omega tau - English only

I wanted to make an episode on a topic from the history of science for a long time, finally it happened. This is an interview with Etienne Benson, professor of the history of science and technology, on the history of how people of the western world have been seeing, studying and explaining their environment. We talk mostly about his book, Surroundings, but also briefly about his current field of study.

A quick update on why there's so few episodes from Markus and Nora. In English and German.

In July I visited the Airbus Helicopters factory in Donauwörth and spent time with Antoine van Gent, the Head of Development Flight and Ground testing for Germany. We talked about the helicopter flight testing process, some of the cultural aspects, the collaboration between pilots and the flight test engineer as well as his participation in a landing of an H145 on top of the Aconcagua mountain.

The climate situatation is getting more and more dire, and in order to reach the goals the international community has set for themselves, engineering solutions seem increasingly necessary. After talking about solar geoengineering in episode 385, we will look at direct air capture in this episode. Direct Air Capture is a family of technologies that allow the extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere. My guest Peter Psarras explains the technology, the economics and also the political and moral challenges associated with the technology.

The root cause of global warming is that more and more of the energy supplied by the sun is captured by the atmosphere because of increased amounts of CO2 and other climate gases. One way of fixing this is to make sure that more of that energy is reflected and never even penetrates the lower atmosphere. Solar geoengineering proposes to put particles into the upper atmosphere to increase its reflectivity and thereby reduce the temperature. In the episode I talk with Harvard's David Keith about some of the technical aspects, which role this technique can play in the overall fight against climate change, some of the political challenges as well as current avenues of research.

The beam dump is a large graphite block used to take up the energy stored in the LHC beam in case the beam needs to be shut down. Since the energy in the beam can be as high as the kinetic energy of a landing 747-400, designing and operating the dump is challenging. In this episode, Marco Calviani, who heads the group that is responsible for this and other beam dumps at CERN, tells us about how the dump works, and what they have recently changed in order to cope with the higher luminosity in future configurations of the LHC.

It's been 377 episodes and we have not yet dedicated one to the F-18. This changes now. In the episode we first talk with Jerry Deren, a former US Navy Hornet pilot who also flew with the Blue Angels; we cover both aspects of his career. In part two we chat with Nick Anderson, former RAAF F-18 pilot (and co-host of the Airline Pilot Guy podcast). We chat about his experience flying the Hornet Down Under, focussing on quirks and funny stories.

The main part of this episode is about flying the F-22 Raptor, the most modern air superiority fighter in the inventory of the USAF. Our guest is Dan Javorsek, callsign Animal, who has previously flown the Raptor in operational test. Dan has also been the initiator of the Alpha Dogfight trials, where an AI was tested against a real pilot in a simulator air-to-air engagement. Dan also flew the F-117 and the F-35, so we cover those airplanes as well.

In this episode I talk with Paulo Iscold, a professor or aeronautical engineering at Cal Poly about Nixus Nixus, his most recent project. Nixus is one of the most fascinating and ground-breaking research efforts in the space of gliding. It uses advanced manufacturing techniques to support a very thing wing, plus a fly-by-wire system to control the ailerons and the flaps; the latter are automatically adjusted to the current speed.

In this episode we cover the final storage of nuclear waste in underground facilities. We start out with a conversation about the basic process and the chemistry and physics of nuclear waste with Gareth Law, a professor of radiochemistry at the university of Helsinki. We then discuss geological issues with Heini Reijonen of the Geological Survey of Finland. Our third conversation is about the Onkalo storage facility in Finland with Sophie Haapalehto, who works for Posiva, the operator of the site.

My guest Jens and I have two things in common: we both fly gliders, and we both got to fly in an F-16. Which is why we form the Viper Gliding Club :-) Jens is a Danish journalist and got to fly with the Danish Air Force in one of their F-16Bs. In this episode we compare notes on our experiences, appreciate the commonalities and discuss the differences.

A while ago we had a whole series about LHC, ATLAS and particle physics in general. Despite all we know about what our world is made of and the explanatory power of the standard model, there is also a variety of open questions and currently unexplained phenomena. These include dark matter, dark energy, the neutrino mass, the CP violation, the hierarchy problem, and of course the unification of the standard model with gravitation. In this episode, CERN's Valerie Domcke explains what it's all about.

In this episode we take a look at newer generations of fission reactors, those that are currently being developed or researched. Our guest is Jacopo Buongiorno of MIT. We discuss some of the high-level goals of these new reactors, such as increased safety and efficiency, and then look at a few of the interesting new designs and how they realize these goals. We also briefly cover some of the policy arguments around keeping fission in the mix for combatting climate change.

