Sure renewable energy adds to the fluctuations in the demand for fossil fuels. And if we expect to keep the power grid operating in the current mode the integration of wind and solar beyond 20% or so starts to add infrastructure costs. At the moment in the US, we are nowhere near these barriers and Germany is doing ok at much higher renewable penetration. Solar power mostly decreases peak generation requirements since they occur on hot sunny days. The current grid model is basically 'take whatever you want whenever you want and the utility companies will find a way to get it to you'. The smart grid can do a lot to change that system so that the load follows the power available. Maybe we have to invest more in grid energy storage. But you seem to be only identifying costs of solar power without providing any other suggestions.. should we keep powering our economy as it currently is with coal and natural gas just because it is easy to maintain grid stability? Are you a global warming denier who thinks we can do whatever we want and the ecosystem will magically make it all work out? In short, there will be some extra infrastructure costs if we hope to protect the environment for future generations. The costs are not that large, and in the long run you can be quite certain that renewable power is going to be cheaper than any other options...(If you object to that, it is a hint that your view of the future is pretty short sighted. It is guaranteed that renewable power becomes cheaper at some point. The only question worth debating whether that is now, 20 years from now, 100 years from now or 500 years from now). So how and when should we go about making the hard and somewhat expensive work of making the transition to renewable power? Some people seem to assume we should leave it to our grandchildren to figure out in a world that is a few decrees C warming than it is today. I recommend we start solving problems rather than rejecting things out of hand if they have a small cost involved.

The solar power systems for homes that most installers use these days have not yet been designed to address the problem of power outages. They give you two choices...a grid-tied system that is relative cheap and a very expensive system with battery backup designed for off-grid applications. As several other commenters have noted, what most of us would like would be an inexpensive system that could at least be used to power the freezer, cell phones, and a few other things when the power is out but the sun is shining. Clearly full battery backup is going to be very expensive for a long time. But I don't see why an auto-transfer switch and maybe a small battery should add so much to the cost of these systems. It seems that the designers simply have not included this option in their design goals. Can anyone explain why a standard grid tied system could not be upgraded to provide power to the house when the sun is out and the grid is down for less than the price of a generator (~$600)?

Don't underestimate the number of citations you can get by being controversial or wrong.

It seems hard to believe that sending all the equipment needed for long term colonization of mars is going to require less fuel than sending the fuel or equipment to make the fuel for a return voyage. It would be interesting to see them quantify the supplies required for each of these types of missions. I suspect that they are greatly underestimating the quantity of supplies required to initiate a colony on a planet where water is extracted from the soil at great cost and humans and their subsistence gardens require pressure chambers. If they can find enough financial backing to build and test systems for extracting large amounts of water from martian soil, that would already be a major contribution.

We don't know scientifically what caused the universe to come into being. Evolution says nothing at all about that subject. You would be well served to look at the evidence rather than claiming that a very difficult question about philosophy of beginnings must be answered first. We don't even know how the first living things came into being. But we know with great precision that there has been a sequence of increasingly complex organisms living on earth over the past few billion years. There is really no serious debate about that. Biological evolution is an highly successful explanation that unites many pieces of our observations about the history of life on earth and about the genomes of living creatures.

It is unfortunate that people use hostile labeling for creationists since it makes it harder for everyone to think clearly. I grew up believing as you. But the evidence for an old earth and evolution of species became so clear that I abandoned Young Earth Creationism. The evidence is really not circular. For the full story about how radiometric dating works, check out the essays linked at : http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/evid.anc.earth.pdf For a more complete account of why many Christians find the evidence for evolution compelling see: http://biologos.org/ And let's be clear that this is not about the origin of the universe. Or even the origin of life. The point that is overwhelmingly obvious from the data is that life has become more complex on earth over the last few billion years.

