A Thought Experiment

Thought Experiments are one of the more interesting but underappreciated tools Scientists use.  It has come into modern use through the Germans.  Their term "Gedankenexperiment" is literally a mashup of the German word for "thought" (gedanken) and the word "experiment".  The term and procedure first became popular among German scientists in the 1800's. Its international use became popular as a result of its frequent and very effective public use by Einstein.  But the concept actually dates back to the ancient Greeks who called the same process "deiknymi".

But okay.  None of us in the room are theoretical physicists.  So how it this relevant to us?  Like most scientific techniques anybody can use it.  And anybody can find it useful in surprising ways.  In fact, one of the principle attributes are the surprising things we can learn from a well constructed thought experiment.  And that's what I am going to do.  I am going to walk through the process of doing a thought experiment.  I hope to demonstrate that using your imagination, which is all a thought experiment really is, a disciplined use of our imaginations, can be surprisingly useful.

So what are we going to do?  We are going to build a large and complex piece of infrastructure.  But since we are only doing it in our minds it will be quick, cheap, easy, and generate no pollution.  And we can get a long way even though none of us really has the expertise to build the real thing.  Trust me!  It's going to be fun.  So what are we going to build?

Before doing that, let's take a digression and figure out why what we are going to build is useful.  We as a society have a problem.  Well, we have lots of problems but I am going to focus on just one.  We use a lot of electricity.  Most of it comes from "the grid", a complex and elaborate set of equipment that shuttles electricity from here to there.  In general the grid's job is to connect producers (power plants, etc.) to consumers (homes, businesses, etc.)  You can all relax.  I am not going to go into how all this works.  I am just going to note one thing.

The whole thing has to work instantly.  The producers have to produce exactly the right amount of electricity right now to meet the needs of consumers right now.  Handling this very difficult problem is extremely difficult.  But it has to be done.  Why?  Because batteries suck.  Fifty years ago they really sucked.  Now they only suck.  Anyone who has had their smartphone die because the battery has run out of juice knows what I am talking about.  Manufacturers are very aware of this.  If they could put a much better battery in, they would.  And its not a matter of cost.  A battery that is much better than the ones they currently use literally does not exist.

I am going to use "battery" as a generic term for anything that can store electricity.  In some cases the thing you use to store electr4icity is not literally a battery.  But for the purposes of this discussion I am going to call all electricity storage devices batteries even if they are actually something else.

So something that would help with the whole "instantly" problem would be to hook a giant battery up to the grid.  Then when you had extra capacity you could generate a little extra to charge up the battery and when you were short of capacity you could run the battery down to make up the difference.  That would make the job of the people who manage the grid much easier.  The problem is that batteries suck.

We know that the little batteries in our smart phones suck.  But they must be small and light.  So can we fix the problem with something that is big and heavy?  No!  Batteries suck.  Look at Teslas and other electric cars.  Why doesn't everybody buy an electric?  Well the obvious problem is that they are expensive.  Why?  Enough batteries to do a decent job cost a lot of money.  And they are heavy and take up a lot of space (not a problem in our "grid" situation but still . . .).  But Tesla has to do a lot of tricks to get their cars to go as far as they do.  And it takes forever to recharge them.  If you could "fill up" the battery in a car in the time it now takes to gas up then go 400 miles between fill ups (and the car was affordable) we'd all be driving electrics.  But we can't.  Why?  Batteries suck.

But we're still not talking industrial scale.  But the Tesla experience is illuminating.  Elon Musk, the Tesla guy, is trying to get into the electricity storage business using warehouses full of batteries.  But the batteries are really expensive and they can't store industrial scale amounts of energy.  Remind me again why it's a good idea to be able to hook a big battery to the grid.

Well, the cost of renewables has plunged.  Solar panel farms and wind farms can and do produce industrial scale quantities of electricity.  But they have a problem.  They are intermittent.  Wind farms can't produce electricity if the wind is calm or if the wind is blowing so hard the wind generators can't handle it.  Solar panel farms can't produce electricity at night or when it's dark.  And output is reduced by bad weather, the time of year, and other factors.

