Deceased--John King

John King
1925 to July 6th, 2014

"John King, professor emeritus of physics, dies at 88"

Innovative researcher and educator was a champion of attacking science problems with “ferocious vigor.”

by

Teresa Lynne Hill

July 7th, 2014

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Professor emeritus John G. King ’50, PhD ‘53, an experimental physicist, transformative physics educator, and leader of the MIT Molecular Beams Laboratory in the Research Laboratory for Electronics for 42 years, died on June 15 at his summer house in Wellfleet, Mass. A longtime resident of Cambridge, King was 88. The cause of death was congestive heart and renal failure.

“John was an inspiring teacher and experimentalist. His educational passion was creating hands-on experiments built from ordinary parts you can find at any hardware store, what he lovingly called ‘mulch,’” said MIT senior lecturer in physics, and former King student, Peter Dourmashkin ’76 (physics), ’78 (math), PhD ‘84. “He was MITx before MITx.”

King was born in London and educated in France, Switzerland, and the United States. He came to MIT as an undergraduate in 1943 and completed his undergraduate studies in physics following war service for the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and the Harvard Underwater Sound Lab. He joined the MIT physics faculty in 1953. King was named the Francis L. Friedman Professor of Physics in 1974 and retired from MIT in 1996.

King was renowned for his null experiments — those designed to test fundamental principles. He helped develop the atomic clock and invented the molecular microscope. King’s best-known experiment, still found on the first page of most electricity and magnetism textbooks, is the measurement of the charge magnitude equality of the electron and the proton, and the neutrality of the neutron to a 10-20 of an electron charge. King also conceived an imaginative experiment, prompted by cosmological ideas, to set a hard limit on the possibility that matter, over cosmological time, begets new matter, a version of what was once called the steady state cosmology.

Building atomic and molecular beam research

Professor of physics emeritus Rainer Weiss ’55, PhD ’62 was a colleague of King throughout his student and faculty years at MIT and considers him to be “one of the most creative and imaginative experimental physicists of his generation.” Both physicists were students of Jerrold Zacharias, who began the Molecular Beam Laboratory at MIT shortly after World War II. Molecular beam experiments measure the properties of individual atoms in a vacuum unperturbed by interactions with other molecules. The technique provides precise and universally reproducible values for the energy levels and other parameters of these quantized systems. King began his work in molecular beams by pioneering new methods to measure the charge and current distributions in the nuclei of the halogens. He discovered the magnetic octupole moment of the common isotope of iodine.

During his years as director and principal investigator of the Molecular Beam Laboratory, King transformed the research conducted there. It branched into molecular beam techniques applied to collective body physics, cosmology, and biophysics. More than 100 undergraduate and 25 doctoral students obtained their degrees working on these topics during King’s tenure at the laboratory.

At a 2000 gathering to celebrate King’s career, Fred Dylla ’71, SM ’71, PhD ’75 described working in the Molecular Beams Lab as “getting your hands dirty and being surrounded by brilliant students who were around all the time.” Dylla is currently executive director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics (AIP), a nonprofit umbrella organization for 10 scientific societies that publishes scientific journals and provides information-based products and services.

Applying atomic beam techniques to biophysics, King invented a molecular microscope using water molecules rather than light as the illuminating projectile. His idea was to map the locations where water would evaporate or stick on small biological samples such as cells with biologically interesting spatial resolution. Working models of the device were developed for some biology labs, though the technique has yet to be widely adopted. 

When inventions such as the molecular microscope were not as successful as he had hoped, King attributed the failure to insufficient effort in combining enough money and skilled personnel. Achieving this winning combination required, in his view, an attack on the problem with “ferocious vigor.” Moderate vigor was not enough.

Reinventing physics education

Dissatisfied with the lab exercises used in mid-century physics pedagogy, King worked tirelessly on innovative methods that stressed hands-on learning and independent thinking. In 1966, he initiated the Project Lab, in which students developed their own open-ended research projects. His belief that anyone could “find something interesting to study about any mundane effect” reflects the independent spirit of King’s own early and eclectic science education. He told his students that “the best way to understand your apparatus is to build it.”

As an adviser, King quickly became a project participant. Charles H. Holbrow, professor of physics emeritus at Colgate University and currently a lecturer at MIT, recalled that King had “the wonderful gift of seeing physics in everyday phenomena and turning these into research projects.” Some 2,000 MIT undergraduates experienced Project Lab.

Approached by a student seeking a thesis experiment or a colleague with an idea, King would, before long, be sketching ideas on the backs of envelopes, estimating orders of magnitude, and offering ideas on how to build and run the experiment.  Fred Dylla’s own undergraduate thesis with King was designed to determine the difference in charge between an electron and a proton. Still considered a highly sensitive measurement, the experiment utilized $20 worth of equipment.

A King student from his MIT sophomore year through graduate school, Samuel A. Cohen, director of the Program in Plasma Science and Technology at Princeton University, learned how to operate a drill press and to build his own electron multipliers. At the same time, he was being influenced by King’s ideas. He says, “John’s mind kept jumping decades ahead, from atomic beams to superfluid He3 to molecular microscopy — always decades ahead.”

King believed that an understanding of fundamental science concepts should extend beyond physics course curricula. For years he championed the creation of a “Corridor Lab.” Never entirely realized at MIT (a couple of experiments now grace the Infinite Corridor), Corridor Lab would have placed 100 experiments, each demonstrating a scientific principle, along the miles of MIT hallways. Anyone passing could interact with an apparatus; faculty members could send students to experiment with them; and other departments could participate. King envisioned similar modules in a wide range of venues to further public understanding of science.

