2008 ND Forum -- Part 2

As promised, we'll try to summarize some of the more interesting parts of the Notre Dame Forum on renewable energy. The full video is located on the University's website. It is fascinating and you should view it if you can spare some time.


The speakers were Majora Carter, founder of Sustainable South Bronx, an organization dedicated to developing green jobs for some of the poorer neighborhoods of New York; Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO of General Electric; Ernest Moniz, a professor at MIT and the former Undersecretary of Energy; and Bill Ritter, Governor of Colorado. The forum was moderated by Anne Thompson, the chief environmental affairs correspondent for NBC News and a graduate of Notre Dame.

Majora Carter's main focus was on how poorer neighborhoods have felt the brunt of environmentally unfriendly energy usage. She described how to solve two problems -- poverty and pollution -- by creating green jobs, which she defined as any job that has a net benefit to the environment. She emphasized that the people of America want to give of themselves and contribute to the greater good, and the environment is the greater good for today. "Environmental justice for all is the civil rights of the twenty-first century."



Jeff Immelt said that he tries to view energy and environmental issues without emotion. He cited studies that have convinced him and his company that global warming caused by human beings is a scientific fact. He believes that the quest for renewable energy is a solvable problem -- and not just 20 to 30 years from now. He stressed the need for an energy policy in this country: "Right now, there is no energy policy." At the same time, he warned against pursuing any one source of renewable energy, such as corn-based ethanol. "We need to pursue dozens of new technologies so that we don't put our eggs all in one basket." Among those dozens would be clean coal (and cleaner than any of the technologies being discussed today), solar, wind, hydroelectric, nuclear, natural gas, sugar-based ethanol, and other sources. In Immelt's view, a policy would require no caveats; it would have to establish clear goals with no exceptions. Otherwise, nothing would get done as the exceptions would swallow the rule. He believes that the rest of the world is waiting for America to lead the way, and the companies of America, for financial and other reasons, are waiting on leadership from the U.S. government. The time to act is now because high gas prices are permitting the development of alternative fuels to be economical. (And Immelt believes that high gas prices have nothing to do with America's usage of oil and everything to do with China's and India's ever-increasing usage of oil.)


Ernest Moniz warned that, at the rate we're going, the atmosphere will have too much carbon dioxide in it to sustain healthy human life by the middle of this century. He talked about the need to develop zero-carbon and low-carbon fuels such as nuclear, solar, wind, and geothermal energy. Fossil fuels have been so successful because there is no better way to store hydrogen atoms than by attaching them to carbon atoms. He described the need to capture carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere and to find a way to store it underground. China is working on this type of technology for coal plants, but the United States is not. Right now, American business is not set up to develop new energy technologies. Smaller companies are more entrepreneurial in developing the new technologies, but they lack the resources to do it. Larger energy companies lack the incentives to work on new technologies rather than to promote the types of energy they are trying to sell. Moniz views renewable energy as a matter affecting our nation's security, environmental, foreign relations, fiscal, industrial, and agricultural concerns, but the current structure of our government separates the management of energy issues rather than integrates them into a strategic energy policy. New energy sources will require new transmission lines, which will be expensive to build.


Bill Ritter talked about the ways Colorado is a leader in energy and conservation within the United States. Among other things, Colorado has established goals for renewable energy, provided economic incentives for energy companies to develop renewable energy technologies, and is working to better sequester carbon in farming operations. A new wind farm statute provides $500 to farmers for each windmill they allow on their property, and a windmill manufacturer has opened its U.S. operations in Colorado. One of Colorado's utilities has developed a "smart grid," which is essentially a computer that tells users whether they are using energy at peak or non-peak times and allows users to adjust their usage accordingly. The smart grid will shut down appliances when they are not in use and will adjust usage to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Ritter felt that the biggest hurdles we face are raising awareness among the greater public. For example, nuclear power is not practicle any time soon because the public will not allow plants to be built near its part of the country. He views corn ethanol to be valuable not because it is a good energy substitute. Actually, it is a poor one, looking at it from the point of view of energy alone; it requires a large amount of energy to produce, and it raises food prices. But it was successful in raising the public's awareness of alternative sources of fuel for their vehicles. Now, the path is open to develop alternative fuels such as fuels made from algae. One of the problems with solar and wind energy is that there is insufficient means for storing it. Ritter pointed to new technologies that are being developed for storing solar energy, and described ways in which regions that produce wind, solar, geothermal, or coal energy could all work together to supply continuous power to the grid.


We hope this summary is useful. While long, it is much shorter than the full two-hour video. But if you get the chance to view the video, you should as it is good enough to shape your views of this subject for years to come.