There is a clunky kind of solution.  Buy lots.  Then run only as many of them at a time as you need at that time.  That, for the most part, is what the electricity industry does now.  But this is inefficient.  You have to build two or three or possibly more times the capacity you really need.  This problem would go away if we had a good battery.  We could run everything all the time.  When we had more power than we needed we use the extra to charge the battery up.  When we are short we drain the battery to make up the difference.  If we have a good battery we need enough capacity to handle the average load plus a little more as an insurance policy.

So that's the problem.  We need a ginormous battery.  Now so far I have talked about "battery" batteries.  These are chemical reactions at heart.  That's why we refer to "lead acid batteries", traditional car batteries, or "carbon batteries ", old batteries for electronics, or "alkaline batteries", newer batteries for electronics, or "lithium batteries", modern batteries for electronics, cars, and (Musk would have you believe) industrial scale grid storage.  Is there another way?  Yes, of course there is.

This problem has been around a long time and smart people have been trying to fix it the whole time it has been around.  You can transform back and forth between electricity and other forms of energy.  So people have suggested using big heavy flywheels.  You use a motor to spin them up (storage) and you hook them up to a generator to run them down (drain) by hooking them to a generator.  And it turns out that compared to even a lithium battery flywheels work pretty well.  They are relatively cheap, we know how to make them, and they store a lot more power than a similar amount of lithium batteries.  But people haven't figured how to do flywheels at industrial scale.

Another idea people have had is to seal up a big cave.  Then you pump air in to raise the pressure (charge).  Later you discharge the compressed air through a turbine (first cousin to t jet engine) that is hooked up to a generator (drain).  No one has actually tried to do this at industrial scale.  There are lots of other ideas.  But, like flywheels and caves full of compressed air, people for the most part haven't figured out how to make them work.

So is there anything that has been tried and works at industrial scale?  Yes.  It goes by the generic term "pumped storage".  I live in a part of the country that has lots of hydroelectric dams.  You dam up a river.  Then you periodically drain the water through a penstock (a fourth cousin to a turbine) and hook that up to a generator.  It works great if you have a nice river to dam up.  And this has been done lots of times and works well.

There is a variation you can do.  What if you have a lake high above a river?  If you drain the lake into the river you can do the dam thing and make electricity in exactly the same way.  But eventually the lake goes dry.  But what if you use surplus power to pump water up to the lake when you have more capacity than you need?  Then you can keep the lake from running dry.  That's the idea behind pumped storage.  There's an example of this not too far from me called Banks Lake.  When there is extra capacity water is pumped from a nearby river up to Banks Lake.  When capacity is short they drain the lake through the same kind of setup that is used for a dam and electricity comes out the end.

So problem solved, right?  Unfortunately, no.  You need just the right setup for an installation like Banks Lake to work.  And there are only a few places where just the right setup exists.  As a result only a few pumped storage facilities have been built anywhere.  A Wikipedia article on the subject states that the total pumped storage capacity of the European Union is only 5% of total generating capacity.  And 97% of US "grid-scale energy storage" is pumped storage.  So at this time there is really no alternative to pumped storage when it comes to grid-scale, what I have been calling industrial scale, energy storage.

Enough already.  We are finally ready to start work on our thought experiment.  The Banks Lake pumped storage project is part natural and part artificial.  The river and the lake were provided by nature.  The artificial part, the pipes, pumps, generators, etc., had to be added before it would all work.  As a thought experiment, let's build a completely artificial pumped storage facility.  To do so we need to make some decisions.  but first let's talk about the givens.  We need a "high" reservoir that we pump water up to and a "low" reservoir that the water can drain down to.  These will be big water tanks.  We as a society know how to build big tanks so we'll just take it as a given that these tanks can and will be built.  Then we need the between machinery.  It will be the same sort of equipment that is used in the Banks Lake facility.  So we will also take it as a given that this machinery can and will be built.