With other educators in the late 1950s and ‘60s, King worked on the revitalization of high school physics, following the startling realization on the part of Zacharias that “while students had taken physics, they didn’t understand anything.” When the 1957 launching of Sputnik spurred a nation-wide alarm and allocation of money to improve science teaching, King became deeply involved. In cooperation with the influential Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC), he produced — and acted in —eight physics movies, including “Times and Clocks,” “Interference with Photons,” “Size of Atoms from an Atomic Beam Experiment,” and “Velocity of Atoms.” One of the films featured King demonstrating a principle of physics by driving one of the Bugatti automobiles he had meticulously restored down the Massachusetts Turnpike at high speed.

A lengthy 2009 interview for the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics shows King’s ongoing interest in science as a basis for a healthy and rewarding intellectual life. Speculating on the significance of the earliest point on the educational spectrum, he proposed that each child at birth be equipped with a kit of simple tools (balls, funnels, etc.) designed to stimulate a life of joyful investigation. A more advanced set of gear would be universally furnished at age six.

A life of invention

Family, friends, and colleagues paint a portrait of an energetic, curious, and engaging man who applied these characteristics equally to his intellectual, professional, and personal lives. King’s wife, Jane Williams, recalls him as “interesting, imaginative, ingenious and lots of fun.” In addition to his enthusiasm for physics and the value of science as the basis for understanding the world around us, she says, he was throughout his life “passionate about classical music, poetry, and any kind of dictionary. Since his early years were spent in France, he cared about things French, including French wines.”

King’s French stepfather introduced him to the tinkering that informed much of his approach to science, especially science teaching. As a high school student at Phillips Exeter Academy, he had his own laboratory. In life, as in science, he remained a relentless tinkerer, once rebuilding a bus, complete with bunks, to transport his large family to the farm in Woolwich, Maine, where he and his first wife, Elizabeth, lived for many years. She and several of their eight children still live in or around Woolwich.

King was the recipient of many honors and awards for contributions to physics and physics education. These include the Alfred P. Sloan Award (1956), the AAPT Robert Millikan Medal (1965), the E. Harris Harbison Award (1971), and the Oersted Medal (2000), the most prestigious award of the American Association of Physics Teachers. His numerous publications include co-authorship with Paul Gluck of Jerusalem of “Physics Project Labs,” (Oxford University Press) to be published in fall 2014.

In addition to his wife, King is survived by a daughter, Martha, and sons Andrew, James, Charles, David, Benjamin, and Matthew; granddaughters Sara, Katy, and Lily; stepchildren Cynthia, David, Catherine, and Nicholas; and eight stepgrandchildren. His oldest son Alan predeceased him.

A memorial service will take place at MIT in October.

John G. King [Wikipedia]

MIT and JSTOR hacked

Okay, it was wrong to hack into the system but I have to chuckle a bit. I am neither a faculty member nor attend a university and thus I am denied access to JSTOR's vast archive of technical and academic papers. As with other journals and journal repositories a hefty subscription or per paper cost is demanded which is ironic and may even be close to an oxymoron for they claim status as "a not-for-profit organization".

"Cambridge man accused of stealing 4 million documents in MIT hack"

July 19th, 2011

Boston Herald

A federal indictment unsealed today charges a Cambridge man with computer intrusion, fraud and data theft in computer hacking incidents that targeted the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and JSTOR, a not-for-profit archive of scientific journals and academic work.

Aaron Swartz, 24, was charged in an indictment with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. If convicted on these charges, Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million.

The indictment alleges that between Sept. 24, 2010, and Jan. 6, 2011, Swartz contrived to break into a restricted computer wiring closet in a basement at MIT and to access MIT’s network without authorization from a computer switch within that closet. He is charged with doing this in order to download a major portion of JSTOR’s archive of digitized academic journal articles onto his computers and hard drives. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization that has invested heavily in providing an online system for archiving, accessing, and searching digitized copies of over 1,000 academic journals. It is alleged that Swartz avoided MIT’s and JSTOR’s security efforts in order to distribute a significant proportion of JSTOR’s archive through one or more file-sharing sites.

The indictment alleges that Swartz’s repeated automatic downloads impaired JSTOR’s computers, brought down some of its servers, and deprived various computers at MIT from accessing JSTOR’s research. Even after JSTOR and MIT worked to block Swartz’s computers, Swartz allegedly returned with new methods for accessing JSTOR and downloading articles.

The indictment alleges that Swartz exploited MIT’s computer system to steal over four million articles from JSTOR, even though Swartz was not affiliated with MIT as a student, faculty member, or employee. In fact, during these events, Swartz was allegedly a fellow at a Boston-area university, through which he could have accessed JSTOR’s services and archive for legitimate research.

"Feds Charge Activist As Hacker For Downloading Millions of Academic Articles"

by

Ryan Singel

July 19th, 2011

Wired

Well-known coder and activist Aaron Swartz was arrested Tuesday, charged with violating federal hacking laws for downloading millions of academic articles from a subscription database service that MIT had given him access to. If convicted, Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

Swartz, the 24-year-old executive director of Demand Progress, has a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls. Swartz, who was aware of the investigation, turned himself in Tuesday.

Disclosure: Swartz is a co-founder of Reddit, which like Wired.com is owned by Condé Nast. He is also a general friend of Wired.com, and has done coding work for Wired.

The grand jury indictment accuses Swartz of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading more than four million documents from JSTOR, a not-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals. The scraping, which took place from September 2010 to January 2011 via MIT’s network, was invasive enough to bring down JSTOR’s servers on several occasions.