2008 Notre Dame Forum

Today, the University hosted its fourth annaul Notre Dame Forum. The topic was sustainable energy. For those of us unfamiliar with the Forum,

The Notre Dame Forum is an annual event that aims to engage Notre Dame students in intellectual discussion about an issue significant to the nation, the world, and/or the Church. Instituted by Notre Dame’s President, Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., during his inaugural weekend in 2005, the Forum aspires to serve our wider society by staging interdisciplinary debate and discussion that calls upon the moral and spiritual values that help define Notre Dame as a Catholic university.

The idea is to gather experts from all different backgrounds to discuss the challenging issues of our time. Then, the University encourages students, faculty, alumni, and staff to continue the discussion in dorms, classes, and everyday life on campus. In other words, its sort of a theme for the academic year. The focus of the 2008 Forum on Sustainable Energy is described on the website as:

The 2008 Forum on Sustainable Energy invites us to take note of the issues; to review a variety of perspectives—from science, the Church, and the media; and to come to an understanding of our own individual accountability.

Take a look at this video, which describes the speakers at this year's Forum. Even better, take a look at this funnier video featuring the Notre Dame Leprecaun. (The Leprecaun is about the only way to make the issue of sustainable energy funny.)

In terms of research being conducted on campus, there are endless possibilities. For example, did you know there was a Notre Dame Energy Center, a Center for Building Communities, a Center for Environmental Justice and Children's Health, a Center for Environmental Science and Technology, the GLOBES Program, and the University of Notre Dame Environmental Research Center. (If you don't want to read about each of these programs individually, you can get a short summary of all of them at this site.) In addition, there is a new Office of Sustainability whose job it is to promote conservation and energy sustainability all over campus.

When John Affleck-Graves spoke at our Universal Notre Dame Night a couple of years ago, he talked about educating students one at a time (and also important your donations were to that effort). If you take a look around the sites linked to the Forum website, you can start to see strong contributions by individual students in unique opportunities to demonstrate real leadership. These opportunities for individualized education did not exist in such large abundance when you and I were there.

The video and transcripts from the Forum have not yet been posted, but a summary is found here. If any of the transcripts are particularly interesting, we'll provide some quotes in a later post.

Did You Know? Ringer from Dayton

Javon Ringer, the powerful senior running back for Michigan State, is from Dayton. He played for Chaminade-Julienne in high school. He was part of the 2002 state championship team, rushing for over 200 yards in the title game. In 2005, Scout gave him four stars and ranked him as the fifteenth best running back in the country. The following is from the Spring 2005 edition of Vision, CJ's alumni newsletter:

Javon Ringer, who is ranked as the second best player in the state, signed with Michigan State. The three time All-Ohio running back rushed for 1,763 yards and 20 touchdowns last season before being sidelined with an ACL injury in week seven.

Notre Dame never made a scholarship offer to Ringer, but that was the year that our recruiting was divided between two coaches: Willingham and Weiss.

We're still rooting for the Irish this weekend. However, if anyone knew Ringer or his family, we'd love to know more. Share any stories in the comments section.

Discovering the Origins of the Universe

A few years ago the Church exonerated Galileo Galilei. In March, it announced that it's going so far as to erect a statue of Galileo inside the Vatican walls.

In 1995, the Cardinal in charge of reviewing the Galileo trial gave this explanation and statement about the relation of faith and science:

Science and Faith

A second and immensely important area is the relationship between science and faith. I had the honour to be President of the interdisciplinary Commission that, at the request of the Pope, investigated the Galileo Case. That sad and symbolic episode, we discovered, was born mainly from the limitations of the culture of the time: it lacked the intellectual tools to distinguish between methodologies and fields of knowledge. Thus the theologians who judged Galileo were unable to see that the Bible does not make claims about the physical world as such. As a result they were mistaken in transposing "into the realm of the doctrine of the faith a question that in fact pertained to scientific investigation" (John Paul II, L'Osservatore Romano, English edition, 3 November 1992, pp. 1-2).

In the last century there were other tensions between theology and science in the field of creation itself: one thinks of the initial panic about Darwin's theories. But today what is striking is a new and mutual openness between science and religion. Undoubtedly this was helped by the clear recognition of the "rightful independence of science" by Vatican II (Gaudium et Spes § 36) and also by the healing of wounds through the initiatives of the Holy Father concerning Galileo. Besides, both science and theology have learned new forms of humility. Possibly the most significant shift within the field of science is the abandonment of a mechanistic model of reality and the move towards a new sense of mystery especially in cosmology and astrophysics.
How can we really grasp the staggering fact that the universe is about fifteen billion years old? For the theologian today, in fact "cosmic evolution can be considered as something entirely logical if one supposes that God did not wish to create a fully realized universe and that he chose to rely on the cooperation of natural causes" (Mariano Artigas, "Science et foi: nouvelles perspectives", in Après Galilée: science et foi - nouveau dialogue, ed. Paul Poupard, Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1994, p. 210). Here I am doing no more than evoking horizons of friendship between science and religion that were unimaginable in the culture of even a few decades ago.

