Materials and All Matters of Science with Mark Miodownik

0:04 Welcome to AMSEcast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a global leader in science, technology, and innovation. My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the K-25 History Center. Each episode of AMSEcast presents world-renowned authors, scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between, sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics. Welcome to AMSEcast. I’m very glad to welcome on this episode, Dr. Mark Miodownik, the University College London professor of materials and society.

0:45 With his PhD from Oxford University in turbine jet engine alloys, Mark worked as a materials engineer in the UK, the US, and Ireland. At University College London, he established and is the director of the Institute of Making, and created the Plastic Waste Innovation Hub. Now, Mark is a very active science communicator, presenting BBC television and radio programs as well as podcasts. A fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Mark was awarded the great honor of an MBE for services to material science, engineering, and broadcasting. And on top of all that, he’s an award-winning author of the books, Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Man-Made World, Liquid Rules: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances that Flow Through Our Lives, and the book we’re going to discuss today, It’s a Gas: The Sublime and Elusive Elements that Expand Our World.

1:42 Mark, welcome to AMSEcast. Thank you. It’s great to be here. So, you’ve done matter and liquid, and now gases. So, I’m going to start very basically. People know, if they listen to AMSEcast a lot, I have degrees in history, so I’ve learned a lot as director of this science and engineering [laugh] museum. Let’s just start with, what are gases? Yeah, well gases are a state of matter that’s different from solids and liquids. So, in a solid, you have atoms, and they’re linked together to each other by these things called bonds, and those bonds are pretty strong, so mostly they can’t escape them. They’re next to their neighbors, they’re bonded to their neighbors, and that’s really where they’ll be. They do move around a bit, but in general they’re static.

2:22 And then liquids are, well, you’ve got neighbors, but you can keep switching them, and that gives the liquids their fluidity, right? So, they’re constantly switching neighbors, but they’re still bonded to their neighbors. But a gas is when those atoms or molecules escape completely. They are not bonded to nearby, and they can just roam the universe as they please. It’s the ultimate freedom of the molecular world. [laugh] . I love it. I will keep that model in mind. It’s a great way of putting that. And you mentioned in It’s a Gas the importance of steam gas, something I think about—we talk a lot about energy production here at AMSE—something I think about a lot that in the 21st century, steam gas is still, as you say, a vital part of our life support system.

3:06 Can you explain that? I mean, steam generates 70% of today’s electricity, would you believe it? [laugh] . Right. People don’t realize it. And they go, “Well, where is it? I can’t see the steam.” And the steam these days is not in the form of locomotives or steam liners, but it’s steam turbines, and it basically turns water, the energy of the nuclear power—so nuclear power stations—the energy of those actually heats water, turns it into steam, and steam is the thing that generates electricity going through a turbine, a bit like water going through a water wheel, but it’s much more efficient than that. And then, of course, coal-fired power stations, what is the coal doing?

3:47 It’s heating up water to create steam. Gas-fired power stations, what are they doing? They’re heating up water. So, you know, really, most of the world is still run on steam. Yeah. You think about it, we talk—there’s a big, you know, nuclear renaissance, as it’s called, particularly here in Oak Ridge, a lot of companies moving in, and fission and even now a fusion company here, I mean, there are real technical aspects of that, but at the end of the day, it’s a big steam power plant that they’re hoping to produce. So, really, an amazing fact that I think a lot of people overlook. And also, I think a lot of people here have natural gas. I have a natural gas stove at home, but I’m not really sure what natural gas is. So, can you tell us what that is and what were the technical challenges that were there that had to be overcome to be able to harness it?

4:31 Yeah, the story of how natural gas came into our lives is really fascinating because natural gas, which, it’s mostly methane, we mine it now, and the gas we’re talking about is a molecule called carbon with four hydrogens attached to it. If you make that molecule any bigger, like two carbons and some more hydrogens, it becomes a liquid fuel, you know? You get ethanol and ethane and so on. So, we’re used to the carbon. In the form of a liquid, it’s gasoline, but as soon as you get down to one carbon atom, it’s a gas. And those gases, traditionally, have been mined, you know, next to coal deposits, and I think they’re underneath the rock deposits. But they were a nuisance before.

5:11 And before that, we knew about those gases way back in our history, like, thousands of years ago because they were called will-o’-the-wisp, or jack-o’-lantern, as you say in America. And they were bubbling out of marshland. And this isn’t due to a fossil fuel process; this is wetlands in which vegetation kind of gets subsumed into the liquid, and it rots but without oxygen, and that produces methane. It bubbles up to the surface. It’s an odorless, invisible gas. It doesn’t taste of anything. You often get these sulfur whiffs when you’re around those places, and that’s from a different kind of metabolism. They’re mixed up together.