According to the U.S. attorney’s office, Swartz was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Boston this morning where he pled not guilty to all counts. He is now free on a $100,000 unsecured bond. His next court date is Sept. 9, 2011 and he’s represented by Andrew Good of Good and Courmier.

The indictment alleges that Swartz, at the time a fellow at Harvard University, intended to distribute the documents on peer-to-peer networks. That did not happen, however, and all the documents have been returned to JSTOR.

JSTOR, the alleged victim in the case, did not refer the case to the feds, according to Heidi McGregor, the company’s vice president of Marketing & Communications, who said the company got the documents, a mixture of both copyrighted and public domain works, back from Swartz and was content with that.

As for whether JSTOR supports the prosecution, McGregor simply said that the company was not commenting on the matter. She noted, however, that JSTOR has a program for academics who want to do big research on the corpus, but usually faculty members ask permission or contact the company after being booted off the network for too much downloading.

“This makes no sense,” said Demand Progress Executive Director David Segalin a statement provided by Swartz to Wired.com before the arrest. “It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”

“It’s even more strange because the alleged victim has settled any claims against Aaron, explained they’ve suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute,” Segal said.

JSTOR doesn’t go quite as far in its statement on the prosecution — though there are clear hints that they were not the ones who wanted a prosecution, and that they were subpoenaed to testify at the grand jury hearing by the federal government.

We stopped this downloading activity, and the individual responsible, Mr. Swartz, was identified. We secured from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed.

The criminal investigation and today’s indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney’s Office.

When asked about this, Christina Sterling, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s office said, “I can’t speak specifically about this case, but fundamentally speaking, the U.S. Attorney’s Office makes own independent decisions regarding prosecution based on the merits of a case.”

But the feds clearly think they have a substantial hacking case on their hands, even though Swartz used guest accounts to access the network and is not accused of finding a security hole to slip through or using stolen credentials, as hacking is typically defined.

In essence, Swartz is accused of felony hacking for violating MIT and JSTOR’s terms of service. That legal theory has had mixed success — a federal court judge dismissed that argument in the Lori Drew cyberbullying case, but it was later reused with more success in a case brought against ticket scalpers who used automated means to buy tickets faster from Ticketmaster’s computer system.

“Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away,” said United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz in a press release.

The indictment accuses Swartz of repeatedly spoofing the MAC address — an identifier that is usually static — of his computer after MIT blocked his computer based on that number. Swartz also allegedly snuck an Acer laptop bought just for the downloading into a closet at MIT in order to get a persistent connection to the network.

Swartz allegedly hid his face from surveillance cameras by holding his bike helmet up to his face and looking through the ventilation holes when going in to swap out an external drive used to store the documents. Swartz also allegedly named his guest account “Gary Host,” with the nickname “Ghost.”

Why would Swartz want to download what is likely gigabytes of information? His history includes a study co-authored with Shireen Barday, which looked through thousands of law review articles looking for law professors who had been paid by industry patrons to write papers. That study was published in 2008 in the Stanford Law Review.

Swartz is no stranger to the feds being interested in his skills at prodigious downloads. In 2008, the federal court system decided to try out allowing free public access to its court record search system PACER at 17 libraries across the country. Swartz went to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals library in Chicago and installed a small PERL script he had written. The code cycled sequentially through case numbers, requesting a new document from PACER every three seconds. In this manner, Swartz got nearly 20 million pages of court documents, which his script uploaded to Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service.

While the documents are in the public record and free to share, PACER normally charges eight cents a page.

The courts reported him to the FBI, which investigated whether the public records were “exfiltrated.” After in-depth background searches, a luckless stakeout and futile attempts to get Swartz to talk, the FBI dropped the case.

The same anti-hacking statute was used to prosecute Lori Drew, who was charged criminally for participating in a MySpace cyberbullying scheme against a 13-year-old Missouri girl who later committed suicide. The case against Drew hinged on the government’s novel argument that violating MySpace’s terms of service was the legal equivalent of computer hacking and a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

A federal judge who presided over the prosecution tossed the guilty verdicts in July 2009, and the government declined to appeal.

Tesla redux--wireless electricity

Wireless Electricity

Okay, this is small scale for now, but think of the huge potential of transmitting electricity without copper wires and overhead transmissions lines. It would reduce the vulnerabilities, maintenance, and cost of high voltage transmission lines...and complaints from some people about the possible human harm. The downside: Reduce the number of electricians and the value of copper would fall.

"Goodbye wires…"

MIT team experimentally demonstrates wireless power transfer, potentially useful for powering laptops, cell phones without cords

by

Franklin Hadley

June 7th, 2007

MIT news

Imagine a future in which wireless power transfer is feasible: cell phones, household robots, mp3 players, laptop computers and other portable electronics capable of charging themselves without ever being plugged in, freeing us from that final, ubiquitous power wire. Some of these devices might not even need their bulky batteries to operate.

A team from MIT's Department of Physics, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN) has experimentally demonstrated an important step toward accomplishing this vision of the future.

The team members are Andre Kurs, Aristeidis Karalis, Robert Moffatt, Prof. Peter Fisher, and Prof. John Joannopoulos (Francis Wright Davis Chair and director of ISN), led by Prof. Marin Soljacic.

Realizing their recent theoretical prediction, they were able to light a 60W light bulb from a power source seven feet (more than two meters) away; there was no physical connection between the source and the appliance. The MIT team refers to its concept as "WiTricity" (as in wireless electricity). The work will be reported in the June 7 issue of Science Express, the advance online publication of the journal Science.