So what do we have to decide?  We have to decide what the capacity will be.  I am going to arbitrarily decide that the plant will have a capacity of one megawatt-hour.  That means it can put out a million watts of power for a hour.  So how much is that?  My recent electricity bill says I used a little less than 1,200 kilowatt hours over a two month period.  That's a rate of consumption of roughly a kilowatt-hour per hour.  So out plant would be capable of powering about 1,000 homes like mine for an hour.  That seems like a lot.  But in 2010 the US had over 20 gigawatts of pumped storage capacity.  So our plant's capacity would be 20,000 times less.  Put that way. it seems like not very much.

But what I have in mind for my thought experiment is to come up with something that could be turned out in large numbers assembly line style.  It turns out there are about 50,000 wind turbines in the US and the average capacity is about 1 megawatt per turbine.  So our plant would be a close capacity match to one wind turbine.  Is that a good choice?  I don't know.  But it is a starting point.  And the nice thing about thought experiments is that you can easily tweak them.

So what else do we need to decide?    We need to decide on the height difference between the two tanks.  The height difference between the two reservoirs at Banks Lake is 280'.  I'm going to go with 100 meters or about 330 feet.  It is a nice round number.  Is it the right number?  I don't know.  But as it is close to the Banks Lake number it follows that the kind of machinery necessary to do the pumping, draining, generating, etc. is readily available.

If we know this then we can size the tanks, pipes, pumps, etc.  We also need some water.  But this is a closed system.  We move the water around.  But once the system has been loaded up all we need to do is replace small losses.  So we can't site our installation out in the middle of nowhere completely away from any water at all.  But once we have done the initial fill we only need access to a little water.  So lots of places can work.  And we don't need drinking quality water.  We are just going to pump it around.  We don't want the water to be so nasty that it rots the machinery.  But with the right kinds of paint and that sort of thing the water can be pretty nasty and still work just fine.

And we are building the whole thing from scratch.  We are going to put the high tank on a tower so we don't need dramatic landscape.  If we have dramatic landscape we can take advantage of it to reduce costs.  But even flat landscape should do.  The idea is to have a basic design that with little or no modification can be put pretty much everywhere.

A key item is how much it is going to cost.  And I don't know the answer.  But someone like a civil engineer who has experience with large construction projects should be able to quickly and inexpensively come up with a rough number, a "back of the envelope estimate".  And for our thought experiment that's all we need.

We are not going to actually build it.  We are just trying to answer two basic questions.  The first and most important one is "can it be built at all"?  The second question is "how much would it cost"?  And this second question is actually two questions rolled into one.  The first is "what is the construction cost"?  And that is a question I really can't answer.  The second question is "what is the operating cost"?  Based on operations like Banks Lake the operating cost, exclusive of the energy costs is "very low".  It should require very little effort to operate and the maintenance costs should be low too.

But this energy cost is important.  To answer it we need to know the operating efficiency.   The science of thermodynamics says that nothing ever operates with 100% efficiency.  There are always losses.  And that is true of pumped storage facilities.  Most of them seem to operate with an efficiency in the 70% to 80% range.  That is if you spend 100 kilowatts pumping water up you will get 70 to 80 kilowatts back when you run it down through the turbines.  So between 20% and 30% of the energy you put in will be lost.  But the idea is that excess wind farm capacity or solar farm capacity otherwise goes to waste.  If we use this capacity to charge our pumped storage facility  we will be ahead on costs in the end.

Given all the "I don't know"s we have racked up as we have worked through our thought experiment it would seem at this point that the whole thing was a waste of time.  But surprisingly it is not.

Our thought experiment has shown that there is a proven method for creating as much grid-scale energy storage capacity as we want.  That's good to know.  It has never been clear that enough chemical battery based energy storage could be built to make a difference.  The same is true of the flywheel, compressed air, and other approaches I have seen.  Knowing that a problem has a solution is valuable information.

And a civil engineer could quickly come up with a "back of the envelope" quality estimate for what such a facility would cost.  This number, whatever it turned out to be, also turns out to be useful information.  Let's say the facility would cost ten million dollars.  What that does is give us a benchmark against which to judge other potential solutions.  How much would a similar sized chemical battery facility cost to build?  If the answer is "a lot more" then we should forget about chemical based battery solutions.  The same thing applies to other approaches.  If it is obvious that they would cost a lot more they are not worth looking into further.