In this episode we look at how supercomputers are used to help with managing the pandemic. It's a double-header with two guests. We start with Cineca's Andrew Emerson. As part of the EXSCALATE 4 COV EU-funded research project, he works of virtual screening of existing drugs regarding their potential efficacy against SARS-CoV-2. In part two we talk with Dan Jacobson of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He and his team used a big data analysis to understand how the virus "works", and they figured out very interesting mechanisms and pathways.

Humanity has always been exposed to potentially catastrophic risks that might endanger the continued existence of humanity. Asteroid impacts or supervolcano eruptions come to mind. But since about the invention of the atomic bomb, humanity has been able to wipe itself out, adding self-made existential risks to the natural ones. Oxford philosopher Toby Ord argues in his book The Precipice that those risks are much more likely than the natural ones. In this episode we explore this idea with him, and also discuss what we should do about this realization.

To conclude our detailed look at the ATLAS experiment, this episode looks at the computing infrastructure. We start out with the trigger systems that decide, very quickly, whether the data from a particular collision is worth keeping. We then discuss the reconstruction of the event, the simulation needed to understand the background as well as the LHC Grid used distribute data and computation over the whole planet. Our guest is CERN'n Frank Berghaus.

After understanding the history and development of ATLAS (and covering the LHC and particle physics in general) in previous episodes, we are now at the point where we can try to understand how a scientist uses the data produced by one of these large detectors and make sense of it. This is what we'll do in this episode with physicist (and listener) Philipp Windischhofer. If you want to learn even more, you can check out these links provided by Philipp or read the last chapter of the book :-)

ATLAS is one of the two general-purpose experiments at the LHC. It has been conceived, designed, and built over decades by hundreds of scientists and engineers from dozens of countries and hundreds of organizations. My guest, Peter Jenni, has been the head of the ATLAS collaboration for most of this time. In this episode we talk about science and engineering, but mostly about organizational aspects and the "community management" necessary to get such a magnificent machine off the ground.

The Lockheed F-35 Lightning II is going to be more or less what the F-16 and F-18 are today: the backbone of the US and NATO land and sea-based air forces. It is a multi-role fighter, and one of its versions has the capability to take off with a very short roll and land vertically. Tucker "Cinco" Hamilton is a test pilot who has flown all three versions of the jet. In this episode we talk about flying this fifth-gen fighter and about some aspects of the testing program. For more F-35 and Cinco check out episode 78 of the Fighter Pilot Podcast.

In light of the current situation, we have decided to record a couple of episodes that cover some of the relevant background in terms of biology, medicine and healthcare. In this first episode we discuss emergency care and intensive care with a special focus on ventilation. We discuss these topics in general, and also specifically to COVID-19. Our guest, Kimon and Junad, are both practicing doctors and have practical experience with these topics.

A major component of particle accelerators like the LHC are the actual accelerators; the current approach relies on radio frequency cavities. However, their acceleration gradient, measured in Volts per meter, is limited. This means that future accelerators, especially linear ones, will become longer and longer to reach the desired energies. A new approach to particle acceleration relies on plasma wakefields, this technology can deliver orders of magnitude more acceleration per distance. AWAKE is a proof of concept experiment at CERN that uses proton beams to produce the wake field. In this episode we chat with Edda Gschwendtner, the leader of this project.

Over the last two years, Markus wrote a book about some of the repeated topic covered on omega tau: SOFIA, Enterprise, Aerospace, Gravitational Waves, Telescopes, Models and Particle Physics. The book, called Once You Start Asking is now available as an ebook, with the softcover edition forthcoming. In this episode, Nora and Markus discuss the book and its history.

Six years ago, in episode 150, Jochen Liske of ESO told us about the Extremely Large Telescope that is currently being built in Chile. This episode is a continuation (which is why this is a kind of bonus episode labelled as 150.5) in which Thomas Pfrommer tells us about how to control the optical path of this monster telescope: the 39 meter, 798-segment main mirror, plus the four additional mirrors involved in bringing the light to a stable and sharp focus. I recorded this episode mainly to fill in some "gaps" I needed for the book chapter on telescopes.

The F-14 Tomcat is one of the most iconic fighters, certainly among its generation. In this episode we talk with Nick Pirnia about the aircraft's development and history as well as about flying it with former pilot Okie Nance. The aircraft is also available in the DCS flight simulator and the third part of this episode is a conversation with the development team from Heatblur about how to implement the F-14 in DCS; if you haven't yet, check out some of their videos, this thing looks unbelievably realistic!