Late-night beeps

The story starts one late night a few years ago, with Soljacic (pronounced Soul-ya-cheech) standing in his pajamas, staring at his cell phone on the kitchen counter. "It was probably the sixth time that month that I was awakened by my cell phone beeping to let me know that I had forgotten to charge it. It occurred to me that it would be so great if the thing took care of its own charging." To make this possible, one would have to have a way to transmit power wirelessly, so Soljacic started thinking about which physical phenomena could help make this wish a reality.

Radiation methods

Various methods of transmitting power wirelessly have been known for centuries. Perhaps the best known example is electromagnetic radiation, such as radio waves. While such radiation is excellent for wireless transmission of information, it is not feasible to use it for power transmission. Since radiation spreads in all directions, a vast majority of power would end up being wasted into free space.

One can envision using directed electromagnetic radiation, such as lasers, but this is not very practical and can even be dangerous. It requires an uninterrupted line of sight between the source and the device, as well as a sophisticated tracking mechanism when the device is mobile.

The key: Magnetically coupled resonance

In contrast, WiTricity is based on using coupled resonant objects. Two resonant objects of the same resonant frequency tend to exchange energy efficiently, while interacting weakly with extraneous off-resonant objects. A child on a swing is a good example of this. A swing is a type of mechanical resonance, so only when the child pumps her legs at the natural frequency of the swing is she able to impart substantial energy.

Another example involves acoustic resonances: Imagine a room with 100 identical wine glasses, each filled with wine up to a different level, so they all have different resonant frequencies. If an opera singer sings a sufficiently loud single note inside the room, a glass of the corresponding frequency might accumulate sufficient energy to even explode, while not influencing the other glasses. In any system of coupled resonators there often exists a so-called "strongly coupled" regime of operation. If one ensures to operate in that regime in a given system, the energy transfer can be very efficient.

While these considerations are universal, applying to all kinds of resonances (e.g., acoustic, mechanical, electromagnetic, etc.), the MIT team focused on one particular type: magnetically coupled resonators. The team explored a system of two electromagnetic resonators coupled mostly through their magnetic fields; they were able to identify the strongly coupled regime in this system, even when the distance between them was several times larger than the sizes of the resonant objects. This way, efficient power transfer was enabled.

Magnetic coupling is particularly suitable for everyday applications because most common materials interact only very weakly with magnetic fields, so interactions with extraneous environmental objects are suppressed even further. "The fact that magnetic fields interact so weakly with biological organisms is also important for safety considerations," Kurs, a graduate student in physics, points out.

The investigated design consists of two copper coils, each a self-resonant system. One of the coils, attached to the power source, is the sending unit. Instead of irradiating the environment with electromagnetic waves, it fills the space around it with a non-radiative magnetic field oscillating at MHz frequencies. The non-radiative field mediates the power exchange with the other coil (the receiving unit), which is specially designed to resonate with the field. The resonant nature of the process ensures the strong interaction between the sending unit and the receiving unit, while the interaction with the rest of the environment is weak.

Moffatt, an MIT undergraduate in physics, explains: "The crucial advantage of using the non-radiative field lies in the fact that most of the power not picked up by the receiving coil remains bound to the vicinity of the sending unit, instead of being radiated into the environment and lost." With such a design, power transfer has a limited range, and the range would be shorter for smaller-size receivers.

Still, for laptop-sized coils, power levels more than sufficient to run a laptop can be transferred over room-sized distances nearly omni-directionally and efficiently, irrespective of the geometry of the surrounding space, even when environmental objects completely obstruct the line-of-sight between the two coils. Fisher points out: "As long as the laptop is in a room equipped with a source of such wireless power, it would charge automatically, without having to be plugged in. In fact, it would not even need a battery to operate inside of such a room." In the long run, this could reduce our society's dependence on batteries, which are currently heavy and expensive.

At first glance, such a power transfer is reminiscent of relatively commonplace magnetic induction, such as is used in power transformers, which contain coils that transmit power to each other over very short distances. An electric current running in a sending coil induces another current in a receiving coil. The two coils are very close, but they do not touch. However, this behavior changes dramatically when the distance between the coils is increased. As Karalis, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, points out, "Here is where the magic of the resonant coupling comes about. The usual non-resonant magnetic induction would be almost 1 million times less efficient in this particular system."

Old physics, new demand

WiTricity is rooted in such well-known laws of physics that it makes one wonder why no one thought of it before. "In the past, there was no great demand for such a system, so people did not have a strong motivation to look into it," points out Joannopoulos, adding, "Over the past several years, portable electronic devices, such as laptops, cell phones, iPods and even household robots have become widespread, all of which require batteries that need to be recharged often."

As for what the future holds, Soljacic adds, "Once, when my son was about three years old, we visited his grandparents' house. They had a 20-year-old phone and my son picked up the handset, asking, 'Dad, why is this phone attached with a cord to the wall?' That is the mindset of a child growing up in a wireless world. My best response was, 'It is strange and awkward, isn't it? Hopefully, we will be getting rid of some more wires, and also batteries, soon.'"

This work was funded by the Army Research Office (Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies), National Science Foundation (Center for Materials Science and Engineering), and the Department of Energy.

"Wireless Electricity Is Here (Seriously)"

by

Paul Hochman

January 14th, 2009

Fast Company

I'm standing next to a Croatian-born American genius in a half-empty office in Watertown, Massachusetts, and I'm about to be fried to a crisp. Or I'm about to witness the greatest advance in electrical science in a hundred years. Maybe both.

