Category Archives: Government agencies

The 2013–22 decadal survey in solar and space physics

Posted on by
2

Last Wednesday the National Academy of Sciences held a press conference in Washington, DC, to introduce its newly completed report on priorities for the coming decade in solar and space physics. Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado chaired the committee that wrote the report. Thomas Zurbuchen of the University of Michigan was the vice chair. Together, they summarized the report’s highlights for the assembled reporters, scientists, and bureaucrats.

Like its counterparts in astronomy and planetary science, the latest solar and space physics decadal survey is more than just a shopping list of missions and facilities. Its authors begin by defining their field in a broad and inspiring way:

We live on a planet whose orbit traverses the tenuous outer atmosphere of a variable magnetic star, the Sun. This stellar atmosphere is a rapidly flowing plasma—the solar wind—that envelops Earth as it rushes outward, creating a cavity in the galaxy that extends to some 140 astronomical units (AU). There, the inward pressure from the interstellar medium balances the outward pressure of the solar plasma forming the heliopause, the boundary of our home in the universe. Earth and the other planets of our solar system are embedded deep in this extended stellar atmosphere or “heliosphere,” the domain of solar and space physics.

The report goes on to review past and present accomplishments in solar and space physics before defining the four overarching goals that guided the committee members as they drew up their final recommendations:

  1. Determine the origins of the Sun’s activity and predict the variations in the space environment.
  2. Determine the dynamics and coupling of Earth’s magnetosphere, ionosphere, and atmosphere and their response to solar and terrestrial inputs.
  3. Determine the interaction of the Sun with the solar system and the interstellar medium.
  4. Discover and characterize fundamental processes that occur both within the heliosphere and throughout the universe.

As I listened to Baker and Zurbuchen’s presentation, it became clear that two other overarching considerations informed the report. The first is a conceptual emphasis on viewing Earth’s aurorae, the solar wind, coronal mass ejections, and other heliospheric phenomena as part of a single system. It will be interesting to see whether this systemic view becomes manifest in journals, conferences, and courses. I, for one, have tended to think of solar physics as belonging more to astronomy than to heliospheric physics.

The second consideration is a realistic and—to use Baker’s word—responsible approach to costs. The committee retained Aerospace Corp, a nonprofit consultancy based in El Segundo, California, to carry out an independent cost appraisal and technical evaluation (CATE) of potential missions. For the most part, the total cost of the committee’s recommended suite of programs lies within the budget envelope that NASA provided the committee for the years 2013–22.

Physicists who remember chuckling when they first encountered the zeroth law of thermodynamics might be amused to learn that the committee’s first recommendation is also numbered zero—for good reason. As NASA and NSF, the other principal sponsor of heliospheric research, look to future missions and facilities, the committee recommends that they first complete their current program.

Among the lineup is Solar Probe Plus (shown here in an artist’s impression). The ambitious mission, whose price tag is $1.4 billion, aims to fly as close as possible to the Sun to determine how the solar corona is heated and how the solar wind is accelerated.

Diversify, realize, integrate, venture, educate

The committee’s second recommendation, numbered 1.0, is to implement an initiative that goes by the acronym DRIVE (for “diversify, realize, integrate, venture, educate”). As far as I can tell, DRIVE aims to reorganize and reinvigorate the way researchers and their students practice heliospheric science.

Surprisingly, given its high priority, DRIVE is not expensive. The committee projects that the initiative will cost at most about $50 million a year. To fulfill the goals embodied by its name, DRIVE seeks to make research opportunities more accessible to universities through small and mid-sized missions, including the shoebox-sized spacecraft called CubeSats.

Funding the analysis and interpretation of data adequately is a key element of DRIVE, as is fostering interdisciplinary approaches to heliospheric research. Indeed, the committee urges NASA and NSF to establish heliospheric science centers, where observers, theorists, and modelers can work together to solve the grand challenges of solar and space physics.

When Baker and Zurbuchen introduced DRIVE, it sounded somewhat woolly to me. Now, having read the DRIVE section of the report, I think it’s a bold and worthwhile model that could be profitably emulated in other fields, such as green energy or neuroscience. But to be effective, DRIVE will probably need a light administrative structure.

Accelerate and expand the Heliophysics Explorer program!