5:52 And they self-ignite sometimes, and we still actually amazingly don’t quite know how that works. But imagine going back thousands of years, our ancestors wandering around and they see a light in the distance as the sun is setting or the sun has just set its twilight. It would have been so magical. And they called them fairies, and there are names for them all over the world. Mostly they’re evil spirits, thought of to be evil spirits because if you head towards them thinking that there might be a light from a house, and you’re lost in a wilderness and in a landscape, you’ll end up in marshland, and people died [laugh] because they got completely stuck. And so, these jack-o’-lantern, these will-o’-the-wisps that we call them in England, these were the first inclinations that there was a gas that you could harness to make a light, and that was the first application.

6:38 In the industrial age when steam is happening, we start to make methane artificially from basically burning wood and coal, but burning it with very little oxygen so you get methane coming out of it. And then it was piped under the ground to be burnt on sticks, which we call lampposts. And so, the beginning of using methane—natural gas—as we now use it, was to light the streets. And it is a miracle because we’re so used to lit cities now. We’re so used to that miracle of being able to walk around a city bathed in light, but it was the first time that was possible. So, you’re talking about the 1800s, 1810, where before this, if you got to a city like London or Chicago, you were in danger at night.

7:26 It was a very dangerous place. You might get mugged, you might get robbed, you might get your throat slit, if you went to the wrong part of town. And there was a big urge by people in cities, and particularly the shop makers in cities, to kind of light the streets, make them safe so people shop and feel safe. Women in particular could feel safe. So, you might say, well, it’s a bit odd piping this flammable explosive gas underneath the streets and putting it on sticks, but it was a miracle. It was a real enlightenment moment. In Britain when it first happened, within 20 years of the first demonstration in London, every city in London, over 20,000 people—so every town in fact, and this is hundreds of towns—had street lighting.

8:06 Within 20 years. And they’re all making artificial methane and they’re piping it around the place. We then find out later, as the fossil fuel industry builds up, that you can mine this stuff, and that’s what comes into our houses now. And of course, the lighting was replaced by electricity, but the heating bit has remained because it’s a very efficient way to heat your house, with natural gas. You know, you’re reminding me—I’m trying to remember the name of the river—we’re producing an exhibit here next year on US presidents in science over the years, and starting with George Washington. And while he was in New Jersey, awaiting the signed Treaty of Paris at the end of the revolution, he called his old friend Thomas Paine over to hang out, and they decided to go out and investigate a burning river next to them, and they’ve tried to figure out why this was happening.

8:55 Well, methane was coming to the surface is what was happening at that. And they went out, and sure enough, were able to create a fire, and this really showed that Washington was of that enlightenment era of wanting to do experiments, and figure out what the heck was going on. So, really fascinating that he was right there, and that it’s part of what we’re talking about today. So, you ought to come see that exhibit when it’s up, Mark, hopefully [laugh] next spring. Yeah. And these fossil fuels leaking out, the liquids were visible, and tars, the tar sands, they were also visible, and they were used, but it was the invisible gases. And that’s really what my book is about is that there are so many invisible gases that have turned out to have absolutely pivotal roles in the evolution of humans, but also in our technology, particularly our technology.

9:40 And it is our life support system. We talked about methane in terms of heating and lighting, and we talked about steam, which is still a part of our life support system, but there are many others in the book. And it really is—one of those things when you write a book, you don’t realize quite [laugh] how important something is until you really delve into it, and I really enjoyed writing it for that reason. Well, I really enjoyed reading it as well. And one gas that’s very important to our daily life is oxygen. We can’t live without it. So, can you kind of in a nutshell tell us why we can’t live without oxygen. And attached to that, Mark, I was really fascinated with your description of how oxygen is produced and distributed in modern hospitals.

10:22 Again, I had no idea before I read this book how that was done. The story of oxygen is kind of a very ancient story because you got the earth being formed, let’s say, four-and-a-half billion years ago, we believe, and it’s a kind of fiery rock, hot lava, loads of noxious gases. There’s the sulfurs, and sulfates, and sulfur dioxide. There is methane, actually. And then there’s carbon dioxide, a lot of carbon dioxide. So, there’s almost zero oxygen. And you might ask, well, why is there zero oxygen? And the answer is oxygen is a very reactive gas. So, if it can react with something that is present, it will just react. So, the iron core of the earth, for instance, when that’s exposed to oxygen, becomes iron oxide and you see that as rust, but there are loads of rocks and whole stratas of rocks that have been laid down, and you can see that oxygen just reacting away.