Now I just made the ten million dollar number up.  What if the number was actually a hundred million dollars or a billion dollars?  It is still easy to use whatever number eventually turns out to be the right one as a benchmark against which to measure other alternatives.  Certainly the lower the cost of our "back of the envelope', "thought experiment" design is, the worse it makes possible alternatives look.

And what if the number looks expensive but not wildly expensive.  Then it might just be a good idea to actually build one.  The cost of wind turbines has dropped dramatically as more and more are built.  The same is true of solar panel farms and many other things.  If it turns out that out that the rough estimate of the cost of our first facility is high but not completely out of the question high it may turn out that the hundredth or the thousandth one might be quite inexpensive.  So another thing this cost experiment does is give us a starting point for deciding whether the "artificial pumped storage" idea deserves a serious look.

And that's how it often goes with thought experiments.  You can figure out a lot without having to invest a lot of time, effort, and money.  And you often find out surprising things.  And you can easily imagine doing something that would be either dangerous or flat out impossible.  After all, it's all made up anyhow.  Scientists often ask questions like "if I was inside a worm hole what would it be like"?  Scientists who actually asked that question decided the answer was "I wouldn't know because I would be killed instantly".

So what that particular thought experiment told us was "don't bother even trying to figure out how to put people through worm holes because if you succeeded it would kill them".  In our far less dramatic example we can safely conclude that "there are better approaches than warehouses full of chemical batteries or flywheels or tunnels full of compressed air" for solving the grid-scale energy storage problem.  That's something that is important for the officials in government, industry, and the investment community to know when they are making the decision on whether to fund a project or not.

And thought experiments don't have to be technical or esoteric.  They can be things like a "what would it be like if I want to Mazatlán on vacation?" thought experiment.  This can be compared to a "what would it be like if I want to Paris on vacation?" thought experiment.  Or it could be applied to picking a car or deciding on the route you are going to take to work today or any number of other things. 

And the nice thing about a thought experiment is you are not confined to the practical or even the possible.  You just come up with a scenario and try to answer "what would happen" or "what would it be like" type questions.  Often a lot can be learned by getting an approximate idea of how things stack up.  And the specifics of the thought experiment can be tweaked instantly.  It's not like you are already in Mazatlán or Paris or wherever your thought experiment takes you.  In a thought experiment if you change your mind all you are out is a little time and effort.  And that's their beauty.

Fake Boobs

Yes, I'm talking about breast implants.  And since there is a political angle on everything today I'm sure there is one for this one too.  But I am going to leave that part of the story alone and look at the subject from the perspective of Science.  And, as is my custom, I use history as an organizational tool.  Where to start?

I am going to start with the invention of the bra.  There are a lot more "origin stories" about this item of clothing than most people realize.  But I am going to stick with the one that is popular in the US.  I choose it because it involves a direct line from invention to the manufacture and distribution of a commercially successful product.

The story goes that in 1910 Mary Phillips "Polly" Jacobs, also known as Caresse Crosby, was getting ready to go to a debutante ball.  She initially struggled into a whalebone corset.  This device cinches in the waist and pushes the boobs up and forward.  If you add a bustle (think a fabric version of Kim Kardasian's butt) the result is an "hourglass figure", full through the bust and hips, thin at the waist.  This had been the height of fashion for some time but we were about to move into the "flapper" era.

Anyhow, Polly was apparently a full figured gal so she didn't need any help up top.  And the whalebone reinforced corset was very uncomfortable to wear.  So she took two handkerchiefs, some ribbon, and a needle and thread, and fastened together a garment that provided coverage but not much support.  It turned out to be an ideal match to the sheer gown with a plunging neckline she was wearing.  And it was an instant smashing success (apparently both the gown and her invention).

The popularity of the garment was apparent from the start.  This led her to get a patent for the design in 1914 and to begin to manufacture them.  But her interests were elsewhere so she sold the rights to the Warner clothing company.  Initially Warner did not make much of a success but they were smart enough to license it widely.  In the hands of others it quickly became popular.