Recommendation 2.0 seeks to revitalize NASA’s Explorer program of modestly sized and priced spacecraft. Begun in 1958, the program, according to the committee, is “arguably the most storied scientific spaceflight program in NASA’s history.” Despite its success, which includes three Nobel prizes, funding for the Explorer program fell in 2004 and has languished since. To quote the report:

The medium-class (MIDEX) and small-class (SMEX) missions of the Explorer program are ideally suited to advancing heliophysics science and have a superb track record for cost-effectiveness. Since 2001, 15 heliophysics Explorer mission proposals have received the highest category of ranking in competition selection reviews, but only 5 have been selected for flight. Thus there is an extensive reservoir of excellent heliophysics science to be accomplished by Explorers.

Because MIDEX and SMEX missions are comparatively cheap, developing and launching more of them would not require a big outlay. The committee recommends that NASA augment the current Explorer program for solar and space physics by $70 million per year.

In addition to more money for the Explorer program, the committee also recommends establishing a faster, more nimble way of accommodating missions of opportunity—that is, missions that are conceived in response to new technologies, new scientific knowledge, or new partnership opportunities with other space agencies.

NASA: Let academia lead space science

Perhaps by coincidence, a commentary by Baker appeared in Nature two weeks before his committee released its report. Entitled “NASA: Let academia lead space science,” the commentary urged the space agency to fund more missions that are small enough in scope that university-based principal investigators (PIs) can develop and lead them.

Whether Baker’s fellow committee members endorsed his commentary is not clear. They do, however, evidently share his belief in the merits of PI-led missions. Recommendation 3.0 calls for NASA to transform its Solar Terrestrial Probes program from a large, centrally directed program to “a moderate-sized, competed, PI-led mission line that is cost-capped at approximately $520-million per mission.”

The STP program aims to elucidate the physics of the Sun’s influence on Earth, on the other bodies in the solar system, and on the interstellar medium. To avoid the risk that a competitive free-for-all would omit important aspects of STP science, the committee outlined three kinds of missions that it would like to see fly:

  1. IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) to characterize the zone where the Sun’s magnetohydrodynamic influence ceases to prevail in the solar neighborhood.
  2. DYNAMIC (Dynamical Neutral Atmosphere) to study how Earth’s ionosphere and thermosphere influence, and are influenced by, processes that occur at lower and higher altitudes.
  3. MEDICI (Magnetosphere Energetics, Dynamics, and Ionospheric Coupling) to determine how the magnetosphere-ionosphere-thermosphere system responds to solar and magnetospheric forcing.

The committee’s enthusiasm for modest missions is not unbridled, however. In the committee’s view, tackling the problem of how and why the Sun varies is a job for large, integrated missions. NASA’s Living with a Star program already includes the Solar Probe Plus and the Radiation Belt Storm Probes missions. Recommendation 4.0 is for Geospace Dynamics Constellation, a set of six formation-flying spacecraft that will characterize how the energy of geomagnetic storms is deposited and transformed in Earth’s atmosphere.

Recharter the National Space Weather Program

In March 1989 a geomagnetic storm caused the collapse of Hydro-Québec’s electricity grid. Five months later another geomagnetic storm shut down electronic trading on Toronto’s stock exchange.

Anticipating such storms—or space weather—and predicting their effects is more important, now that the world’s electrical infrastructure has expanded, the number of Earth-orbiting satellites has increased, and telecommunications have become economically and socially more important.

The current solar cycle, the 24th since records began in 1755, is set to peak next year. To monitor the cycle’s activity, the US relies on a set of spacecraft, such as the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, whose principal purpose is basic research and whose engineering lifetimes are coming to an end.

To avoid gaps in coverage, the committee recommends that NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Department of Defense should plan ahead and plan together. Of particular importance, the committee says, is maintaining a permanent monitoring capability at L1, the first Lagrange point of the Sun–Earth system. Lying between the two bodies 1.5 million km from Earth, L1 is an ideal vantage for tracking solar activity.

The US has a comprehensive plan, the National Space Weather Program, for dealing with space weather. The trouble is, as the committee puts it, “implementation of such a program would require funding well above what the survey committee assumes to be currently available.” Accordingly, the committee recommends that the NSWP

should be rechartered under the auspices of the National Science and Technology Council and should include the active participation of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget. The plan should build on current agency efforts, leverage the new capabilities and knowledge that will arise from implementation of the programs recommended in this report, and develop additional capabilities, on the ground and in space, that are specifically tailored to space weather monitoring and prediction.

