[E&E seminars] April 1 - David MacKay: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air

[Jameson Twomey]

Sustainable Energy – without the hot air

David MacKay

Physicist and Chief Scientific Advisor,

Department of Energy and Climate Change, London

The 4th Goldstein Architecture, Engineering, and Science Lecture

Thursday, April 1

6:30 PM

Room 34-101 (50 Vassar Street, Cambridge)

David MacKay was appointed as Chief Scientific Advisor to the  
Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) on 1st October 2009.  
The Chief Scientific Advisor’s role is to ensure that the Department’s  
policies and operations, and its contributions to wider Government  
issues, are underpinned by the best science and engineering advice  
available.

David MacKay studied Natural Sciences at Trinity College, he then went  
to Caltech to complete a PhD in Computation and Neural Systems. In  
1992 he returned to Cambridge as a Royal Society research fellow at  
Darwin College. In 1995 he became a university lecturer in the  
Department of Physics, where he was promoted in 1999 to a Readership  
and in 2003 to a Professorship in Natural Philosophy. He was elected a  
fellow of the Royal Society in 2009.

David MacKay’s research interests include reliable computation with  
unreliable hardware, and communication systems for the disabled. He  
believes that what the climate-change discussion needs is clear,  
simple numbers, so that we can understand just how big our challenge  
is, and not be conned by grand-sounding schemes that don't actually  
work. He has also written a book on the subject (Sustainable Energy -  
Without The Hot Air: David MacKay, UIT Cambridge, 2009).

For further information please see:

http://www.withouthotair.com/

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/


Lectures are free and open to the public.  For some lectures, members  
of the MIT community with IDs will be admitted between 5:45-6:10 pm  
and the general public will be admitted as space permits at 6:20 pm.

Information: MIT Department of Architecture (617-253-7791 or http://architecture.mit.edu/)

  
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