Either way, all I can think of is my electrician, Billy Sullivan. Sullivan has 11 tattoos and a voice marinated in Jack Daniels. During my recent home renovation, he roared at me when I got too close to his open electrical panel: "I'm the Juice Man!" he shouted. "Stay the hell away from my juice!"

He was right. Only gods mess with electrons. Only a fool would shoot them into the air. And yet, I'm in a conference room with a scientist who is going to let 120 volts fly out of the wall, on purpose.

"Don't worry," says the MIT assistant professor and a 2008 MacArthur genius-grant winner, Marin Soljacic (pronounced SOLE-ya-cheech), who designed the box he's about to turn on. "You will be okay."

We both shift our gaze to an unplugged Toshiba television set sitting 5 feet away on a folding table. He's got to be kidding: There is no power cord attached to it. It's off. Dark. Silent. "You ready?" he asks.

If Soljacic is correct -- if his free-range electrons can power up this untethered TV from across a room -- he will have performed a feat of physics so subtle and so profound it could change the world. It could also make him a billionaire. I hold my breath and cover my crotch. Soljacic flips the switch.

Soljacic isn't the first man to try to power distant electronic devices by sending electrons through the air. He isn't even the first man from the Balkans to try. Most agree that Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, who went on to father many of the inventions that define the modern electronic era, was the first to let electrons off their leash, in 1890.

Tesla based his wireless electricity idea on a concept known as electromagnetic induction, which was discovered by Michael Faraday in 1831 and holds that electric current flowing through one wire can induce current to flow in another wire, nearby. To illustrate that principle, Tesla built two huge "World Power" towers that would broadcast current into the American air, to be received remotely by electrical devices around the globe.

Few believed it could work. And to be fair to the doubters, it didn't, exactly. When Tesla first switched on his 200-foot-tall, 1,000,000-volt Colorado Springs tower, 130-foot-long bolts of electricity shot out of it, sparks leaped up at the toes of passersby, and the grass around the lab glowed blue. It was too much, too soon.

But strap on your rubber boots; Tesla's dream has come true. After more than 100 years of dashed hopes, several companies are coming to market with technologies that can safely transmit power through the air -- a breakthrough that portends the literal and figurative untethering of our electronic age. Until this development, after all, the phrase "mobile electronics" has been a lie: How portable is your laptop if it has to feed every four hours, like an embryo, through a cord? How mobile is your phone if it shuts down after too long away from a plug? And how flexible is your business if your production area can't shift because you can't move the ceiling lights?

The world is about to be cured of its attachment disorder.

"Electricity unplugged"

In the near future, wireless electricity could replace the ubiquitous power cable. Aristeidis Karalis looks at a revolutionary new way of transmitting power without wires

by

Aristeidis Karalis

February 2nd, 2009

physicsworld.com

The judge was driving back late one cold winter night. Entering the garage, the battery-charging indicator in his wirelessly powered electric car came on. "Home at last," crossed his mind. He swiped his personal smartcard on the front-door detector to be let in. He heard a “charging” beep from his mobile phone. The blinking cursor on the half-finished e-mail on the laptop had been waiting all day on the side table. He picked the computer up and walked towards his desk. "Good evening, your honour. Your wirelessly heated robe," said the butler-robot as it approached from the kitchen. Putting on the electric garment, he sat on the medical desk chair. His artificial heart was now beating faster.

Science fiction usually expresses society’s impeding desires and sense of anticipation for certain technological miracles to happen. A society without power cables is pretty much a given in most science fiction. Indeed, today we do live in the "wireless age", in which the air that we breathe probably contains more information than oxygen. However, this is also an age where mobile phones, MP3 players, laptop computers and domestic robots exist alongside old-fashioned power wires and bulky batteries. Unlike information, electrical energy is still physically confined to these borderline anachronistic appliances. Overcoming these last obstacles would finally make this a truly wireless world. Science? Yes. Fiction? Not anymore.

It all started a few years ago when Marin Soljačić, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, was driving back home one cold winter night and he heard an unfriendly beep from his mobile phone. It was the annoying reminder that the battery was running out, once again. It then suddenly occurred to Soljačić how great it would be if the mobile phone could take care of its own charging. The next morning, he returned to his office at the MIT determined to find a solution to the problem.

An exhaustive literature search soon revealed that wireless transmission of power was not an original idea. Back in the 1890s Nikola Tesla, one of great pioneers of electromagnetism, was the first to envisage that electricity, then a newly found form of energy, should be delivered to every house, in every city, in every country on the planet. However, Tesla did not foresee that people would be willing to drag wires around the entire globe to use electricity. Instead, he dreamed of a way of transferring electrical energy wirelessly over long distances. This would be achieved using big, coupled electromagnetic resonators able to generate very large electric fields, which were meant to propagate most likely either via conduction through the ionosphere (presumably including gigantic sparks) or through the Earth (possibly via intermediate coupling to the Earth’s charge resonances, so-called Schumann resonances). The epitome of Tesla’s efforts to achieve his goal was Wardenclyffe Tower, a 57 m high structure in Long Island that was meant to deliver electricity to the entire planet. The construction was interrupted in about 1905, not because the method was considered impractical or dangerous, but because the funder, the famed financier and banker J P Morgan, was concerned that there would be no way to bill remote electricity users. Nowadays, more than a century after Tesla, electricity reaches nearly every home through a global electrical grid. Nevertheless, J P Morgan’s objections meant a premature end to the first attempt at wireless electricity.

