About the Author

For several years, I have been interested in solar energy, primarily in the form of homes with active and passive solar components. With the advent of the Paris Agreement in 2015, it became widely accepted that the Earth was in a critical period with the threat of increasing global warming.

In high school, I studied architecture and astronomy. Although I did not pursue these careers professionally, they remain life-long interests, and of course, they are relevant to solar energy.

As a college student during the twentieth century, I worked during the summers at some of the oil patches in Oklahoma and Kansas. One summer was spent working for Sinclair Oil Co. in McPherson, Kansas. My job as a “roustabout” was to work with a crew in replacing broken pumping rods. The wells were drilled during the 1930’s, and some of them produced only a few barrels of oil each day. Today, with “fracking” (fracturing) technologies, water or other fluids are pumped into oil or gas wells to pump more fuels from these wells. For the first time in geological history, Oklahoma has reported earth quakes as a result of the “fracking” process. Sinclair’s logo at the time, which continues today, was a statue of a dinosaur. I suppose that no one has yet calculated the number of dinosaurs that were required to produce the amount of oil that has been extracted from the Earth, but I suspect that this value might approach Avogadro’s Number, or at least its square root. Today, I still purchase gasoline at a Sinclair station in the city where I live near Kansas City, Missouri. I regularly see train loads of coal moving from Wyoming through town on their way to Kansas City where they will be used to produce electric power. Although electric vehicles are becoming more popular, they still require coal or natural gas to power the utility plants for charging their batteries.

After escaping from the University of Oklahoma with an engineering degree, I worked for Pratt & Whitney Aircraft in Hartford, Connecticut in the area of materials development for fuel cells and jet engines. I now wonder about the type of fuel that will power these aircraft after the oil runs out.

In graduate school, I acquired degrees in nuclear physics and then in solid-state (semiconductor) physics. Computers at the time, and continuing today, use chips made from silicon. My research focused on the III-V semiconductor, gallium-arsenide, GaAs, as its electron mobility was higher than that of Si, meaning that, in principle, the chips would be faster. As it turned out, during the oxidation (anodization) process to produce metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) prototypes, “dangling bonds” formed at the semiconductor-oxide interface. As a result of these bonds, the devices did not charge and discharge properly as determined by capacitance-voltage (CV) measurements. Nevertheless, further studies of the anodization process were made using Rutherford Back-Scattering (RBS). From these measurements, a transport number of 0.17 was determined. GaAs continues to be used in solar cell devices. Prior to anodization of the GaAs substrate, it was determined by RBS in a channeling direction that the surface of the crystal had been prepared to perfection within one atomic layer. A short diversion follows.