An important consequence of the warming of the planet due to climate change is that the frequency and/or severity of extreme weather events will increase. But how can we tell whether a particular event can be attributed to the changing climate? Would it have happened in "normal" climate as well, and if so, how would the event have been different? This aspect of climate science is called attribution science, and the guest of this episode, Friederike Otto is a pioneer in the field.

When I was in Bordeaux with the DLR to report about their science campaign in September, I also talked to the team from AirZeroG/Novespace about the technical and aviation aspects of parabolic flights. These interviews are in this episode. I chat with Jean-François Clervoy about the history of the company, with Eric Delesalle about piloting the parabolas, with Hervé Normand about the reasons for the potential sickness, and with Nicolas Barbotin about cabin safety. At the end of the episode I also provide some details about the technical problem that prevented parabolas during my own flight with the A-310 ZeroG.

Marija Jovanovich is a pilot for the Royal Australian Air Force where she has been flying the P-3 Orion. We discuss the aircraft, the missions, and some anecdotes. Marija then also attended the USAF Experimental Test Pilot School, and we talk a bit about the experience of flying a wide range of different aircraft.

Earlier this year I visited the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, a European organization that produces global weather forecasts and performs research on how to improve those. The episode has three parts. First, Hilda Carr gives us an overview of the organization, its purpose and its history. Then I talk with Peter Bauer about weather and climate modeling and about encoding these models efficiently in software programs that run on supercomputers. Part three is a conversation with Tony McNally about where the ECMWF gets its data and how it is continuously fed into the "running" model.

In July I visited the NATS tower at Heathrow Airport to interview my guest Adam Spink. We chatted about some of the mechanics of air traffic control at Heathrow and the unique ways of optimizing throughput. A few days later we met again on the tower of Fairford during RIAT 2019 and chatted about the specifics of ATC'ing during an airshow.

I am interested in societal change: how can a complex society with lots of emergent (perhaps unintended) behaviors make a conscious change, such as transitioning to a more sustainable economy? We discussed this from an engineering perspective in the episode on Modeling Socio-Technical Systems, and we've looked at it historically in the episode on Societal Complexity and Collapse. In this episode we look at the topic more from the perspective of civil society and politics. Our guest ist Maja Göpel; she heads the German government's Advisory Council on Global Change and has also written a book called The Great Mindshift on the topic.

A few months ago, a collaboration called the Event Horizon Telescope presented the first direct image of a black hole; or more specifically, of the radiation created by accelerated particles at its event horizon. The EHT is a Very Large Baseline Interferometer, in which radio telescopes all over the world are computationally connected to obtain resolutions that are not possible with one telescope. In the episode I chat with Heino Falcke, the chair of the EHT science committee, about the science, the telescope, what it took to get it going, and image reconstruction.

In June 2019 I had the pleasure and honor to fly in an F-16D with the USAF Thunderbirds. The episode covers the medical briefing about how to prevent motion sickness and how to deal with Gs, suiting up with flight suit, g-suit, harness, helmet and mask, the briefing with my pilot Maj. Jason Markzon, the flight itself with commentary, an interview about the Thunderbirds with Jason, as well as a reflection on what the flight meant to me, recorded together with Nora.

In May I visited ALICE, one of the four large experiments at the LHC and talked with Despina Hatzifotiadou. We briefly discussed the science that ALICE is interested in, and then spent the majority of the time dissecting the detector to understand its components and how they detect the various products of particle collisions.

Socio-technical systems are systems where (groups of) humans interact with (non-trivial) technical systems; an example is the power grid. The people, the technical system and the combination might easily lead to complex behavior that is hard to predict and control over the long term. However, as illustrated by, for example, the need to transition our energy infrastructure to a more sustainable structure, it is necessary for society to "control" such systems. Igor Nikolic is a professor at the TU Delft where he uses agent-based modeling approach to try to understand, and thus help control and evolve such systems. We discuss the systems, the challenges as well as the modeling approaches.

Earlier this year I visited the London Air Ambulance, a charity organization that flies two MD-902 helicopters over the UK's capital. I chatted with their chief pilot Neil Jeffers about the flying and some of the medical aspects. My recorder then joined Neil on a short flight to their hangar at RAF Northolt. There, we met Adam Spink, a NATS air traffic controller at Heathrow, and the three of us chatted about the ATC perspective of flying helicopters (sometimes) in Heathrows's approach.