No wires attached

Today, we know of a variety of methods to transmit power without wires. The simplest example is electromagnetic radiation, such as radio waves. Omni-directional radiative antennas are one of the most widely used technologies, which are utilized in the provision of wireless Internet services, mobile telecoms, and radio and TV broadcasting. These antennas typically operate in the high-MHz/low-GHz frequency regimes. Even though such antennas are highly robust and suitable for use with mobile receivers, since they can operate in all directions and do not require a line of sight to the receiver, they are highly inefficient. Only a tiny portion of the radiated power in the direction of the receiver is actually picked up, since the vast majority of the radiation is lost in all the other directions. The use of a highly directional antenna, such as a microwave-beam antenna, in principle solves this problem and achieves a high efficiency in power transmission even over long distances (i.e. kilometres). On the other hand, this type of antenna does require an uninterrupted line of sight, which in itself requires a complicated device-tracking and beam-steering mechanism. Also, high-power focused beams may constitute a safety hazard.

An alternative approach to antennas is the use of an inductive transformer, a device commonly used in power circuits and electromechanical motors (for example electrical toothbrushes and chargers). A transformer typically operates up to mid-kHz frequencies. It essentially transfers electrical energy from one circuit to another via induction: the time-varying magnetic flux produced by a primary coil crosses a secondary coil and induces in it a voltage. The primary and the secondary coils are not physically connected, hence the method is wireless. Transformers can be very efficient but the distance between the coils must be very small (typically a few millimetres). For distances a few times the size of the coils, the efficiency drops significantly.

Part of the underlying physics for most of the existing methods for the wireless transfer of electricity is the fundamental principle of resonance: the property of certain physical systems to oscillate with maximum amplitudes at certain frequencies. It follows that, for any type of excitation (mechanical, acoustic, electromagnetic, nuclear) with a given frequency, a receiver will pick up the transmitted energy efficiently only when designed to resonate at the excitation frequency. Only then do successive excitations after each oscillation period add coherently in phase and lead to a build up of energy within the receiver.

To illustrate, consider 100 glasses filled with wine at different levels so that they support acoustic resonances at different frequencies. Now let an electric-guitar player produce and sustain a very well-defined note. Only one of the glasses, the one resonant with the frequency of this note, will respond to the excitation, to the extent that it may even break, while the rest will remain unaffected. Similarly, we tune the electromagnetic antenna of a radio to be resonant with the frequency of the station we want to listen to. Many transformers used in power circuitry and elsewhere are also designed to employ resonance to enhance the power transmission.

Cutting the cord at MIT

Since these days electricity is delivered to pretty much every single house in the world, it is not necessary anymore to transmit electricity over large distances à la Wardenclyffe Tower. Transmitting electricity within a room, namely over distances a few times greater than the size of the receiving devices themselves (what engineers define as mid-range distances), is sufficient for most modern applications. Achieving this goal with satisfactory efficiency, safety and low cost remains an unsolved problem. That was the challenge for Soljačić and his collaborators at the MIT labs: John Joannopoulos, Peter Fisher, Andre Kurs, Robert Moffatt and me.

Revisiting the fundamental principle of resonance, we posed the question of which physical conditions maximize the efficiency of energy transfer between two resonant objects. The energy of any resonator naturally decays due to intrinsic energy-loss mechanisms (friction for mechanical resonances, radiation and resistive absorption for electromagnetic resonances, collisions with phonons and spontaneous emission for atomic resonances). Losses are typically quantified by the number of oscillation periods that it takes for the energy to decay by a factor of 2.72. This number, represented by the “quality factor” Q, is an intrinsic property of resonators and depends on the strength of the loss mechanisms. (As a simple analogue, water inside a bucket with a hole will leak out at a rate that depends on the size of the hole.)

If two equal resonators exchange energy, it also takes a characteristic number of oscillation periods to transfer the energy from resonator A to resonator B, which is proportional to a constant that quantifies the strength of the coupling between the resonators, Qk. (If water is pumped from one bucket to another via a hose, then the transfer time depends on the strength of the pump.) Clearly, for energy transfer to be efficient, Q needs to be much larger than Qk, i.e. the rate at which energy is being transferred needs to far exceed the rate at which energy is being lost. (Water will be efficiently transferred between two leaking buckets if the pump is faster then the leaks from the holes.) The efficiency of the system can then be characterized by Q/Qk. The transfer of energy is efficient only when this ratio is larger than one, the so-called strong-coupling regime.

For our wireless method, we used one of the most basic electric circuits as a resonator: the LC circuit. This circuit is an electromagnetic resonant circuit that consists of an inductor (L), made by a wire coil, and a capacitor (C). Two such wire coils transfer energy via induction, like a transformer device, and the Qk clearly depends on the distance between the coils. For mid-range distances and long enough wavelengths, the spatial-decay rate of the magnetic field means that Qk is roughly proportional to the cube of the ratio of the distance between the coils, D, and the size of each coil, d, while showing little dependency on the frequency and the geometry of the coils. This means that, for mid-range distances, Qk will be large and the coupling very weak.

As a result, the best way to maximize the efficiency is to engineer the resonators to have the highest possible value of Q (try to seal the holes in the buckets). The resonance frequency of each coil (which has to be the same for both coils) can be tuned by varying the capacitance (and tuning a circuit element is exactly what the knob is tuning in a radio antenna). Q varies with the tuneable frequency, and this variation is shown in the figure above for a coil with a diameter of 60 cm made of copper pipe with a radius of 2 cm. It can be seen that, for high-MHz frequencies, the resonator loses energy fast (low Q, often even less than 10) due to radiation. This is exactly how an antenna is designed to work. Similarly, for mid-kHz frequencies, it loses energy fast (Q less than 100) via resistive absorption, which is typical of transformers. This explains why both omni-directional antennas and transformers fail to be efficient power transmitters at mid-range distances: the transfer-time measure Qk is large because of D, and Q is small. On the other hand, in the intermediate, low-MHz regime, much longer loss-times are observed, with Q often larger than 1000. That was our chosen regime.

