The Saint is not usually sympathetic to the plight ofresearchers who spend their lives comfortably ensconced in plush university offices. Part of the reason for this hardened stance is that, as a qualified engineer, your correspondent has seen a scientist take the credit for an engineer’s work too many times.
The Saint’s offspring have asked him several times what the difference is between a scientist and an engineer (not out of any real interest in the subject, rather to curry their father’s favour ahead of the need for more phone credit). The Saint’s stock answer is “scientists investigate natural phenomena in order to explain them, engineers take that knowledge and use it to solve humanity’s problems”. That explanation leaves his teenagers with expressions of abject boredom while the Saint himself wanders off feeling smug at his own analytical brilliance.
Conceit aside, the Saint’s is not a bad description of the difference between the trades - and in theory it should be a recipe for a harmonious and highly productive relationship. But too often the scientist swans off to write another paper (together with seemingly dozens of colleagues) in order to secure another taxpayer-funded research grant while the lowly engineer struggles to commercialise some esoteric technology that’s never functioned outside of a Class 100 cleanroom. And once the engineer does succeed, the scientist pops back up to claim the credit for his “invention” and is interviewed on the ABC.
The Saint thinks that all scientists should be forced to spend a few years working in the commercial sector in order to understand the pressures on their engineering counterparts. But then, why should scientists empathise with the life of an engineer when the toughest challenge the clever bods face is getting back to their leafy university in order to prepare for the next round of expenses-paid overseas conferences?
So it was an atypical emotion for the Saint to sincerely sympathise with the science community this week upon reading an article in Electronics News about the Defence Trade Controls Bill (warning: do not click on this link unless you are suffering from extreme insomnia).
Apparently, the introduction of this bill would do more damage to Australian research than any number of funding cuts from a government desperate to meet its promise of a (wafer-thin) budget surplus in 2013.
The reasons for introducing the bill are complex, but as far as your correspondent can ascertain, they boil down to making it easier for defence companies in the U.S. and this country to do business together by easing export controls. That sounds reasonable - so why is the legislation bad for Australian research?
It turns out that easing export controls for defence contractors requires researchers working on a wide range of technologies – even if they are not employed by those contractors – to attain Defence-issued permits. That includes scientists in universities and similar institutions. The legislation also covers the export of “controlled technology” such as software and data.
According to Michael J. Biercuk, Senior Lecturer in the School of Physics at University of Sydney, “[The restrictions cover] things like lasers, electronics, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, standard chemicals, even elements of the periodic table – and not the ones associated with producing nuclear weapons either”.
Biercuk leads on to explain that items such as low-phase-noise oscillators, radio-frequency amplifiers and electronic systems, mean that key technologies for the international Square Kilometre Array would “likely be controlled”.
If Biercuk is right, researchers will be so tied up in red tape that long-term research will grind to a halt.
The Saint is not alone in considering this situation ridiculous. Defence has been criticised for failing to consult with academia over the implications for civilian research of the bill. But as yet, the organisation appears not to have paid the slightest attention to this rebuke.
Will the Federal Government step in to amend the legislation to ease the restriction on non-defence researchers? While the Saint is not holding his breath, he hopes sanity will prevail. For although your correspondent considers the Australian research community to have an easy life, the last thing he wants is to see the good work they actually do disappear to Singapore, Bangalore or Tel Aviv.
The amazing Stan Ovshinsky
In a previous column the Saint lamented the passing of engineer Eugene Polley. The U.S.-based innovator came up with the wireless remote control, a device that your correspondent dubbed “the world’s most useful invention”.
Polley lived to the ripe old age of 96, but it wasn’t his longevity that impressed the Saint, more Polley’s prolific inventiveness (he had 18 patents in his name).
This week comes news of the death of another engineer whose ingenuity outshines even Polley. Stanford Ovshinsky, a U.S. inventor of Lithuanian decent, passed away at the age of 89.
Your correspondent dug a little deeper into Ovshinsky’s life and was quickly fascinated. It turns out that Ovshinsky dipped out of school early and educated himself in the local library. From there, the industrious individual worked in a rubber factory as a machinist before inventing a new type of lathe. After that he got stuck into human and machine intelligence and had a go at inventing a mechanical version of a nerve cell.
Among Ovshinsky’s most notable inventions was the nickel metal hydride (NiMH) battery, the rechargeable cell that dominated the portable product sector before Lithium-ion (Li-ion) devices took over.
(Actually, it’s not quite true to say that Ovinsky invented the NiMH battery for others claim that honour. But what he did do was significantly improve the alloys used in the original designs and then, through his company, licensed the technology to over 50 companies worldwide.)
According to the Saint’s favourite online encyclopaedia, General Motors purchased the patent in 1994 and applied it to battery packs for its EV1 vehicle. (Although the EV1 wasn’t a success, selling just over 2,200 units in a three-year model life and being voted “one of the 50 worst cars of all time” by Time magazine.)
But NiMH batteries are just one of Ovshinsky successes; among his other ideas was the somewhat immodestly named “Ovonics”, amorphous materials with no ordered crystal structure yet which are able to operate as semiconductors. Among the applications of Ovonics is non-volatile memory.
The Saint was then intrigued to learn that so-called Ovonic Unified Memory (OUM) is a metaphor for Ovinsky’s approach to commercialisation of his ideas. (OUM is a memory that always seems to be emerging but never quite fully emerges.)
That’s because although he registered over 300 patents, Ovshinsky’s main company, Energy Conversion Devices (ECD), made a profit in only four of its forty years in existence. Ovshinsky was ousted from the board in 2007. The company struggled on trying to sell relatively inefficient amorphous silicon photovoltaic (PV) cells until this year, before declaring, perhaps to no one’s surprise, that it was bankrupt.
Despite his apparent lack of commercial acumen, the world owes a debt to Stanford Ovshinsky. Although the ubiquitous Li-ion cell has now replaced NiMH batteries in many applications such as mobile phones and portable computers because it has a higher energy density, the latter retain significant market share in the rechargeable battery market and have even found new niches such as battery packs for hybrid vehicles - the popular Toyota Prius being a notable example. Automotive manufacturers prefer NiMH to Li-ion for this application because they are cheaper and safer.
In 1977 British physicist Sir Nevill Mott received the Nobel Prize for his work on amorphous materials and acknowledged Ovshinsky in his acceptance speech. According to the Wall Street Journal, Ovshinsky claimed he was never directly considered for a Nobel Prize for original amorphous material research because he “wasn’t part of that group”.
The Saint, for one, would love to see Hollywood make a movie about Ovshinsky’s life. But he’s guessing that’ll never happen because this genius is neither a sports personality, musician, politician nor royal. Sadly they just don’t make movies about engineers, no matter how interesting they were.