Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. An amateur astronomer in high school, physics major at Georgia Tech, and PhD student in physics at Caltech, Murphy has spent decades reveling in the study of astrophysics.
He currently leads a project to test General Relativity by bouncing laser pulses off of the reflectors left on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts, achieving one-millimeter range precision. Murphy’s keen interest in energy topics began with his teaching a course on energy and the environment for non-science majors at UCSD.
Motivated by the unprecedented challenges we face, he has applied his instrumentation skills to exploring alternative energy and associated measurement schemes. Following his natural instincts to educate, Murphy is eager to get people thinking about the quantitatively convincing case that our pursuit of an ever-bigger scale of life faces gigantic challenges and carries significant risks.
The Do The Math blog
I, Joshua Spodek, consider Tom’s blog, Do the Math, one of the most important, meaningful sites on the internet, given our environmental situation, the many open questions, but that we can’t help acting. While it looks like it’s full of science, it’s about what to do when you understand the science. It’s about values, behavior, meaning, purpose, responsibility, and fun.
Tom’s blog takes an astrophysicist’s-eye view of societal issues relating to energy production, climate change, and economic growth. The approach is often playfully quantitative, with the aim of arriving at a fresh perspective on our world. Posts stress estimation over exactness, because in many cases a reasonably complete picture can be developed without lots of decimal places. Estimations of this type can be used to bring clarity to complex issues, or to evaluate the potential of proposed energy solutions. Hopefully, readers will gain the courage and techniques to start making valuable estimations of their own. The blog begins with a two-part assessment of the implications of continued growth, then settles down to tackle a variety of cute questions relating to energy storage, biofuels, home energy, transport, climate change, etc.
Many estimates will leave out small contributions to the problem, but these tend not to change the overall conclusions: ballpark is often all we need. Also, it is usually not hard to find thorough, detailed analyses of these same problems elsewhere. Part of the point is that we don’t always need thorough, detailed studies to arrive at a useful understanding. There is power in being able to assess the broad-brush aspects of a problem using things you already know, and putting relevant numbers together. We don’t have to rely on what experts tell us if we have the power of useful estimation at our disposal.