I haven’t read all 455 pages of the committee’s report. In venturing to summarize it, I have no doubt missed some important points and emphases. But what I have read has impressed me. Here is a plan to study the heliosphere as a system in a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and cost-effective way. I hope its recommendations are heeded.

Not enough peasants, not enough economics

Posted on by
Reply

Many years ago I read an essay in which the author—I think it might have been Frederik Pohl—complained about historical inaccuracies in sword-and-sorcery novels. Of course, it’s hardly “wrong” in such works to have fire-breathing dragons, power-bestowing rings, or shape-shifting ravens. Rather, what so irked Pohl were errors in depicting a plausible world based on medieval technology.

In particular, he lambasted authors for getting the economics wrong. The lack of labor-saving devices in the Middle Ages meant that growing and raising food—the main economic activity—occupied most of the people most of the time. A tale of warring princes may have talking bears and magic cloaks but it must have plenty of peasants!

Pohl’s polemic came back to mind when I encountered an essay in the latest issue of Isis, one of the journals carried by the Niels Bohr Library and Archives. Under the title “Time, money, and history,” David Edgerton of Imperial College London urges his fellow historians of science to include economic factors more fully in how they regard and study science.

Edgerton presents several pieces of historical evidence to make his case. For example, in his view the R&D component of the Manhattan project is routinely overestimated and overemphasized by historians (or “oversized,” to use Edgerton’s word). Of the project’s $2 billion budget, only $70 million—3.5%—was spent on R&D. The lion’s share went to DuPont and other large corporations for building two nuclear factories at Oak Ridge in Tennessee and Hanford in Washington State (shown here under construction).

Addressing his fellow historians, Edgerton writes:

We need to follow all the money, not just that going to the university. Rough estimates of the comparative scale of industrial, government, and academic research through the century show that the usual implicit maps of the historians systematically oversize academic research by comparison with government and industrial research. Industry and the military (largely in industry) have been—nearly everywhere and nearly always—the main funders of research and development. Not only research within the academy but, indeed, those aspects of academic research least connected to industry are oversized—physics, particularly particle physics, and biology, particularly molecular biology—while chemistry, mathematics, and engineering are undersized.

Edgerton’s essay triggered another literary recollection—this time, of a paper I’d read in the March issue of the British Journal for the History of Science. In “The limits to ‘spin-off’: UK defence R&D and the development of gallium arsenide technology,” Graham Spinardi of Edinburgh University tells a fascinating story of government-sponsored R&D. And in doing so, he implicitly supports Edgerton’s case.

Gallium arsenide is a semiconductor whose properties make it better than silicon for certain applications. Thanks to its excellent electron mobility, GaAs can operate at the high frequencies used for mobile telephony. And thanks to its direct, as opposed to indirect, bandgap, GaAs beats Si as a material for making lasers, LEDs, and other optoelectronic devices.

But Si has offsetting advantages that continue to give it an edge over GaAs and other semiconductors in computational applications. Si is cheap, stable, and readily doped. It has an insulating phase, thanks to its native oxide. And its hole mobility, while an order of magnitude lower than the electron mobility of GaAs, is still high enough to support gigahertz clock rates.

By the mid 1950s, Si’s predominance in commercial electronics was clear. It was also clear that semiconductors would have military applications. Recognizing that market forces alone would likely propel Si-based technologies, the British defense establishment decided at that time to fund research into GaAs, which was less developed. The goal, to quote one of Spinardi’s sources, was “to leapfrog silicon technology.”

Fateful repercussions

That decision had fateful repercussions for Britain’s electronics industry. In a sense, the British government’s investment in GaAs paid off. By the 1990s, when the commercial applications of GaAs in LEDs and microwave telecommunications were taking off, British labs had already developed devices and manufacturing techniques that could support a consumer-focused GaAs industry.

But, as Spinardi explains, those companies, which included Plessey and Marconi, opted instead to continue developing devices for their original military sponsors. What’s more, their decades-long focus on GaAs had left them little room to develop Si-based technologies. Britain’s electronics industry missed out on booms in Si and GaAs.

To discover why British companies failed to achieve commercial success in GaAs in proportion to their expertise, Spinardi interviewed researchers and managers and studied documents from labs and government departments. Within the economic and industrial conditions of the time, those companies did not act foolishly. In fact, they developed successful products in three areas: defense, equipment for processing GaAs, and radar.