11:13 So, there isn’t much oxygen in the early earth. And as time goes forward and we have oceans, again, the atmosphere is carbon dioxide. And the early, early life—and we still don’t really know how the early cells formed, these are archaea bacteria cells—but they lived off carbon dioxide. So, there’s no oxygen. And then at some point, there’s an evolutionary moment, a very important one where a cyanobacteria [core] is evolved, which can take advantage of photosynthesis. So, it can take light from the sun and it can turn carbon dioxide. It has a waste product to keep it alive. That product is oxygen and it bubbles out. And of course, that immediate reacts, like, as we were saying, like anything in the ocean, it can react, with it does, and so that happens for millions of years.

11:58 But this goes on and on and on until there is no more things to react with. And then the oxygen starts to persist in the atmosphere and persist in the ocean. And it starts poisoning off the many other cell types that can’t cope with this very reactive gas. And so, you get this thing called the Great Oxygen Event, which is about 2.4 billion years ago, and there’s a mass sort of killing off of other things. And these cyanobacteria really thrive and create an oxygen atmosphere. And this is the beginning of our journey into the evolutionary world. Because the thing about oxygen is, when it’s available, if a cell could work out how to use oxygen to metabolize energy, like sugars, as we know, it’s an amazing energy source.

12:42 And so, that’s what happened. These bacteria evolved to be able to use oxygen, and they thrived. And so, what you have is a whole two sets of life on the planet. One set of life is creating oxygen and using carbon dioxide, and the other set of life is using oxygen and creating carbon dioxide, and we’re the latter. So, we breathe out carbon dioxide, and the plants use it. And the plants breathe in carbon dioxide, and they breathe out oxygen. But they’re not the only ones. In fact, most of the oxygen comes from the oceans and the bacteria there. So, you have this symbiosis very early on. And because the oxygen is such a potent way of running a metabolism, it’s got such a high reactivity, what we believe happened is that it then allows multi-cellular organisms, very complex organisms, to have enough energy to run themselves.

13:38 And so, you get this big growth in different multi-cellular organisms. We are descended from them. We are one of the oxygen breathers, which we always have dependent on. But we, of course, cannot live without oxygen because for that reason, we’re evolved to have to use it for our metabolism, but we also breathe out this carbon dioxide, which a whole set of other life depends on. And so, this kind of interrelationship between the different types of organism on the planet, the carbon dioxide breathers and the oxygen breathers, it goes up and down over the evolution of the world, and you see it in the fossil record. But you know, yeah, us oxygen breathers alive today cannot live more than a minute now without breathing in a breath of oxygen.

14:23 And we need it about 20%, 19%, and if it goes too low—not very much lower than that—we suffocate. That’s interesting, I was just at the Smithsonian in DC, and have some great geological samples there showing that Great Oxygen Event where everything changed. Talk to me quickly about the hospitals. That was something that I really learned from your book of how that oxygen is distributed in modern hospitals. Of course, because we rely on it, one of the biggest breakthroughs in medical technology was to be able to get oxygen and put it in a tank so that when someone was having respiratory problems, you could put a mask over their face and deliver oxygen.

15:05 And today, this is one of the major things that saves people's lives all over the world. So, every hospital has oxygen tanks, and every ambulance carries it. Now, the question is, where does that stuff come from? And it’s a really simple process if you’re in a developed country, that’s reasonably rich because what you do is you just get an industrial process to take air and you cool it down. But you have to cool it down a lot. And what happens is when you get to really cold temperatures, out comes liquid nitrogen, and that’s a byproduct. And that’s of course, four-fifths of the air. And then out comes liquid oxygen. And then you can distill away the liquid oxygen, and then you can put it in a tank. And then if you control that with a valve, you can deliver that to people and save their lives.

15:49 It’s an incredible resource. And it’s 24/7. We’re constantly making liquid oxygen, and we’re transporting it every country, every developed country is transporting it on these massive tankers around the country to hospitals. And we saw this in Covid. That was the only therapy available at the beginning that we that worked. And when hospitals ran out of oxygen, people died in their thousands, and there were terrible scenes. In countries where there isn’t a big infrastructure, you might ask, well, where do they get their oxygen from because it’s not a thing that you can globally transport very easily. It’s a high pressure vessel. It’s heavy, obviously quite a dangerous thing. We have this material technology called zeolites, which is an incredible material.