I think you underestimate the number of people who take the Bible too literally. They form majorities in many communities in the American bible belt and they often succeed in ensuring that their children are never exposed to the fossil evidence. Leakey is noting that this isolation is unstable and he is likely right. But he may be overestimating the effect that rational evidence will have on people who think their way of life requires them to reject evolutionary heritage for humans. In my opinion, it is voices like Francis Collins and the Biologos group he started that are most likely to help the Christian anti-evolutionists out of the ideological dead end they have gotten stuck in. Athiests celebrating the triumph of Darwin usually only makes them entrench more.

I that that artificial intelligence that is more effective than human intelligence is the main long term issue. I don't expect it in the next few decades as some do, but sometime in the next 1000 years, someone is going to build a machine that is better at general problem solving and design than a skilled human. And a little while after that, human intelligence will be largely obsolete. This holds by far the most powerful and dangerous possibilities.

It is very nice to see this analysis come to a clear conclusion. There are many reasons for physicists and those who feel constrained by the laws of physics to wish for violations of known laws that have significant effects in our corner of the galaxy. But time after time mundane explanations based on known laws turn out to be right. At some point more people are going to catch that we are not going to continuously overturn accepted science. Eventually the philosophers and sociologists of science might catch on too. But maybe that is wishful thinking.

This explanation is exactly what is required to make any sense of the original article. No one is claiming that hybrids are ready to take over the entire market...but people who have owned one are 14 times more likely to buy another that the general public is. On a site for quantitative types, this comment should be ranked 5.

I was assuming that they were going to shut down the Tevatron pretty soon in any case and the discussion was about whether to keep it going a little longer in hopes of finding the Higgs. It is important to keep multiple high energy experiments in business for competition and independent confirmation.

If the US had extended funding for the Tevatron, the accomplishment of finding the Higgs as the Tevatron neared retirement would have been nice for American high energy physics, but it would likely have been bad for the field more broadly. Having the Higgs discovery near the beginning of data acquisition at the LHC will provide publicity and a morale boost that will enhance the productivity of the field over many years.

'The higgs is a big deal for the future of mankind, if you don't immediately understand that it's kind of difficult to explain why.' You are going to have to explain if you hope to convince anyone except the people who make their salaries looking for new particles. There is a major problem with your analogy between the Higgs and electricity in 1825. The models of matter and energy that were available in 1825 left huge unexplained parts of everyday life. Electricity turned out to be the beginning of our understanding of light and chemistry and neurology in addition to providing illumination and motors. But the best models that we have at the moment have almost no quantifiable deviations with a vast range of measurements. If you compare predictions from Quantum Electrodynamics and from the Standard Model, you don't get any significant differences in predictions for chemistry and hence biology and geology. So confirming or improving the standard model is not going to make any difference either.

Slew, I think you are right. Certain theoretical inconsistencies seem so pressing to resolve to a theorist, but not all theoretical or fundamental advances end up being very useful. I would probably go farther than you in saying that the quantitative effects of the Higgs are so small that we have good reason to guess that it will not have technological relevance for a century or more. And overstating the case for practical importance of scientific research can end up badly...the public learns to disbelieve what scientists say when they are consistently promised the moon and it never appears. The real reasons to fund the LHC are 1) it develops one of the best human dreams...the dream to understand.and 2) The spin-offs from giving money to brilliant people to use to solve fundamental questions have usually turned out to be worth the investment to society even when the fundamental theories were not very useful.

This would indeed be a major prize. But we already know quite a lot about how dark matter and dark energy behave. In particular, they introduce no currently measurable changes in known laws of physics in our corner of the galaxy. This follows immediately from the fact that we only detect dark matter on galactic length scales and dark energy on scales much larger than that. Combine that with some knowledge of the accuracy of current precision measurements and you conclude that their effects on things on human scales are very very small. So even when we learn what they are, we are almost certain to be unable to manipulate them in any significant or useful way. Can you identify any candidate for dark matter that has any conceivable way of being manipulated by humans for useful technology? They are very different than the discoveries of quantum theory and solid state physics for which there was technology already in use that required the theory for explanation and improvement. Of course the future is unknown and we enter with an open mind. But expecting radical new technology from new physics is easier when you don't know how accurate our current theories are on human scales.