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In this valedictory panel to the two-day symposium, 10 speakers offer brief takes on how the Second Law of Thermodynamics might prove useful in seeking answers to our current energy challenge.

Even before the oil embargo of 1973, Thomas Widmer recalls, Joe Keenan and his MIT colleagues wrote of an “entropy crisis.” They analyzed the flow of work in industries and saw great inefficiencies that became crippling when fuel prices spiked. Despite 30 years of improvement, says Widmer, “the effectiveness of energy use is still less than 12%.” In selling ideas to policy makers, he advises, talk about “energy productivity” rather than conservation.

Ernest S. Geskin doesn’t believe alternative energies will be viable quickly enough to make a serious difference in climate change, so his objective is to improve combustion. He outlines several methods he’s developing that increase the availability of generated heat, reduce heat losses, and integrate combustion with materials production and processing, such as in steelmaking.

James Keck says that “improving the efficiency and reducing emissions of auto engines and power plant burners requires an ability to model hydrocarbon combustion.” He

This Nobel Prize-winning scientist admits to staying up late the night before his talk to bone up on thermodynamics. He puts his research to good use, discussing the history and application of the laws of thermodynamics, which have served as “the scientific foundation of how we harness energy, and the basis of the industrial revolution, the wealth of nations.”

Taking Watt’s 1765 steam engine, Stephen Chu illustrates basic principles of thermodynamics -- that energy is conserved, that you can do work from heat, especially when you maximize the difference in temperature in the system and minimize heat dissipation from friction. Chu offers another form of the laws: You can’t win; you can’t break even; and you can’t leave the game.

The game hasn’t changed all that much in the past few centuries. Nations now burn coal for electricity, achieving around 40% thermal efficiency. Natural gas can be harnessed at higher efficiencies still, and if we could deploy temperature-resistant metals for boilers, even less energy would go to waste. This is a pressing matter, points out Chu, because the planet can no longer afford wanton use of carbon-based fuels.

The world is counting on the fulfillment of (Intel co-founder) Gordon Moore’s Law for at least another half century. In Craig Barrett’s view, solutions to the crucial challenges of our time depend on improving on already nano-sized microprocessors every few years.

He points to the astonishing improvements in efficiency and miniaturization in Intel’s semiconductors, which around 1972 came loaded with 2,000 transistors that could be seen with the naked eye. Today’s integrated circuits, 11 generations down the road, bear 1-2 billion transistors that can be seen only with a scanning electron microscope. Intel has had to make other improvements too, says Barrett, as they moved into the nanoscale, attempting to improve functionality and performance without power dissipation. Dual and quad core microprocessors now permit parallel computing within a single PC. Barrett recounts how the first teraflop computer he worked on at Sandia Labs required 10 thousand Pentium processors and took up 2,000 square feet. “The challenge is in the next six to eight years, going to exascale, getting up to a million teraflops,” through multiple core processors, he says, and then there will be a “huge

Evelyn Hu meticulously describes designing and building a new generation of optical materials from nano-sized elements. She hopes to harness “the magic of light in nanostructures.”

Hu walks through her research of exploring and exploiting the properties of different optical materials. She first cites the most important aspects of an optical material, such as its color (emission and absorption wavelength); its ability to convert energy efficiently; how long it remains excited when stimulated; and whether we “get more output than we put in.”

Hu looks for optical material in nature, then superimposes another pattern on it, substantially transforming it at the atomic level. In one case, she uses gallium arsenide of a wavelength or so thickness, and pokes such tiny holes in it that photons of light behave differently when they encounter the structure. As Hu says, “I’m sculpting out a particular environment for photons.” Her gallium arsenide nanostructures contain a tiny cavity or “sweet spot” that creates a high intensity electromagnetic field that interacts in a specific way with photons and atoms. Each structure has a unique optical signature. Hu makes an analogy

Frederick Salvucci’s perspective on transportation development is an amalgam of civil engineering, history, economics, policy, and not least, the direct impact on people’s lives. Here he surveys the evolution of transportation in Boston and beyond from the 1830s to the present.

Salvucci covers significant junctures in transportation history, beginning in the 1830s with horses pulling streetcars on wagon wheels, then steel wheels. In the 1870s, electrification of streetcars alleviated the phenomenon of overworked horses succumbing in the streets, causing both traffic jams and a public health hazard. “It was a really messy affair,” Salvucci says.

By World War I, automobiles increasingly crowded Boston streets, competing with streetcars and encouraging the growth of suburbs. Salvucci acknowledges urban planner Sam Bass Warner, Jr.’s book Streetcar Suburbs for telling this story. Not only the location of housing was affected. On the outskirts of Boston, at the ends of the radial subway lines, amusement parks and dance halls arose, luring city dwellers.

