The green shift lacks a strong commitment to physics

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Everywhere there is talk of sustainability, green transformation and clean energy. The rising standard of living over the past two hundred years has been linked to improved access to energy and knowledge of how to use energy for something useful.

Nuclear power, solar panels, and electric cars are largely based on insights derived from breakthroughs in physics research.

If we really want to achieve clean energy on a large scale, we have to invest heavily in physical research.

Unsolved number of questions in physics. It has failed to unite two of the largest and best-tested theories in physics, quantum mechanics, and gravity. All physicists know that something big is missing in physics, but to know what and how you have to have scientists. Researchers must have research funds.

All physicists know that something big is missing in physics, but to know what and how to have scientists


Very little money is advertised to physicists. Physics is not a focus of its own in relation to the green shift. It must be. Norway seems to have little ambition to achieve something great in physics. This is despite the fact that breakthroughs in fundamental physics could really mean a quantum leap or two towards clean energy, both for us and for the world.

Such a strategy requires robust, long-term research, research funding, and talent.

Populist short-term solutions are easier to achieve, such as raising the gasoline tax from a very high level in order to reduce energy consumption. Or the electrification of the Norwegian shelf, the positive effects of which on the environment are highly dubious.

The most famous formula in physics, Einstein E = mc2, among other things, that there is an enormous amount of energy in the mass. Perhaps one kilogram of gray stone contains as much energy as 25 billion kilowatt hours. This is sufficient for the average annual electricity consumption of 1.5 million households, assuming 16,000 kWh per household. But this is a collective energy that rests in a substance that is not easy to excrete. At least not with today’s technology and knowledge.

Even in an atomic bomb, you can only absorb just under one percent of the potential energy of matter. Only in the interaction between the so-called antimatter and matter does it get almost 100 percent of the energy, but today it is very expensive to produce antimatter.

The largest amount of antimatter ever produced is about a billionth of a gram, and NASA has estimated the cost at $ 62.5 trillion per gram. The potential to extract more energy from matter is enormous. We are probably still in the cradle of potential physical miracles.

We like to see ourselves as a progressive high-tech civilization. But in a few hundred years, we hope, our grandchildren will likely look back on our time, if we look back on the industrial age, a time of pollution and relatively primitive and dirty energy sources.

Perhaps the real solution is not to drastically reduce energy consumption and living standards, but to develop new, more powerful and cleaner sources of energy. Such progress would require the world to invest heavily in basic research in physics, and Norway should also be included.

Norway, for example, has a lot of thorium but minimal investment in research and development for thorium reactors. China is now investing everything in its experimental thorium reactor. Where is Norway located?

Why is a Norwegian party not focusing on physics as a priority area of ​​the Green Shift?

The last time a major investment in physics was made was during the Cold War. Then major military powers like Russia and the USA invested heavily in physics research. They tried to get the best and strongest weapons.

This has also resulted in many positive things for the civilian population, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), which was initially developed in practice for military purposes. GPS requires, among other things, an understanding of how clocks are influenced by gravity and movement, i.e. Einstein’s theories.

Pollution is perhaps one of our greatest enemies today, if not our greatest. Investing in physics, which is ultimately an understanding of the deepest processes in nature, the atom, is perhaps the most important overlooked area of ​​Norwegian green and sustainable politics. What we and the world really need is a sharp surge in investment in physics research.

Significantly increased investments in physics could create many new jobs and perhaps in the long run create the new oil that we will desperately need in the age of oil over time.

The physical quest is to understand the deepest mysteries of nature. How can we have a bunch of parties crying out to save the world but having no strategy to study the mysteries of nature?

It only takes a politician to introduce a gasoline tax, but there is a lot of research going on to achieve a breakthrough in access to clean energy and efficient ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.(Conditions)Copyright Dagens Næringsliv AS and / or our suppliers. We want you to share our cases via a link that leads directly to our pages. The content may not be copied in whole or in part or used in any other way with written permission or within the legally permissible framework. Further conditions can be found here.

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