In our never-ending quest to understand fusion and its potential use in energy production, I visited the Wendelstein 7-X fusion experiment in Greifswald run by the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik. We started out with a visit to the experiment hall, while experimentalist Matthias Hirsch gave us an overview over the machine. Next we discussed theory and modeling with Ralf Kleiber. Finally, I returned to Matthias Hirsch, and we chatted about more experimental aspects of Wendelstein. It is probably best to listen to our previous fusion episodes (22, 157 and 304) before listening to this one.

In this episode I chat with Sean Brady about structural failures in civil engineering. We first discuss the technical and organzational causes for such failures. We then look at Sean's specialty, forensic engineering, which is about analyzing failures to determine the root cause. Sean also has his own podcast in which he delves into much more detail about engineering failures, not just in construction.

Throughout the cold war, and til today, the Cobra-codenamed ground, sea and air assets have been used by the US to monitor Soviet/Russian ICBM missile launches and warhead reentries. The air component consists of the RC-135 Cobra Ball/Eye aircraft. Flying from Shemya in the Aleutians they used cameras and other sensors. Our guest, Robert Hopkins has been flying the aircraft in the late 1980s. In this episode he tells us about the mission and the flying -- Shemya could be quite challenging.

Justin and Jason wrote a nice book on fusion called The Future of Fusion Energy, and this episode is based on this book. We start out by revisiting the breakthroughs that drove progress in fusion over the decades, including understanding stars, the tokamak, superconducting magnets, supercomputers and a number of specific aspects of plasma physics. We then look at the current state of fusion research as well as where it might go.

Have you ever wondered how the processor in your phone or computer got so much more faster than what the increase in megahertz suggests? In this episode we talk with Lex Augusteijn about superscalar processors, pipelining, speculative execution, register renaming and the like. We also discuss concerns other than speed, in particular, energy efficiency.

With power generation in the grid becoming more diverse and decentralized, energy storage is becoming more and more important. Eduard Heindl's gravity storage is an approach to storing electrical energy as potential energy by lifting huge masses cut out of the ground. While this sounds crazy, there are lots of reasons why this makes sense. In the episode we discuss then need, the general approach, the construction process and some of the engineering challenges. We also look at the innovation process, the path from the idea to something that is ready to be built.

In mid-September I drove to Illesheim Army Airfield to meet with Caleb Marheine who flies the AH-64 Apache helicopter there. We talked about the helicopter's systems, the cockpit, aspects of flying it as well as some of the missions.

On October 20, the BepiColombo started its flight to Mercury on an Ariane 5 from Kourou. I was at the launch press event at ESOC in Darmstadt to follow the launch and to record a couple of interviews. The episode consists of three major parts. The first part is an interview with Pablo Munoz about mission analysis and flight dynamics. The second part looks at the science with Joe Zender, Roberto Peron, Ajako Matsuoka and Joana Oliveira. And part three are multiple short takes with Paolo Ferri, Andreas Rudolph and Fabian Luedicke recorded in the middle of the night at ESOC.

CRISPR is a family of DNA sequences in bacteria and archaea that are a part of these organisms' cellular defense system. A recent discovery showed how this mechanism can be used to edit genes much more easily than legacy methods. In this episode I chat with Sam Sternberg about the naturally occuring CRISPR systems, how they work, and how CRISPR together with its associated enzymes can be used to cut, and subsequently, edit, DNA. We conclude the episode with an outlook on the potential use in medicine.

I chat with Daniel Geaslen about bush flying. His (at this time, former) job is to fly Kodiak turbo props for Mission Aviation Fellowship in Papua Indonesia, supplying remote villages. We cover the airplane, the missions, as well as the flying itself, with a particular focus on weather and challenging airfields.

A few years ago, I interviewed Arjen Lucassen about his wonderful music and how he makes it; obviously, I am a big fan! Recently, his Ayreon universe was performed live on stage and I was blown away. I decided I had to talk the the guy behind the live shows, Joost van den Broek. Luckily he agreed. So I visited him in his studios and we talked about music production and arrangement in general, and specifically for the Ayreon live shows.