16:31 And these are rocks, the Greeks sort of discovered a form with them, and they called it sort of— [laugh] , if you heat them up, they basically steam, and they have a lot of water, sort of, stuck inside them. But you can—they’re basically a very porous rock that you can put a gas through, and it will preferentially absorb one of the gases and let the other one out the other side, so it becomes a giant filter. And you can design zeolites that take air in and output oxygen. And so, if you’re in a country where there is not a big infrastructure, you use these zeolites to create, sort of, purified oxygen products, and then you give them to people who need them. Interesting.

17:11 And this section certainly struck home for me. I remember as a kid, I had a lot of breathing issues, and it seemed like I was in the hospital all the time. And I—oxygen masks, but also the oxygen tent sitting in one of those when I was a kid. Thankfully, that went away, but I’m here because of them. Absolutely. And you’re one of billions. That is such an amazing therapy. And it is one of these, it’s a life support system, I mean, literally, but it is also something we take for granted, the idea that if you’re in a modern country, and you have breathing difficulties, you will not be very far away from a tank of oxygen is a modern miracle. One of the other parts of your book, you talk about smells, and I will tell you here at AMSE, we have a space space, we call it where we talk about the James Webb telescope and a bunch of other fun stuff about space.

17:58 And one of those is that space has a smell, and people can—we have an interactive where you can take a whiff of what is said to smell like space. It’s not pleasant. It doesn’t smell great at all. But you talk about things that do, like, perfume and cologne and so forth. How are those smells, those gases, created and captured so that we can buy them, and maybe buy a bottle for our wives at Christmas and so forth. The book covers not just essentially the sort of the chemistry, let’s say, and the evolutionary side of gases, but also the sensual and emotional side. And perfumes, I chose to sort of look at perfumes because I think that is a really good example of it. And people might not think they’re a gas.

18:39 It might be a surprise a perfume to gas because I always see a liquid in this bottle. But of course, what the liquid is, is just a carrier for an odor. And you ask the question, how do you capture odors? Well, in the early days, it was very tricky to do it. You’d go to a garden, you smell a lovely rose, and you might think, okay, I love that. I’m going to bottle that. So, you get a bottle out and you waft it over it and you put a top on it. And then you go inside and you take the top off and you smell and there’s no rose smell. What the hell? What the hell? I put it in there and now it’s gone. Like, you know, you can imagine, like, the frustration of trying to understand that a smell that can be very strong next to a plant is actually a very saturated gas molecules that are being emitted from that plant.

19:24 And when you try to put them into a bottle by, say, just exposing the bottle to it, you forget that the bottle is already full, it’s already full of a gas. And so, the gas would have to fight to get in there. You have to basically take all the gas out of there first, make it into a vacuum, and then open it up. But even then, you only have a very small amount of these molecules. So, really early on, we realized, you know, in the history of technology that you what you needed to do was find the oil that was being vaporized into a gas that the flower was emitting. So, rose oil in this case. And how do you get rose oil? Well, mate, you take all the petals off the rose, and you put it into a distillery, basically. So, you maybe put it in some water, and then you gently heat the water up, and all these oils evaporate into the air, and then you very carefully collect them in a cooling tube.

20:16 And if you get it right, you can exactly capture just the oil and not the water vapor. And this allows you to capture any oil, let’s say, of—and it was a big business, and of course, you know—but it was very skilled work, and it was very expensive. So, the only people who had perfumes were kings and queens and rich people. Like, everyone else smelt terrible. So, early perfumes, but these are liquid and you put them into bottle, but of course, they’ll evaporate very quickly unless you put the top on. And that’s of course why when you buy a perfume, you’re buying it in a spray form, and if you take that top off and leave it off for any time, you’ll lose all of it. But the other thing that of course, people realized is that you could get a liquid that was very—you could bottle other smells that were more, let’s say musky or earthy by dissolving them in a very volatile liquid like an alcohol.

21:07 And then when you spray those on the skin on the back of the hand, the alcohol evaporates, it doesn’t have much smell, and maybe the cinnamon does or the bark of a tree does, and you get this very—so that the art of perfume here was to kind of find these liquids, oils, essential oils. But then it got very complicated. Like ambergris, right, for instance, is the kind of sick of a sperm whale that’s been fermented in its stomach until it’s died, it’s then been released, it floats around on the ocean for years and years and years, changing its kind of composition due to the sun’s rays and the salt water. Then if you happen to find it, you’ll find this incredibly complex, fragrant, unbelievably attractive smell.