Those areas have one thing in common, notes Spinardi. They’re inhabited by a few big, commercial or government customers, rather than thousands or millions of individual customers. To quote Spinardi: “Unlike consumer products, where buyers are sought after production, made-to-order goods are only produced once a buyer has agreed terms. Investment is therefore far less risky because it can be based on, and costed into, procurement contracts.”

That aversion to risk partly reflected British corporate governance. The big British electronics companies were public and had to answer to their shareholders. In the short term, bidding on large contracts made commercial sense.

It might also have made sense in the long term. As British investment in GaAs was beginning to bear fruit in the 1980s, Sony, Matsushita and other deep-pocketed Japanese companies were moving into the consumer electronics industry. The US had begun investing in military applications of semiconductors. Competing against either the Japanese in the commercial sector or the Americans in their own military sector might have been a futile and costly mistake.

Whether Britain’s investment in GaAs was a success or a failure is a matter of perspective. On the one hand, the expected military applications were realized, to the gain of both Britain’s armed forces and their British suppliers. On the other hand, having made that investment, the final step to mass-market success was surely small enough that at least one company could have, and maybe should have, taken the financial risk and jumped. Spinardi concludes his paper with this observation:

The dominance of defense in the post-war UK innovation system helped provide a technology base with much spin-off potential, but ironically it also engendered industrial conditions that may have limited the capacity of UK industry to make the most of this.

Is there something wrong with the Spallation Neutron Source?

Posted on by
17

Before becoming Physics Today‘s online editor in May of 2010, I ran the magazine’s Search and Discovery department. In that job, my prime directive was to find and write about the most interesting and important research in physics and its related sciences. My biggest worry was that I’d overlook a major discovery—not a Higgs boson or room-temperature superconductivity, which would get instant and voluminous press coverage, but something like asymptotic freedom or giant magnetoresistance, which didn’t.

Asymptotic freedom and GMR earned their discoverers Nobel prizes decades after the original papers were published. Finding such significant work when it first appears in print is tough for a science journalist, but not impossible. You need good contacts in the physics community, a willingness to pore through lists of preprints, and a familiarity with the big unsolved problems in science.

Less effort is required in the case of major new facilities. After NASA launched the Chandra X-ray Observatory in July 1999, I knew I wouldn’t have to wait long before a newsworthy result appeared. To justify the expense of launching and operating a space observatory, the instruments onboard must be much better than their predecessors. My first Chandra story, about the cosmic x-ray background, appeared in May 2000.

The Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee is the world’s most powerful neutron source. Unlike some other big projects, the SNS was completed on time, in June 2006, and slightly under budget at $1.405 billion. One month earlier, in an article for Physics Today, SNS director Thomas Mason, introduced the new facility:

A negatively charged hydrogen ion accelerates down a linac to nearly a billion electron volts—90% of the speed of light—and punches through graphite foil that strips off the ion’s two orbiting electrons. The resulting proton enters a ring where it and other protons are stored and accumulated into pulses that are fired at 60 Hz toward a vessel of liquid mercury. In a process known as spallation, the protons collide with atomic nuclei in the heavy metal and knock out short, intense pulses of neutrons. Those neutrons are then guided through as many as 24 beamlines to the myriad instruments and detectors used for experiments.

That’s the vision behind the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), a $1.4 billion facility nearing completion at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Currently in its testing phase, the facility is expected to produce the most intense pulsed neutron beams in the world, with each pulse yielding neutron fluxes estimated at 20 to 100 times the peak intensity obtainable from fission reactors. Materials of ever-increasing complexity are key elements of today’s technologies and underpin the world’s industrial and economic development. Consequently, the spallation source will surely find broad applicability in fields far beyond the condensed matter systems to which neutron scattering has traditionally been applied.

Now, six years after SNS made its first neutrons, I’m wondering if there’s something wrong with it. In particular, I’m wondering where the science is.

The SNS is hardly unproductive, as the long and diverse list of research published in 2010 demonstrates. Still, none of those 2010 papers were published in Nature or Science and just one appeared in Nature Physics.

To get a sense of how SNS compares with other spallation sources, I took advantage of the full-text search option on the Physical Review website. My search for the phrase “spallation neutron source” in all 11 Physical Review journals published last year yielded 51 hits.