It became so popular so quickly that it became a standard of apparel for women in no time.  Dorothy L. Sayers casually mentions one in a "Lord Peter Wimsey" murder mystery she wrote in the mid thirties.  She was English and the book was set in London. As a murder mystery with a male lead the book did not concern itself with the minutia of women's fashion.  But twenty-five years after the patent was issued everyone took it for granted that British women wore them as a matter of course.  And so it quietly played its role as part of the ambience of a book whose focus is most decidedly elsewhere.

We would not recognize the initial design.  But the standard band, cups, and straps design emerged quickly.  Another innovation that showed up early was the underwire.  And that sets the stage for the next subject I want to cover.

Not every woman is built like Polly.  But many women feel it is important to put on a show, to appear to be built like Polly.  The addition of the underwire made another innovation possible, the padded bra.  Foam rubber, first manufactured in 1929 but widely available by the late '30s, could be used to fill the void between what nature provided and what a bra with a fuller cup presented to the outside world.  And foam had the great advantage of being far lighter than the materials nature used.

So a woman could comfortably and inexpensively and inconspicuously wear a padded bra under the now more conservative clothes that came in when the flapper era ended with the end of the '20s.  And a lot of women did.  This was especially true of Hollywood actresses of the '50s.  Clever work by skilled costume designers could even make it possible to maintain the illusion of a "full figure" in what would otherwise seem like quite skimpy outfits.

And this got taken to extremes.  Mamie van Doren was a Hollywood fixture in the '50s and '60s.  She was as well endowed or even better endowed than Polly had been.  But in some situations "there's no such thing as too much".  So she often appeared in a specially made padded bra that made her bust size appear to be not just substantial but literally awe inspiring.  But the times, they were starting to change.

During this same period, the padded bra era, strip tease enjoyed a considerable degree of success.  The problem was that the artists ended up wearing so little that a padded bra was not feasible.  But there were always enough "full figured girls" who "came by it naturally" to provide a sufficient pool to fill the demand for ecdysiasts, as strippers were called in polite circles.  But what if a less well endowed girl was interested in entering the business?

Carol Doda, initially a waitress at a club in San Francisco called "The Condor" was just such a person.  She actually had a pretty good figure.  But again on the theory that "there's no such thing as too much" she let herself be talked into being the first person to try a new procedure.  Initially the new procedure took her bust measurement from 34 to 44.  So she got the result she was looking for.  But the procedure she underwent looks pretty barbaric from the perspective of the present.

She had silicone injected directly under her skin and into the breast area.  Why silicone?  Was this some kind of underhanded plot by scheming corporate executives?  The exact opposite was true.  No one in the business of manufacturing medical devices or producing silicone for use in medical procedures even knew what was happening.  Instead people in the entertainment business were looking for a way to give strippers or potential strippers bigger boobs.  A little research showed that medical grade silicone had a long track record of being safe.  And it wasn't particularly expensive.

It was also obvious quickly that just injecting it was a bad idea.  It didn't cause medical problems but it did tend to wander.  So "shapely" quickly turned into lumpy, and lumpy in strange places.  The solution was obvious and quickly adopted.  Put the silicone in a bag and insert the bag.  The bag would keep the silicone in place.  This turned out to work very well and women started getting silicone breast implants in large numbers.

But it is important to note that even in this period when breast implants were flying off the shelf the companies that were making the implants saw the business as a small sideline.  It was never a big moneymaker.  They were just meeting a demand and making a few bucks along the way.  But then some women noticed they all of a sudden were having strange medical problems.  And these medical problems seemed to start when or shortly after they got breast implants.  So it must be the fault of the implants, right?

Now a real problem did surface with a significant number of women who got implants.  Their bodies manufactured scar tissue around the implant.  This made their breasts hard and in some cases detracted from their visual appeal.  But this scarring did not cause any serious medical problems.  It was just not the result they wanted.

But what about all these mysterious medical maladies?  The first thing to recognize is that many women had serious medical problems that were completely real.  So the question was not:  "had they suffered a serious medical problem?"  It was:  "was the cause of the serious medical problem the implants?"

Given the history of implants no serious research or testing had taken place.  Putting the silicone in a bag was an obvious improvement over just injecting it.  And both the silicone and the bags were materials for which a lot of experience existed.  There was no reason to believe that they would cause problems.  So the companies just went ahead and provided the product the public demanded.  So early on there was a plausible argument to be made that the implants were the cause.