Based on our theory, we started experiments in late 2006. The main challenges consisted of designing a driving circuit that would operate in our desired low-MHz regime and constructing coils that would resonate with a high enough value of Q. After a trial-and-error phase, we realized that a simple coil design without a separate capacitor, but using the coil’s self-capacitance to achieve resonance, was the best option in terms of Q.

We made two copper-pipe coils with 60 cm diameters and with five turns, such that they resonate at 10 MHz and have Q = 1000. A 60 W light bulb was our chosen device, since it operates at the tested frequencies (and what can be a clearer sign of the functionality of a system than the switch on of a light bulb?). We suspended the coils from the ceiling with fishing wire, at a distance of 2 m from each other, tuned them up, turned them on and…there was light. At an efficiency of 45%, this was, to our knowledge, the first-ever demonstration of midrange efficient wireless energy transfer.

On the safe side

The selective property of resonance means that almost all of the source power will be transmitted to the destined device and not to anywhere else. This is because any random object, including a biological organism, is almost always a non-resonant structure. Even if an object happens to be resonant, say a mobile-phone antenna, its resonance will be very different from the precise source-resonator frequency (just like those 99 wine glasses). Furthermore, even in the extremely unlikely case of it having the same resonance frequency, its Q value would be so low that no significant amount of power would be transmitted to it.

In our long-wavelength regime of operation (30 m wavelength at 10 MHz compared with 60 cm coils), power is transmitted from one object to another by spreading away from the source resonator and then “focusing” back into the device resonator. In contrast to higher frequencies, where power would be radiated across as a focused beam with a much smaller cross-sectional area, the former mechanism implies that, in our system, the power density locally and thus the fields will be considerably smaller at all points, except perhaps those too close to the coils. Smaller fields obviously imply safer performance.

Furthermore, our wireless-electricity method uses magnetic, rather than electric, fields to transfer energy. From the point of view of magnetic fields, most poor conductors, like wood, bricks, plastics and people, look a lot like air. On the other hand, electric fields do pose health hazards, because they can interact with biological organisms. With our method, these electric fields are confined to the capacitor inside our resonator. This method is quite similar to induction hobs on cookers, whereby a hob may transmit kilowatts of power to a metallic pot via induction, but it is safe to touch with our non-conducting hands. Note also that even the "large" magnetic fields in our system actually have tiny strength, approximately 10–4 T near the coils for 60 W of transmitted power, about the order of the time-invariant magnetic field of the Earth. It is the high-Q resonance that magically converts this tiny field into considerable usable power.

Wireless mobility

Long-wavelength fields naturally wrap and redistribute themselves around random objects in their vicinity or those standing between the source and mobile receiver. Therefore, while a radiated beam would immediately be interrupted by obstacles, our method stays robust and does not require an uninterrupted line of sight to the source. Sources can be hidden under floors, behind walls or inside furniture, and the receiving devices do not find shade while roaming freely behind random objects or when integrated inside other systems.

The near field produced by a resonant source coil spreads out quite uniformly in all directions, in contrast to a directed radiation beam. Thus, appropriate placement of one or more device coils can guarantee omni-directional coverage with low system complexity and thus cost.

The response of the system to dynamic variations of its parameters due to variable interaction with its environment during motion can be as fast as within 0.1 ms, based on the available frequency bandwidth of the sharp MHz resonances. This is good enough for the changes associated with daily motion.

Ray Bradbury, the prolific science-fiction writer, once said that "Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science." If our innovation is successfully commercialized, then the concept of a completely wireless world could soon leap from dream to widespread accomplishment. We will forget charging our mobile phones, laptops and other personal digital devices. The maze of cables behind every home or office apparatus will disappear. Cars will drive on electricity for much longer and more cheaply. Robots will completely forget about returning to their charging stations. Micro-robots will forever hide inside electronic chips. Battery-powered sensors buried underground will never die. And the story of the judge will soon belong to history.

"Dad, I found a lamp in the basement, but it doesn't work, see?" said the 10 year old, while ascending the stairs. "It does my son," replied the judge, "but it connects to a wall plug and our new house does not have any of those."

Wireless energy transfer

MIT claims large-scale solar power

Daniel G. Nocera

Shades of Randy Mills, Martin Fleischmann, Stanley Pons, Rusi Taleyarkhan?

"In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine."

'Major discovery' from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution



"Hydrinos"...new energy source????

Rusi Taleyarkhan--falsified research?

EGADS--what's going on at MIT?

One has to scratch one's head when something like this surfaces. Is this really a security issue or runaway micromanagement and security paranoia on steroids.

"Government Declares Some Grad Students Are 'Security Threats'"

by

Michael McGraw-Herdeg

May 9th, 2008

The Tech

Eight MIT graduate students with student visas were denied a key credential by the Department of Homeland Security. After their department appealed the decisions on their behalf, the DHS declared at least two of the students "security threats."

The troubles stem from a new homeland security program called the Transportation Worker Identification Credential, a plastic card which, like an MIT ID, contains personally identifying information and can be read wirelessly. Without the credential, the students will soon have a harder time boarding and leaving ships at U.S. ports, including the three research ships at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, where the students work.