In this episode I talk with NASA Armstrong's chief scientist Al Bowers about the research projects he has been involved in during his long career at NASA. We cover deep stall research with a Schweizer sailplane, high-alpha flight and thrust vectoring with the X-29, X-31 and F-18 HARV, aero-tow of fast jets with the F-106, supercritical wings with the F-8, as well as space related projects using the SR-71 and the X-30. This is one of my favourite episodes of all time, since it is a bit of trip down memory lane for me personally, and Al perfectly hits the sweet spot between recounting facts and telling anecdotes

Effects devices are essential for electric guitars and keyboards because they shape sound and make it interesting; many classic devices exist. However, those are rare and/or expensive, plus, even if they are not, carrying them around on a tour costs money. This is why these hardware devices are simulated in software, and distributed as plugins for audio software. Native Instruments is a manufacturer of such software analog effects packages. In this episode I chat with one of their engineers, Julian Parker, about how this software simulation of the electronic hardware is done.

Superconductivity, the ability of a material to carry electrical current with zero resistance, is a surprising property of nature, which man has been able to exploit in many ways, in particular, for high-performance magnets. Those are used in magnetic resonance imagers, but also in colliders and fusion reactors. In this episode we discuss the basics of superconductivity and its uses with Pierre Bauer, a superconductor engineer at ITER.

The Perlan Project aims to fly gliders into the stratosphere by exploiting mountain waves in order to better understand those waves and to explore the edge of what gliders can do. In fact, last September, they broke the world altitude record for gliders. In this episode we chat about the project, the airplane and the flying with engineer Lars Bensch and pilot Jim Payne.

During our tour NorthWest 2017 I visited the drop tower at Uni Bremen's ZARM and talked with Martin Castillo, the head of material science at the facility. We discussed the basics of microgravity research, the technical aspects of the tower, how to set up experiments, and also about his particular work in material science.

In December 2017 I had the opportunity to spend a few days on board the Royal Navy's HMS Enterprise on her trip from Limassol, Cyprus to Valetta, Malta. HMS Enterprise is a survey ship, her primary task is to map the sea floor using sonar and feed the data into civilian and military maps. In this detailed episode, we chat about the ship, its mission, the survey equipment, the technical aspects of the propulsion and systems, plus about life on board a ship and nautical issues in general.

Conlangers are people who design human languages, either just for fun or for use in works of fiction, often TV series or movies. My guest, David Peterson, has designed several languages, including the the Dothraki language featured prominently in Game Of Thrones. In this episode we use Dothraki (and English, and a bit of German) to introduce the basics of linguistics, i.e., the science behind natural (and in this case, designed) languages. We also discuss a few specific of Dothraki, and how it gets used in Game Of Thrones.

This episode is a continuation of the two previous episodes (132, 133) with Davide on the Space Shuttle. Based on his new, second book we talk about the contributions the Space Shuttle made to space exploration in general. These include advances in space suits, the construction of the ISS, satellite servicing, its use as a science platform as well as military operations.

In this episode we chat about the science and engineering involved in nuclear weapons. Our guest is Alex Wellerstein of the Stevens Institute of Technology. We talk about atomic bombs as well as hydrogen bombs, how to refine the necessary fuels as well as a little bit of history.

267 - The Quantum Tron UAV

266 - Secondary Surveillance Radar

264b - Special Announcement EN

258 - The History and Technology of Spy Satellites

257 – Flight Research at NASA Armstrong, Part 2: Fullscale

256 - Flight Research at NASA Armstrong, Part 1: Subscale

255 - Aerial Refueling with the KDC-10

252 - Red Flag

251 - Flying the F-16 Viper

249 - Plasma Physics

248 - Distant Early Warning, SAGE and the F-106 Delta Dart

247 - Bulk Metallic Glass

245 - Glaciology Research at the Darwin Glacier

243 - Formal Specification and Proof

242 - Satellite Testing at ESTEC

241 - Electric Propulsion of Spacecraft

239 - The Saturn V Launch Vehicle

238 - Societal Complexity, Part II: Today's Perspective

237 - Synthesizers

236 - Space Flight Software

235 - A Walk in the Woods with Miami Rick and the Big Boeings

233 - Bio-Inspired Systems at EPFL

231 - The Future Circular Collider

229 - (Ant-)Arctic Sea Ice

226 - Tidal Power

224 - Flying the F-15 Eagle

219 - Flying the V-22 Osprey

218 - A Life in Apollo

216 - Airbus History

212 - The Tornado ADV

211 - Farnborough 2016

210 - A350 Flight Testing

209 - Satellite Development at OHB

204 - Earth Observation at Planet Labs

202 - Aviation Incident Reporting at CHIRP

200 - Port Towage and Tugs

199 - Mass Spectrometers

198 - Ship Salvage

197 - The European XFEL

196 - Lasers

195 - Flying the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft

Das Jahr The Year 2015

191 - String Theory

190 - SOFIA Part 2, The Flights

189 - SOFIA Part 1, Basics