But it quickly turned out that women experienced a variety of problems.  It wasn't just one thing.  And all these problems were of the type that had always been happening.  But they had only been happening to a few women.  So the rarity of occurrence of any one of these illnesses had made it hard to draw much interest or attention to the illness.  So there was not much known about them.  That is before they all got lumped together and blamed on breast implants.

These women went to court and told their tale.  The companies involved were big companies that had a lot of money.  When it came out that the companies had done little or no "due diligence" and that the women were suffering horribly from one affliction or another juries awarded the women a lot of money.  All of a sudden the companies involved found it in their interest to find out what was what.

By this time literally millions of women had gotten implants.  So the first question to ask was "are these women getting sick more often than women without implants?"  It turns out that the answer was no.  The next question was "is there any evidence that the illness is being caused by the implants?"  Here too the answer was no.

But big companies misbehave frequently.  And the women really were sick.  So juries kept making large awards.  So the companies and others dug in and did more research.  The research kept coming up with nothing.  But the public was not interested in some scientific study.  This was especially true if the study was funded by a big company.  Over a period of years various large well done and very expensive studies were done.  Nothing.  And the jury awards kept rolling in.

Finally in desperation the companies replaced the silicone with saline, salt water.  Eventually this put an end to the law suits.  Everybody knows that disinfected salt water is not dangerous.

But then a funny thing happened.  Women found they did not like the saline implants.  They didn't jiggle right.  So first a few and then more and more women said "I don't care if it is dangerous.  I want my silicone."  And people finally noticed that the vast majority of implant customers did not have any of the horrible problems that had started the whole circus.

Things have changed slightly.  In the old days plastic surgeons made a large slit and inserted the bag with the silicone already in it.  Various techniques were employed to hide the scar.  But the size made it hard to conceal completely.  So some doctors started inserting an empty bag.  This could be done using a small incision which was far less noticeable in the first place and much easier to conceal.  It was also easier on the body which improved the healing process.

They would then inject the silicone somewhat in the manner used on Carol Doda.  But this time the silicone went into the bag.  It was inflated just like a balloon.  There had also been leaking problems with early implants.  That problem was also fixed.  But none of these "fixes" made implants any more or less dangerous.  They just improved the user experience of women getting implants.

The result was that ultimately the science prevailed.  Everybody figured out eventually that implants are safe.  And the occasional law suit that someone still tries to file is routinely thrown out without even a hearing.  And implants, who has them, are they safe, etc. is not something that gets anybody riled up anymore.

Science won, eventually.  And it's the "eventually" part that is troubling.  We are still going through the same kind of thing with the anti-vaxers.  The science is in.  Vaccines are safe and they do a lot of good.  As was (and is) the case with implants, people get sick, sometimes horribly sick, at the time of or shortly after they get the procedure.  But as was the case with implants it doesn't happen very often.  And the science has looked thoroughly into the issue and concluded "it's a coincidence".  This is exactly what was going on with implants.  The difference is that with vaccination we haven't gotten all the way out from under the issue.  There are still a lot of people who believe that the anti-vax people are right.

But whether a woman gets implants or not just affects the woman in question.  But when parents fail to vaccinate their children the child can get very sick and perhaps die.  That's bad.  But there are others who for one reason or other can't or have not gotten vaccinated.  And these people can also get very sick and perhaps die.  So the anti-vax people hurt not only themselves and their loved ones but they hurt innocent strangers.

The breast implant controversy and the anti-vax controversy are part of a larger anti-science movement.  The implant controversy hurt some companies and their stock holders.  It amped up the anxiety level of a lot of women.  But it ultimately had a small impact on society as a whole.  The anti-vax movement has had a bigger negative impact on society as a whole.  But the anti-science movement is a much bigger problem.

I wish I knew what to do.  But people have proved over and over that they will find a way to believe what they want to believe.  And they are proving every day that they are impervious to anything short of applying a two by four vigorously to side of the head (or so the old story about mules recommends), when it comes to what will change their minds.