21:53 So, surprising. And if you find ambergris, by the way, I mean, it does float around, it’s worth a huge amount of money. It’ll go for thousands of pounds, one small bit of ambergris because all the perfume [unintelligible] . You’d have thought these days, we don’t need that stuff, like natural [sources] because you can synthesize—surely we can synthesize any smell, but it’s just not true. We don’t actually have that ability. So yeah, I delve into all these things about the kind of mechanics of how you take smells from the natural world and turn them into perfumes, and also how perfumiers balance smells. So, there’s kind of a palette of smells and a trick to it, which is why, you know, certain people like certain perfumes, they feel that it kind of reflects their personality, and other people might hate that exact perfume and find it too clingy, too musky, too sweet, too floral, not masculine enough or not feminine enough.

22:46 And that whole world, I’m fascinated by that. That whole world of how we kind of identify with a certain portfolio of smells is something that I—yeah, I think is a really big part of being—of gas technology, for instance, I think people don’t think it’s a gas technology, but it is. It’s a billion dollar business, and it is so complex and so sophisticated. You know, you’re reminding me a question I often have about things with the, it was the ambergris of who first thought to try that because, hey, we think this might have a good complex [laugh] smell at the end. I’ve often thought that, Mark, with like a lobster, you know, who first thought, “Let’s eat one of those. It looks so daunting.” [laugh] . But it’s really so fascinating how that becomes part of your life in a way and as you say, part of your identity in a way.

23:37 Let’s turn from that, though, to transportation. You talk about gases and hot air ballooning, and I have to also say this, Thaddeus Lowe. I’m going to claim him as a relative. I don’t know if he was, but he was one of the pioneers here. During our civil war, he worked with President Lincoln to get hot air balloons utilized during the battles. The sad story in his later life will lead that part out, but I’m claiming him. So, can you tell us a bit about hot air ballooning, when it started, and for those of us who don’t know why it works the way it does with the gases? Being able to fly, of course, a long standing dream for humans. And could see the birds can do it, so why can’t we do it?

24:20 And I mean, you know, like, you can’t flap your hands and have—and people did—of course, there was Icarus, the myth of Icarus, of flying with wings. It’s actually a very tricky thing to get off the ground because we as humans, we are quite heavy. So, in order to kind of be buoyant, to be able to float in this fluid that is surrounding us—so I think you first have to realize is that we’re surrounded by air. We’re at the bottom of a sea of 100 kilometers of air, and just as if you were at the bottom of the sea, right, if you wanted to float upwards from the sea, you have to be the same density as the liquid around you. If you’re the same density of liquid around you, you’ll start to float.

25:01 And that’s how scuba diving works, that you kind of you match your density to the liquid, and then you can go up or down or left or right and you feel weightless. You essentially are weightless. In the case of doing that in air because air is so less dense, we need to basically make ourselves a huge volume, and that volume is a balloon. But of course, air itself is the same density as the air next to it and you are heavy, so that’s not going to work. But what if you heat the air up? Then hot air is less dense than cold air, and if it’s a large enough volume, the average density of you plus the balloon is lighter than air, and you ascend. And you control your height by cooling down the balloon and adjusting other things.

25:45 So, that’s how hot air balloons work. And that was an absolutely pivotal moment in the history of the world. This is, like, the 1700s now because what we have is this dream come true. And every king, queen in Europe at the time, no kind of celebration was replete without these balloonists. They were just a marvel. It was just extraordinary. But it was very dangerous. You can imagine how do you come down? [unintelligible] —they got swept out the seas. They went high, and then a big storm came, and then no one ever saw them again. They just died. Yeah, so it was very dan—they were daredevil. And then what happens is, there’s a different way of doing that, which is that you actually make hydrogen. Now, hydrogen is a very low density gas, so you don’t have to heat it up.

26:30 It is much less dense than the air around it. And if you have enough hydrogen, it will take you up no problem at all. And making hydrogen was relatively easy at the time because they had quite a large amount of vitriol, which is sulfuric acid, and that was made in large quantities for many different things like tanning. And they had things like, well, they had metal filings, and so they could add the two together, you get bubbles of hydrogen. And so, the hydrogen balloonists competed with the hot air balloonists as to what’s the coolest thing. And,one of the things they used to do is set off fireworks high above the palaces to the delight of the audience below. And of course, occasionally one of the fireworks would then light the balloon and then everything would just blow up.

