|
Energy Conversion Devices:
an interview with Stan Ovshinsky serious societal problems. We picked energy and information to work on as they are the twin pillars of our global economy. We thought we might be able to change them and change them fundamentally. I’ve always done basic fundamental work in science. In so doing, we created a new area of science and technology as well. BB: You have a practical idealism. You know the planet is in trouble, and you are aware of our basic unity, saying as you did that we have “one culture.” Did that awareness start very early in you? SO: Very early, practically when I was born, but in the seven- to eight-year-old time frame. But you put your finger on the right thing … practical idealism. I’m not one who wants to do anything destructively, but wanted to be constructive in changing the world. I don’t even mind being called an industrialist. I think that’s great because if you build new industries you build new jobs, a future. You know you can’t have civilization without advances. BB: You focused on areas that have environmental impact though. SO: Why did we pick energy? Energy is the oxygen of any society. I was raised in a town where pollution was just a given. We used to thank God for pollution because it meant the factories were working. So if you want to come up with something that’s realistically going to change the world, you want to not only get rid of pollution and climate change but the strategic dependence on oil. I knew when we cut off the Japanese oil supply before World War II, I knew that there would be war then. Energy — where it’s geographically located — is something that causes war, you know, if it’s oil. BB: So our problem, as I understand it technologically, isn’t that there is no energy — the Universe is made out of it — but, as the name of your company implies, energy conversion is the issue. SO: Absolutely. BB: So much of your work is in creating new materials, amorphous materials, to either utilize energy (like solar), store energy (like hydrogen or batteries), and work with information and intelligence like DVDs or computer memory or processors. SO: All ages of civilization are noted by the materials they use — the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, and so on. So really there has to be a new age of materials if you are going to have new phenomena. It’s really what we’re about. You have to make things from different science and technology. There was no field of amorphous materials, and that’s what Iris and I worked on. I got great support from many of the greats in physics, relativity, chemistry — not the masses of scientists, but the top people like Linus Pauling and many others. BB: Don’t we look for perfect structure, like a crystal, not disordered structure, chaos? SO: Everybody thinks of disorder as what happens on campuses, or amorphousness as a literary term, but the fact is that it offers the opposite of chaos. A crystal structure is a Totalitarian system. It’s one atom after another atom, just exactly alike. If you perturb that atom in any way, you’ve ruined the crystal structure. But that perturbation is where transistors came from. They found a way to slip in, subversively, a foreign atom like arsenic or boron into silicon and germanium to make transistors. What you do with amorphous and disordered material is that you open up huge new degrees of freedom to build your own materials that have never been built before. They are synthetic and, because they have an unusual bonding with each other, they can have new mechanisms that were not thought about before. You can make devices that can do things that have never been done. So I’d rather say it’s like local order, like a cooperative. You don’t need a long-range structure and long-range rigidity. That inhibits creativity. BB: It’s a brilliant metaphor for every level from the atomic to the political. SO: I don’t think that’s an accidental thing, by the way. BB: I’d like to talk about Ovonics, the company for a moment. Even with all the dazzling invention — the two hundred fiftyish patents touching everything from nickel/metal/hydride batteries, thin-film solar cells, hydrogen fuel cell development, DVD and CD/RW technology, computer memory, hydrogen storage, and the |
||||||