many lobster businesses would harvest a shared lobster resource. Because each of them had a significant stake in the resource, they were able to set up rules that were not only strong enough to prevent depletion, but were actually followed by members. She cited many other case and lab studies in her work, and found that good communication between involved parties was essential to making effective rules.

Oliver Williamson received his half of the prize for his work on firms—specifically, on the efficiency of doing transactions within a firm or between firms. Does it make more sense for companies to stick to one aspect of production and outsource the rest, or make everything in house? Obviously, it depends—I'm guessing that Blue NC doesn't own the servers it's running on, and, at the very least, did not manufacture them. But I'd bet Google owns its servers. Microsoft lets computer manufacturers take care of the hardware, but makes its slow, unstable, buggy, insecure, craptastic Windows software itself.

Williamson found that sometimes, business is best conducted internally within firms, particularly if a great deal of complexity associated with the transactions. This work has significant implications for public policy: we've been breaking up overly-centralized markets with antitrust regulations since Teddy Roosevelt because of the inherent inefficiency of such markets. It appears that in some cases, uncompetitive markets might make up for the lack of competition by improved efficiency of business within the firm.

Before the wingnuts declare that these projects prove that regulations are bad and government should go drown itself in a bathtub and leave everything to the perfect free market, it is worth emphasizing that both of these scientists' studies are applicable to some situations and inapplicable to others. Nobody in their right mind would advocate letting a single firm control the food market, despite the improved efficiency associated with having access to all types of food under a single firm. Everything depends on the circumstances.

In other news:

Pretty volcano picture taken by an astronaut in space. Those brown traces on the north and southwest sides are volcanic mudflows called lahars. (I'm currently studying seismic data from this volcano!)

Astronomers have discovered an extrasolar gas giant planets with organic molecules. Organic molecules, critical for the development of life, have now been found in two exoplanets (though uninhabitable ones), suggesting that they might occur commonly on planets outside the solar system.

Plant fossils from a Colombian open pit coal mine provide a rare look into prehistoric New World rainforests of 58 million years ago, for which the fossil record is pretty poor. They apparently had the same families of plants, but were warmer and wetter than modern rainforests.

EPA finally grows a backbone and revokes a mountaintop removal mine permit. The project would have violated the Clean Water Act. The company was “shocked” to hear that someone didn't like their idea. Gov. Joe Manchin (my least favorite Democrat, by the way): "To say that I am mad would be an understatement."

James already posted this, but this article on food is really cool.