27:13 [laugh] . Yeah, quite a party. Yeah, quite a party. And you think about this, and you think—so at first it was just a sort of fascination, but then of course, you realize that there’s so many advantages to the military of being able to see high. And you can see where the positions of your enemy are, and you can then use artillery. In the Civil War, this is exactly what they did. They made hydrogen balloons, and they put them up into the air, saw where their positions were, then they would direct their artillery towards them. Of course, all the while you’re being shot at. So, it was dangerous and thrilling in equal measure, I’m sure. After the Civil War finishes, a guy called Baron von Zeppelin, he’s seen this happening. He’s a German, and he goes back to Germany and he says, “I want to start the first airline and I want to use hydrogen balloons as the way to get around.” And he starts to make these airships made of hydrogen and thin skin on the outside with a capsule underneath that you could travel in.

28:11 And the airship is born, and it’s an incredible moment in history because it’s the first airline. I mean, people start traveling around Europe, and then even to America, and to South America. In fact, they go all the way around the world, eventually, on these Zeppelins, which are full of [laugh] hydrogen. It’s just extraordinary. It is. I know not to always go back to our Presidents and Science exhibit, but I believe—and people can correct me—the first demonstration in America of a hot air balloon was Philadelphia with President Washington in attendance. So, it took off, he actually gave—it was a Frenchman who did it; I can’t remember his name—he gave him essentially credentials, so wherever he landed, people wouldn’t shoot him or whatever [laugh] . You know, this guy has the right to be there.

28:56 When he landed, I think some, like, 20 miles away from where he took off. But really, really interesting story. Again, revolutionizing transportation. We also talk a lot here about the periodic table and the noble gases. Can you tell us what the noble gases are and how they’ve entered our daily lives since their rather unexpected discovery? Yeah, the noble gases, well, they’re called noble because they really react within anything. And that’s unusual because most things on the periodic table, most elements have a certain number of electrons in the outer shell, and usually that number of electrons means they’re not stable. They would like to complete their outer shell, and so the way to do that is to react with something.

29:38 But the noble gases are molecules like helium, neon, argon, and they have a complete outer shell. So, they have no interest. There’s nothing in it for them to react with anything, and so they basically don’t. There are a few exceptions. And what that means in practice means that when a noble gas is brought into creation—and most of them on earth, like helium, that they’re born deep in the earth through nuclear reactions, and they bubble to the surface—they just sit around in our air, and no one knows they’re there. You can’t taste them. You can’t see them. They don’t react with anything, so why would you know? That was why they were completely missed. In the history of chemistry, they’re absent. And it’s only with these sophisticated techniques that come later that we piece together that they exist, and they’re in the air you breathe, and they don’t react with anything.

30:23 So, you think, well, okay. Then who cares? At least we found them, but you know, and helium is cool and neon’s great, but what you know, what use could they be? But it turns out actually that a gas that doesn’t react with anything is super useful. In the case of argon, we use it a lot to kind of make inert atmospheres so that things will not react. So, if you want to protect them from reacting, you put them in an argon atmosphere. We also make lasers out of them. They have a particular electron structure. You can make lasers out of them. And in the case of neon, if you put electric fields through them, they glow this beautiful neon color, and of course, the whole of the science initially would not be the same if neon lights had not been developed in the 20th century.

31:04 And Las Vegas. What would Las Vegas be like? There’s so much they’ve given us. But I think helium is probably the most important because helium is a gas very similar to hydrogen. It’s very lightweight. It is used for ballooning now, much safer way to balloon around. But its major use is in health care. And if you ever go an MRI scan, you know, you’re relying on helium. And what are you relying on? Well, it’s got a very low boiling point—like, 4.2 Kelvin, which is minus 273 centigrade—and so once you get it down to that and you start letting it boil off, you can keep things that are almost at zero temperature. And that’s what you need to get very high control over the things, like the detectors that you’re using.

31:50 And basically the whole of science, basically, all of these very sensitive detectors relies on liquid helium to cool them. And that has had huge implications in health care. And whenever helium gets low, people really worry in hospitals, I can tell you, because it’s a major cost if the price goes up. And if they run over it completely, they can’t even run those instruments. You also you mentioned argon. I worked for many years at the National Archives in Washington. I do believe argon is part of the encasement for the Charters, the Declaration of Constitution, for that environment it creates within the case to help protect those documents. Wow, that’s interesting. I didn’t know that. That’s cool. I believe that’s the case. Now, my archives friends will probably call me today and say, “No, you idiot. It’s something else,” but I’m pretty sure that’s it [laugh] . So, we also talk about climate change and the need to address that. What are some of the strategies right now to capture carbon dioxide gas and address that real crisis we’re facing?

