While you take your break from Berkeley, give the man (Feynman)some orange juice…..and have some yourself. Very refreshing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKTSaezB4p8

Cheers

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WUXI, China — President Obama wants to make the United States “the world’s leading exporter of renewable energy,” but in his seven months in office, it is China that has stepped on the gas in an effort to become the dominant player in green energy — especially in solar power, and even in the United States.

Chinese companies have already played a leading role in pushing down the price of solar panels by almost half over the last year. Shi Zhengrong, the chief executive and founder of China’s biggest solar panel manufacturer, Suntech Power Holdings, said in an interview here that Suntech, to build market share, is selling solar panels on the American market for less than the cost of the materials, assembly and shipping.

Backed by lavish government support, the Chinese are preparing to build plants to assemble their products in the United States to bypass protectionist legislation. As Japanese automakers did decades ago, Chinese solar companies are encouraging their United States executives to join industry trade groups to tamp down anti-Chinese sentiment before it takes root.

The Obama administration is determined to help the American industry. The energy and Treasury departments announced this month that they would give $2.3 billion in tax credits to clean energy equipment manufacturers. But even in the solar industry, many worry that Western companies may have fragile prospects when competing with Chinese companies that have cheap loans, electricity and labor, paying recent college graduates in engineering $7,000 a year.
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Rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/business/energy-environment/25solar.html?em

About energy:

1) The costs were high initially, then they fell with better technology and discovery of more/ larger fields. However, in the last 20 years the costs (human, capital, environmental) have gone up again.

2) Energy will get costlier, since supply will certainly shrink and will be out-stripped by demand from a growing economy. No new fields have been discovered of size to offset the demand growth. No new technology has been invented to offset it either.

Do you mean that all natural laws are simple in some sense? That the number of bits required to describe a natural law is always some small number? It’s an attractive idea, but why would we assume this? In science, we try to find the simplest explanation that fits the phenomena. But the simplest explanation needn’t actually be simple…

On the cost of energy:

Q3: I’d say it has been going up. Of course the canonical answer is it has been going down, but that usually ignores the human cost (Iraqi lives, for example) and the environmental cost.

Q4: Current sources of energy will keep increasing in cost. If we discover a new way towards cheap energy then it will definitely go down. But if we don’t then it won’t. So the question is really asking, will there be a major technological breakthrough? It’s hard to predict such things…

On different representations of physical laws:

Isn’t it a little like we’re using different languages to describe the same things? Is it nature that’s doing this, or us?

I am pretty sure you delivered a likeable lecture and made it interesting and assimilable. I have learnt more while reading during the course of the employment than in School and College. I have learnt many concepts from many different sources. In fact to this day I feel uncomfortable and uneasy when I dont recall the basic axioms and principles in Mathematics and Physics. I instantly feel I am unfit for what I get paid for. The reason I forgot them at the first place was some third rate dis-interested teachers in a fourth rate Govt School first introduced me to these subjects and they had no incentive of making it appealing and ever-lasting to the dumbest guy in the class aka me and they immediately jumped to solving some problem sets by trying to fit values in a formula and eureka.. I have l cleared the exams with 95% in Physics in my 12th standard but beleive me I have begun to admire wave-particle thoery now better after coming acrosss the a video on double-slit experiment for the first time in over a decade and a half of last trying to absorb it. It fact the lectures in youtube by Prof. Walter Levin would make anyone instantly love physics. I must admit despite being a merit scholar for the marks I scored, I knew almost nothing. We are all as good as our teachers at School made us.