Background:
Ed Bair is a 3rd generation Coloradoan, an ideal environment for curiosity about how the world works. Early summers were spent with prospectors on his uncle’s gold mining properties in a museum of geologic history from mountain peaks recently uplifted to expose sedimentary layers, even more recent glaciers, and granite batholiths swept clean by ice flows. He financed college by cutting timber in a rain forest at 10,500 feet where forests had replaced glaciers, by analyzing limestone at a quarry that showed sedimentary geology at a 45º angle, by analyzing blood at a million acre Wyoming cattle ranch where vehicles navigate by compass on land as it appeared before it formed mountains and by every kind of analysis used to operate a sugar refinery.
He arrived at the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge with a new B.S. degree in time to help set up facilities to purify 235U for the first atomic bomb. A Ph.D. from Brown University under Professor Charles A. Kraus for a study of incipient micelle formation by electrolytic conductivity was followed by a post doctoral appointment at the University of Washington to set up a molecular spectroscopy laboratory for Professor Paul C. Cross.
His academic career at Indiana University began by building facilities to study fast processes and energy distributions in the photochemistry of molecules such as ozone, the subject of much of his published work. Except for brief visiting scientist excursions at places such as the National Research Council, Ottawa, Cambridge University, England, and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory he remained at Indiana.
The reasons for the vast underestimation of the magnitude of the world energy problem became clear from consulting visits to most of the solar energy facilities in the U.S. Ed Bair uses his qualifications for independent minded iconoclasm in explaining the energy problem on a web site. The raison d’etre of journalism is public enlightenment that goes beyond mere facts. There are three ways to accomplish it, - explain, explain, explain.
Connecting the Dots to Future Electric Power: http://www.indiana.edu/~power/