32:46 That’s a technology—carbon capture is a technology that is going to be a big industry in the future for this century because we really can’t do without it. The way in which it all adds up, there’s a latency in that if once you admit a carbon dioxide molecule into the atmosphere, it stays there for a long time and it’s heating up all that time. And you have to get it back out of the atmosphere in order to stop that heating. So, the carbon dioxide parts per million, which at the moment is something like 427 parts per million in the atmosphere, that is like a thermostat for Earth. If we want to get the temperatures down, we have to basically pull that oxygen—pull that, sorry—carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But how do we do it?

33:28 Because we’ve got to get it out of there at an economic cost, and we’ve got to get it out there and store it so it doesn’t go back in there again. So, that’s carbon capture. That’s the challenge. And it’s worth saying probably at this point that even if we were to stop burning all carbon fossil fuels now, we would still have a lot of global heating in this century and probably go up to two degrees. So, we have to get it out. So, how do we do it? Well, of course, trees naturally pull it out of the atmosphere by putting it into their cellulose and lignin. So, you might think, well, the easy thing to do is just grow trees. And the problem with that is the calculations don’t—are difficult because even if you would sort of plant trees on all the available land, and they grew to maturity to pull that carbon in, you still only account for one year’s normal carbon dioxide emissions.

34:22 And the truth is that most tree-planting carbon capture schemes don’t work because they’re often in countries where the land is cheap. The local residents actually need wood. So, you have to protect that wood from being chopped down for the lifetime of the tree, and that turns out to be very rarely the case. So, not only do you have to grow them, you have to make sure they are not chopped down and burned, and that is not a trivial thing because that land is competing for food as well. You see that in Brazil. So basically, I think the consensus is that tree planting, although great where you can do it, is not going to get us anywhere near what we need to do. So, then you think, okay, we can’t use trees. So, what can we use?

35:02 The idea that we’ve got these power plants that are basically fueled with gas, which is methane, or with coal or oil, and out of the tubes coming out of those is quite concentrated carbon dioxide. So, can’t we capture from that and basically store it? And that is happening now. That’s called carbon capture and storage. The problem with that is that it perpetuates the business as usual. So, in a way, it’s that basically companies that are capturing carbon coming out of the power stations, they have a business now where you keep burning it and capturing it, burning it and capturing it, burning it and capturing it, and it’s not clear that will actually take us to a net-zero situation.

35:45 Even though I think that technology is useful, it’s probably not going to bring the paradigm shift that we need. So, then we’re into the only one that I see as really absolutely going to save us—and I say that word kind of, yeah, deliberately because I do think it is about saving us; I think a lot of life on the planet will be fine. You know, it’ll deal very fine with hotter temperatures. I think humans will be really in trouble if we don’t do something, and specifically our grandchildren. So, in order save them from very high temperatures and mass… mass migration, yeah, then I think we have to do this thing, which is called direct air capture.

36:27 And what that is—and it sounds ludicrous— [laugh] is that you basically make a machine that just breathes air in a bit like our lungs breathe it in, and it takes out the carbon dioxide molecules and stores them. And it either does that as a sort of solid with a bit of chemistry or it pumps them down into a safe storage place. It’s very early days with that technology, although it does exist. There are companies already capturing of the order of—and this is going to sound ridiculous, but you know, hundreds to thousands of tons per year. But I mean, you have to take that in the kind of, we’re going to need to store trillions. So, you know, that’s the scale of the problem. And it costs thousands of dollars per ton to store it and capture it.

37:09 And if you’re paying thousands of dollars per ton, that makes most of these businesses uneconomic unless without subsidies. So, it’s a tricky one, but I think this direct carbon capture, and there are different versions of it, they are being rolled out. There’s a new one happening in Paris now. There’s one that’s operating in Iceland now. They are really vital, and I think we just need more investment to scale them up and bring the price of the carbon capture per ton down. That was going to be my question. The current models, how large are those pieces of equipment? I imagine that’s a fairly large imprint. Yeah, it is. And you’ve got this big infrastructure. I mean, if you look at the history of technology, and I think that’s what the book does quite well, if I’m—you know, I was trying to do anyways—look at steam.

37:55 Steam starts out as a clunky technology that hardly works, terribly inefficient. People understand how important it is, and they innovate, and they make it efficient, and they innovate, and they make the business around it, like [what] does with [unintelligible] ? And that’s what we need to happen in the carbon capture market. I think we need to stop thinking we may not need it. We will need it. It’s 100% we’re going to need it. We need investment. So, that thing that humans do really well, which is to innovate, and make efficient, and innovate. We’ve done it with the internal combustion engines. We’ve done it with jet engines. We’ve done it with steam. We can do it for this. We can. And we need to. And we just need more talent in that space and more investment in that space.