Not all the hits corresponded to research that made use of spallation neutrons. Some papers were theoretical predictions; some were about the neutron sources themselves; and some were relevant to, but not about, research at neutron sources. Because the search looked for any occurrence of “spallation neutron source,” papers by SNS staffers, even if they weren’t about research done with the SNS, generated hits.

The results surprised me. By my count, the SNS yielded 5 PR papers, but two other spallation neutron sources, ISIS at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK (7 papers) and SINQ at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland (13 papers), were more productive.

Science also has a full-text search option. In that journal, the only occurrences of “spallation neutron source” in research papers corresponded to two studies that appeared in 2008. Both reported results on the heavy-fermion superconductor cerium-cobalt-indium derived at SINQ.

The US paid $1.4 billion for the SNS, a facility whose publicity brochure says, “The capabilities of the SNS will enable scientific breakthroughs that will enrich our lives in ways we haven’t even imagined.”

I admit that the title of this post is deliberately provocative, but it’s also intended as an open question: Is there something wrong with the SNS?

Charles Day

Monkeys by your swimming pool

Posted on by
1

Two days ago I was rotating at 0.03 rpm aboard the Singapore Flyer, the world’s tallest Ferris wheel. Despite the rainy weather, the view of Singapore’s Marina Centre and central business district clearly evinced the country’s current and growing wealth.

With me in one of the flyer’s observation cars were my hosts for the day, Tracy Won and Patty Woo of Contact Singapore. Formed in 2008, Contact Singapore is an alliance between the Singapore Economic Development Board and the Ministry of Manpower. Its mission is to attract talented foreigners to work, invest, and live here.

Tracy, Patty, and their colleagues work hard. Even though Singapore is a rich, modern country, even though it spends close to 3% of its GDP on R&D, Singapore is hardly foremost in the minds of foreign scientists and engineers who are contemplating a career move.

But during my visit here, which ends today, I met plenty of scientists who moved to Singapore from elsewhere and are thriving. Keith Carpenter, who directs the Institute of Chemical and Engineering Sciences, told me that working in Singapore gave him the chance to influence and participate in science on a national scale.

ltm.jpg

Oezyilmaz Barbaros moved to the National University of Singapore from the US to set up a lab for studying graphene. His lab is part of the university’s new graphene research center, which is headed by another import, Antonio Castro Neto.

Physicists and other scientists will readily move to other countries to pursue research opportunities. In 1988, right after I’d earned my PhD in the UK, I took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Sagamihara, an industrial suburb of Toyko and Yokohama.

In Singapore, research opportunities are likely to become more attractive. This past Thursday, the government announced that it would boost the country’s R&D spending by 20%. “What other country is doing that?” Barbaros asked me, knowing that the answer was probably “None.”

Barbaros also told me of Singapore’s other attractions. His house is near Kent Ridge Park. “In the morning, I sometimes see monkeys by my swimming pool.”

Charles Day

Turning conversations into theorems

Posted on by
Reply

Either of two Hungarian mathematicians, Alfr√©d R√©nyi or Paul Erd≈ës, is reputed to have said, “A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.” The quotation brings to mind solitary toil, but with equal justification you could also say, “Coffee is a device for turning conversations into theorems.”

Artur Ekert, who directs the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore, evidently believes in coffee’s catalyzing effect. When the center was established three years ago, Ekert insisted that it include a space, the Quantum Café, where staff could meet and exchange ideas over free coffee or tea.

CQT_QuantumCafe.JPG

Ekert’s enthusiasm for social interaction was shared by Fred Hoyle. In the mid 1960s, when he directed the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University, Hoyle commissioned a new building. The design sounds boringly simple: little more than a long, one-story box with outward-facing offices on either side of a central corridor. But it was conceived to foster conversation and collaboration. The corridor was deliberately broad; in the center of the building was a large open area for having coffee; and lest the staff fail to meet for coffee, an institute-wide coffee break took place at 11am each weekday.

As a graduate student at the institute, I must have enjoyed a thousand or so coffee breaks. I can’t remember any theorems or ideas those casual conversations produced, so, as evidence of their effectiveness, I’ll have to invoke a substitute (and one that might not have involved coffee; I can’t be sure):

In 1950, while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the physicist Enrico Fermi had a casual conversation while walking to lunch with colleagues Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller and Herbert York. The men discussed a recent spate of UFO reports and an Alan Dunn cartoon facetiously blaming the disappearance of municipal trashcans on marauding aliens.