The situation was well-known to WHOI, but it only came to MIT's attention yesterday, when a German student forwarded to colleagues in the Earth, Atmosphere, and Planetary Sciences Department a letter from the Department of Homeland Security. The letter said in part: "I have personally reviewed the Initial Determination of Threat Assessment, your reply, accompanying information, and all other information and materials available to the TSA. Based upon this review, I have determined that you pose a security threat and you do not meet the eligibility requirements to hold a Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC)." A British graduate student received a similar letter, said James A. Yoder, dean of WHOI.

After the denials, WHOI sent an appeal on behalf of each student, saying how important the students were to government-sponsored research, Yoder said. "We'd sure like them to have the same access rights as any other graduate student," Yoder said.

WHOI will continue to try to obtain the credential for the students. "We're a long way from giving up," he said.

Without a TWIC, graduate students will face a hassle, but not an insurmountable burden, Yoder said. In preparation for a research cruise, people frequently have to run out and get supplies or replace broken parts, Yoder said, and this is hard if you cannot freely enter and leave the port.

WHOI is currently working within the DHS system to try to get credentials for its workers with student visas, called F-1 visas. WHOI has also contacted its Congressional delegation, Yoder said. They have not yet contacted an attorney, he said.

Students as 'security threats'

The government has denied at least two students' appeals and decided that the students' visa status made them a "security threat."

Applicants to the credential program were required to submit electronic fingerprints and their passports were photocopied, but whether the DHS will connect this information to their "security threat" status (which could make it difficult to fly) is as yet unclear.

It is "just really offensive" to call the graduate students security threats, said Yoder. The students conduct research funded by federal agencies including the National Science Foundation, he said. Because WHOI has no secure facilities, its employees do not do research on site that requires a security clearance, Yoder said.

Wilken-Jon von Appen G, an oceanographer from Germany who had his request for a TWIC denied and was subsequently deemed a "security threat," said that the TWIC restrictions only hinder research. Field research is essential to oceanographer’s work: "If you have not been out at the field and have not seen under which conditions measurements are being taken, you have no feeling whatsoever" for your research, said von Appen.

Von Appen has worked on research cruises that departed from Woods Hole during summer 2006 and summer 2007. He plans this summer to visit a mooring point off the Greenland coast, where he will collect information about short-term changes in the currents that leave the Arctic Ocean.

It caused "a bit of a troublesome feeling" to be considered a threat by the government, von Appen said. He said he would have understood an explanation of why his visa status made the government think it should his deny his application, but the "threat" language made little sense.

Yoder agreed. He said he understood the government's arguments about the students' visa status. But he said he took issue with "this outrageous wording that calls them security threats. … That’s unreasonable."

What exactly is a security threat?

In the Code of Federal Regulations, a person generally presents a "security threat" if the TSA considers him a threat to national security, to transportation security, or of terrorism. A person may also pose a "security threat" if he "has lacking mental capacity." But a person may also pose a threat if he does not have the right kind of visa, as described in 49 CFR § 1527.105.

The TWIC card is available to most U.S. citizens and to some residents with certain visas, according to the Code of Federal Regulations. Student visas are not explicitly listed as one of the kinds the government may accept, but the rules provided allow the government some leeway. Despite this flexibility, the TSA's Security Threat Assessment Operations department denied applications by eight WHOI graduate students. The $132.50 fee for each application, paid by the institute, is nonrefundable.

MIT unaware of problems

Although WHOI has been working on the TWIC denials since early April, administrators at affiliate institution MIT seem to have only learned of the troubles yesterday.

"I just learned about it moments before you called me," said Danielle Guichard-Ashbrook, director of the International Students Office, yesterday afternoon. "I'm sure that MIT is going to be very, very concerned about this," she said.

MIT will investigate the problems and contact lawyers and immigration officials if necessary, she said.

Through his secretary, Dean for Graduate Education Steven R. Lerman '72 declined to comment and deferred to the ISO.

Chancellor Phillip L. Clay PhD '75 was made aware of the situation yesterday, Yoder said. Clay could not be reached for comment.

Other oceanographic institutions have not tried to get credentials for all their staff and students, Yoder said, so they are unlikely to have encountered similar problems.

At the University of Washington's School of Oceanography, ship crew and dock workers have received TWIC credentials, but there is no coordinated effort to get the card for all employees, according to a spokeswoman for the administrative office.

Also unavailable for comment were representatives of the Volpe National Transportations Systems Center in Cambridge. Employees of that center developed technical and policy specifications for the national TWIC system, said former Volpe director John O’Donnell.

Although all ports were originally required to check for the credential by mid-September 2008, most ports now face an April 15, 2009 deadline. Boston and New England have an Oct. 15, 2008 deadline instead, in a "realignment" announced by the DHS last Friday.

The delay may be related to the slow speed at which credentials are being issued: workers receive a TWIC identification card 4–8 weeks after they have completed the signup process, "due to technical capacity challenges that resulted from the sophisticated encryption that ensures the security of the cards," according to the TSA's Frequently Asked Questions Web site.

Specifications for the card are available online at:

http://www.tsa.gov/assets/pdf/twic_reader_card_app_spec_032808.pdf.

Seeking comment from the government, this reporter was referred by the DHS media relations office to the TSA public affairs office, who redirected the call to the TWIC hotline. After 30 minutes on hold, this reporter was told by an operator to contact the DHS, who did not return a request for comment.

CORRECTION TO THIS ARTICLE:

The article "Government Declares Some Grad Students Are 'Security Threats'" (Friday, May 9) misstated the name of an academic department at MIT. It is the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, not the Earth, Atmosphere, and Planetary Sciences Department.