38:36 You talk about all kinds of effects on society, on civilization, that gases have had over the years, and they kind of go hand in hand with the growth of our modern societies. Of those fundamental changes, gas technologies have brought, maybe it’s an unfair question, but which one do you believe has had perhaps the greatest impact on civilization as we know it? Oh, yeah. That’s a great question and so hard to answer. Yes [laugh] . The civilization bit makes me say it has to be the steam engine. And I think the reason for that is because it’s the first time in which a gas technology is harnessed that’s not a natural gas technology. It’s not like the wind, you know, wind turbines and sailboats.

39:19 Which did change the world a lot. I mean, if you didn’t have a sailing ship, the geography and politics of the world would be totally different. The whole of America, North America itself, you know, and its history, it was all about the sailing ships coming from Europe. Think about that. That’s a huge, you know, impact on civilization and the clash of cultures and the creativity around that. I mean, it is a creative and destructive at the same time, right? But the steam engine, what it does is it kind of starts us on this journey to liberate people from manual labor. Before this, if you want to make goods, in the end, it’s people who are doing that making. And so, not everyone can own loads of goods because you just can’t afford have that much labor.

40:03 So, the rich are rich, and they have lots of stuff, and the poor are poor, and they don’t have any much stuff. Then the steam engine comes along, and it doesn’t just kind of creates these different transport technologies, like the steam locomotive, and railways, and the steam liner, but it creates the mass manufacturer. It makes mass manufacture possible through use of coal or oil, [unintelligible] , and that means that everyone can get wealthy. Like, it’s hard to underestimate, really, how the machine age where everything doesn’t have to be built by a person’s hands makes everyone wealthy. And I think that we take it for granted now that we have lots of people—though I’m not saying everyone, but certainly in developed countries—90% of the population have a huge, amazing array of wonderful things in their lives from sofas to trainers to TVs to phones to lights.

40:56 You know, they’re bathed in light. You know, they have baths, you know, they have showers. All down, all in the end, none of that’s possible without mass manufacturing, and it all starts with a steam engine. Fascinating. You write so many fascinating books. I really enjoy them all. What are you working on right now? What’s next for you? Segueing from that, we live in this very material, wonderful material world, and the one downside to that material wealth has been the pollution caused by it. I’m talking about plastic pollution in the [unintelligible] of plastics, but there’s many other unintended side effects. And it’s not like I want to write a book about how bad that is.

41:38 I don’t. I want to write a book about how we can change so we still can have all this wonderful stuff in our lives, but not pollute the planet. And I think there is a very clear way forward. And it’s just going to be this turning point. It’s the next bit of our journey as humans, as I see it. And I want us to kind of move towards this thing where we actually look after our stuff. We don’t just buy it, enjoy it, and then in a sense, what often happens is you throw it away and buy something new because that’s now more interesting to you. You just don’t do that. You actually look after it, and you hand it on to the next generation, or you hand it on to some other person who wants to buy it, and we don’t have to buy new all the time.

42:21 We can look after our stuff. So, I want to write that book. Yeah, interesting. You’re going back to my parents’ ethic. That was their thought, coming out of the Great Depression of, you don’t just throw things away. You either repurpose them or make sure someone else has a use for them. So, I look forward to that. Where can people learn more about your work? Yeah. I mean, I’ve got a website, markmiodownik.net. So, that kind of lists most of the things I do in different headings. So, I do research at the university or on things like repair of materials and how to design for repair and waste, but also some quite sci-fi stuff we’re working on, which is self-repairing materials, which I really believe is a big part of the future.

43:01 So, materials that look after themselves. So, your phone, you’ve dropped your phone, the phone breaks, the housing cracks. You plug it in the wall, you leave it 12 hours, and it’s healed. That’s the kind of thing we’re working on. And I do think that’s an inevitable next step for materials technology. A fellow I think you should talk with is a good friend of ours, Guru Madhavan at the National Academy of Engineering. He’s the Norm Augustine Senior Fellow there, and a good friend to AMSE. He talks to me a lot and he’s been on AMSEcast a couple of times about the importance of maintenance and the type of thing you’re talking about. So we, again, are very much an innovation area here in East Tennessee.

43:42 A lot of innovation all around us, which we know is important, but that maintenance and, you know, maintaining things so they can continue to be used this and the next generation is really an important part of that equation too. So, I look forward to that book, and I look forward—I hope you can visit us in Oak Ridge and I can’t thank you enough for joining us on AMSEcast. Oh, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for letting me onto the AMSEcast, which I’ve really enjoyed. Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSEcast. For more information on this topic or any others, you can always visit us at AMSE.org or find, like, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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