The conversation, quoted here from Wikipedia, prompted Fermi to estimate over lunch the likelihood that Earth had been visited by aliens, given the size of our galaxy, the number and age of its stars, and other physical constraints. After concluding that aliens must have dropped by many times, he asked his lunch partners, “Where are they?” Fermi’s question became the basis of a field of inquiry known as the Fermi paradox.

I can’t claim to have founded a field, but I can say that the idea for this blog entry came to me yesterday while drinking an espresso in the Quantum Café.

Charles Day

Supporting the right industries

Posted on by
Reply

Earlier this month at a housewarming party in Long Beach, California, I met Mike Rivas, the vice president of admissions at Laguna College of Art and Design (LCAD) in nearby Laguna Beach. As a location for an art school, Laguna Beach makes sense. The town has an unusually high number of shops that sell paintings, sculptures, and other art. But at the risk—which I willingly take—of being thought a snob, I have to say the art on sale in Laguna Beach is vulgar, unicorns-in-the-surf dross.

Thus prejudiced, I was worried that Mike’s students learn how to increase the supply of pictures of fluffy kittens and dayglow Hawaiian sunsets. I was utterly wrong. Mike explained that LCAD is famous for its programs in animation and game art. The college has strong ties to the movie and computer gaming industries. Its graduates are in high demand.

I was reminded of LCAD last week when I read an account of a surprisingly frank discussion that China’s Premier Wen Jiabao participated in in New York City. Wen was in town for a United Nations’ conference on eliminating world poverty, but the remark of his that lodged in my brain was about iPads.

Wen complained that even though Chinese factories make the popular tablet computer, they earn only $6 per unit. Apple nabs the lion’s share, because it sells the device and because it designed it. Other, presumably non-Chinese companies earn money when iPad owners buy attractively designed apps from Apple’s iTunes store.

sulogo.jpg

This week I’m in Singapore visiting labs and facilities funded by the country’s Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR is the slick abbreviation). Like China, Singapore has a thriving high-tech manufacturing base. Half the world’s disk drives are made here. Through A*STAR and its sister agencies, the island’s government establishes effective and profitable links between academic research and industry.

Singapore’s government and its advisers have already learned Wen’s iPad lesson. To ensure future prosperity, it’s not enough to make expensive high-tech gadgets that sell by the million. You have to design them too. In two years’ time, Singapore University of Technology and Design will admit its first students.

Funding and promoting ties between academia and industry is worthwhile—provided you choose the right industries.

Charles Day

For the greatest benefit to mankind?

Posted on by
Reply

In establishing his prizes, Alfred Nobel wanted to reward science that brought, in the words of his will, “the greatest benefit to mankind.” In justifying the billions spent on research, scientists argue that they are also benefiting people—either directly by developing, say, new vaccines or indirectly by advancing our knowledge of the universe and its contents.

Given those high goals, what are we to make of the science practiced by Algordanza AG? The company, which is based in Domat/Ems, Switzerland, produces “qualitative high-grade certified diamonds out of the ashes of your beloved deceased in memory to their unique and wonderful life.”

The conversion process entails heating the chemically purified ash to 2500 °C and subjecting it to a pressure of 6 gigapascals. Depending on how much boron the deceased had ingested, the resulting gem may be clear and colorless or clear and blue.

algordanza.jpg

I learned about Algordanza from a story in today’s issue of the Straits Times, Singapore’s venerable English-language newspaper. (I’m visiting Singapore this week to tour facilities funded by the country’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research, A*STAR.) Reporter Ang Yiying centered her story on Madam Chin Siat Ngo, who paid Algordanza’s partner in Singapore SG$9399 (about US$7250) to make a diamond from the ashes of her late sister Mee Ngo. The two sisters had lived together for 62 years until February, when Mee Ngo succumbed to a fatal stroke.

Madam Chin had the 0.41-carat blue diamond set in the center of a cross-shaped pendant. She’s evidently pleased and proud of her memorial jewel. In her case, science brought her the benefit not of a cure or knowledge, but of comfort.

I don’t know whether Nobel had comfort or happiness in mind when he wrote his will. He might have, if he’d read John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In words that would be echoed 86 years later by Thomas Jefferson, Locke asserted: “The highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness.”

Charles Day