With the Eisenhower administration came the interstate highway system, inspired by the model of the German Autobahn. Salvucci characterizes this period as a time when people held “an unprecedentedly high belief that the government is

Move over, Italy. Rafael del Pino is here to claim Spain’s rightful spot as a major European player in the global infrastructure market. Founded by del Pino’s father in 1952 as a builder of sleeper cars for trains, Ferrovial has diversified into a conglomerate with a hand in construction, real estate, road building design and operation, water treatment and desalination, airport ownership and operation, among other activities, and with 104 thousand employees in 43 countries. Del Pino describes some of the milestones passed, and hurdles overcome, during Ferrovial’s 50 years of expansive growth.

The company’s largest triumphs come from winning contracts in other nations: Ferrovial developed toll roads in Colombia, then Chile, and in 1988 bid on a huge ring highway around Toronto that involved committing 600 million Euros of Ferrovial’s own money. Not all Canadians were receptive to a Spanish company building and running a road with electronic tolls, and indeed, when the system didn’t work correctly at the start there was a great deal of public criticism, followed by a big fight with a new, opposition government.

Ferrovial bought its first airport in northern Chile

These two MIT Museum speakers hope you’ll walk away from their talk with a good case of augmentation envy – or at least a healthy respect for what technology can do for the human body and soul.

John Hockenberry has used a wheelchair for 30 years, since a car accident left him a paraplegic. He tells us the public has viewed spinal cord injuries like his as “something horrific,” or “staggeringly poignant.” But in the last 10 years, disability has moved from being “an extraordinarily fringe activity” to a central issue facing society, that of “marrying technology with humanity in a way that is organic to the body, appropriate to the spirit and sustainable to the community.” Hockenberry believes that the needs and demands of disabled people are helping push science toward creating a set of design principles “that will allow this issue of human restoration and augmentation to merge into a kind of seamless unity.”

In illustration of this claim, Hugh Herr describes the astonishing strides engineers are making in the development of “Human 2.0.” He starts with himself -- a victim of frostbite during

In the curious way of technological evolution, we first had computers that occupied entire rooms, watched them shrink to desktop, laptop and palm-sized devices, and now find ourselves coming full circle, and then some, Alan Benner reports. He tells this MIT class about warehouse-sized data centers, linking processors, and ensembles of processors, in dizzyingly complex hierarchies. These gigantic operations, some with their own power and air conditioning plants, are central to the enterprise of Internet behemoths Google, Amazon and YouTube, but have not yet percolated out to more traditional companies like insurance firms -- a situation Benner and his IBM colleagues would like to remedy.

Benner describes in broad strokes how these data operations are organized into levels of “virtualization and consolidation,” where the hardware is hidden, yet the data is both fully accessible and secure, no matter where the user and the computers are located. These new enterprise data centers aim to maximize efficiency, both in utilization and power consumption. It’s better to have fewer, bigger and well-integrated machines, says Benner, working as much as possible. Since even idle servers use a lot of

Great civil engineers finds an aesthetic appropriate for their building’s material and structure, asserts David Billington, whose life work has been the study of some of the world’s most stunning engineering feats.

He reviews his own intellectual journey, first honoring some of his forebears, including Elting Morison, industrial historian and a founder of MIT's Program in Science, Technology and Society, and R. G. Collingwood, philosopher/historian. Billington describes a momentous turn in his career at Princeton, when architecture students in one of his courses rebuked him: “They told me, we hate what you’re teaching us. ... You’re teaching us stick diagrams and formulas. That’s how you teach structural engineering. Why can’t we study beautiful structures?”

They showed him a picture of the Salginatobel Bridge, built by “an obscure Swiss engineer, Robert Maillart,” about whom there was little published in English. This led to a major stretch of research by Billington, and opened up his lifelong interest in how great engineers delve deep into the nature of their building material, such as Maillart’s reinforced concrete, and discover how to make it beautiful.

In studying the work of Maillart and other European engineers, Billington learned

John Ochsendorf, a structural engineer, “fell in love with archaeology” during college. His senior thesis at Cornell involved a 600-year-old Incan suspension bridge made entirely out of grass. Ochsendorf learned that this apparently primitive structure owed its astonishing longevity to regular rebuilds by the locals (during a community festival), and the use of renewable, biodegradable resources. While Cornell’s engineering faculty couldn’t see the point of this research -- “grass bridges over highway overpasses”? -- Ochsendorf realized that historical structures held important lessons for modern building technology.

The grass bridge raised several problems that now consume Ochsendorf’s academic and professional life. First, how to consider the whole life of a product when designing it, of particular import since “the 21st century is going to be a wild ride in terms of natural resources,” says Ochsendorf. Some building costs increase over time, consuming material and labor while deteriorating (nb: New York’s 1903 Williamsburg Bridge, with $1 billion in repairs, and still unsafe at any speed).

Ochsendorf suggests alternatives: making permanent structures with high quality construction and reusable materials (such as Roman stone arch bridges); very temporary structures, such as the