Many of you follow my eclectic blog posts hoping that one of them might appeal to you.  They span a broad range from personal to professional, craft to art, simplistic to technical, worldly to cosmic.  I sometimes offer my opinions and back them up with data.  In today’s data-challenged world (not from a dearth of data, but rather the challenges from those who don’t like the data), it is hard to make a compelling argument.

Nevertheless, I recently embarked on exploring a topic that has always bothered me:  the idea that we can solve our problems by economic growth.  I can see how it can solve certain short term problems, like borrowing money to pay back interest on prior loans, but it didn’t seem like a viable long term strategy.  We live on a finite planet and so eventually we would end up against practical physical limitations, right?

It is obvious to a physicist, but seemingly not to many others.

Over the last month, while staying warm in our natural gas-heated home, I looked into the future of fossil fuels and their impact on our global economy.  I crafted three essays which are more technical than many of my posts, and may not be of interest to many of my followers.  So don’t feel compelled to digest them.  

But if you are curious, here are brief descriptions, with links.

When I was studying physics in college, one of the early subjects was Einstein’s special relativity theory.  The subject is called “relativity” because it explains the physics of objects moving relative to each other.  It is “special” because it only applies to uniform relative motion, not motion induced by gravity, which is covered by “general” relativity, which Einstein described a decade later.

Special relativity replaced Galileo’s and Isaac Newton’s earlier theories, which were superb at explaining falling objects and orbiting planets, but had run into trouble explaining the properties of fast-moving electrons and light.

It is an early subject in the physics curriculum because as students, we were just learning the techniques of calculus and linear algebra; techniques that are helpful, but not required to understand special relativity.  Most people are familiar with special relativity, and even if they don’t understand the details, they have heard “E=mc²”, one of the consequences of it.  They may also have heard about time dilation, the effect of a moving clock slowing down relative to a stationary one.