This "new sense of mystery . . . in cosmology and astrophysics" is exemplified by the exciting new scientific experiments being planned to test the origins of the universe. The most recent is the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

MSNBC described the Hadron Collider as follows:

The machine is the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, or LHC — the most powerful, most expensive particle-blaster ever invented. On Wednesday, Europe's CERN particle-physics lab is due to start shooting beams of protons through the LHC's 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) ring of tunnels beneath the French-Swiss border, near Geneva.
It will take months for the machine to reach full power. But eventually, those protons will be whipped up to 99.999999 percent of the speed of light, slamming together with the energy of two bullet trains colliding head-on. Underground detectors as big as cathedrals will track the subatomic wreckage on a time scale of billionths of a second. Billions of bits of data will be sent out every second for analysis.

The theories the collider is expected to test are fascinating.

Some of the key mysteries that stem from these clashing theories include why gravity is so weak, relative to the other fundamental physical forces such as electromagnetism and why the universe is so large. These issues come up because on an inconceivably small scale, the particles that make up our world seem to behave completely differently than one might imagine.

For example, if you are driving a car, your GPS tells you where you are, and your speedometer tells you how fast you are moving. But on the scale of particles like electrons, it is impossible to know both position and speed at once; the very act of trying to find out requires incredible amounts of energy.

If it takes so much energy just to try to pin down a particle, then, in theory, all particles should have temporary energy changes around them called "quantum fluctuations." This energy translates into mass, since Einstein famously said that mass and energy are interchangeable through the equation E=mc2.

"It makes it extremely mysterious that the electron, or indeed, everything else that we know and love and are made of, isn't incredibly more massive than it is," Arkani-Hamed said. A theory that has emerged in recent decades that claims to bring some relief to physics mysteries like these is called superstring theory, or string theory for short. Previously, scientists believed that the smallest, most indivisible building blocks of our world were particles, but string theory says the world is made of
extremely small vibrating loops called strings. In order for these strings to properly constitute our universe, they must vibrate in 11 dimensions, scientists say. Everyone observes three spatial dimensions and one for time, but theoretical models suggest at least seven others that we do not see.

Arkani-Hamed proposed, along with physicists Savas Dimopoulos and Gia Dvali, that some of these dimensions are larger than previously thought -- specifically, as large as a millimeter. Physicists call this the ADD model, after the first initials of the authors' last names. We haven't seen these extra dimensions because gravity is the only force that can wander around them, Arkani-Hamed said.

String theory has come under attack because some say it can never be tested; the strings are supposed to be smaller than any particle ever detected, after all. But Arkani-Hamed says the Large Hadron Collider could lead to the direct observation of strings, or at least indirect evidence of their existence.

In 2006, a physics professor from Notre Dame, Professor Anthony Hyder, gave the keynote address at our club's Universal Notre Dame Night. While most of his talk was on the state of the University, the professor answered questions afterwards. One of the questions asked, "What is the current 'big question' that physicists are trying to answer?" Professor Hyder answered something to the effect of "Where is all of the matter in the universe? Our calculations tell us there should be 70% more matter than what we know about, so where is the rest?" Among its many experiments, the Hadron Collider is expected to provide information related to the questions,

Why is most of that mass hidden?
Where did all the antimatter go?

Notre Dame professors are participating in the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC.

Notre Dame physicists Mitchell Wayne, Randal Ruchti, Michael Hildreth, Colin Jessop and Kevin Lannon are responsible for the development of the optical readout for the hadron calorimeter in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector, one of two large, all-purpose detectors that will be utilized in the LHC experiments. A research faculty member, a postdoctoral fellow and three graduate students from the University were at the LHC today as test operations began.

Here at Dayton Domer Digest, we're guessing they discover something unexpected and mysterious.

Play Like a Champion Today

Notre Dame has always enjoyed a good relationship with sports. Our new Athletic Director, Jack Swarbrick, said on his first day on the job that,

I believe in the academic environment there is no better classroom than the athletic field or court. I've spent a lot of time over the years having the privilege of being around great coaches. And when you talk to the student athletes who have been with those coaches, those who played for Ara, and you say, 'Other than your parent, who most influenced you in your life?' The answer is inevitably that coach.
That is the essence of the educational experience. In collegiate sports now we use the phrase 'student athlete.' Well, the corollary of that is educator coach. That's what the coaches at Notre Dame are. They have an opportunity to shape lives, which is not, as I said, incidental to the mission of this great university. It is one of the most effective ways to realize it.

Under this "Swarbrick Doctrine," sports are not just something to cheer for, or a happy coincidence that ND would have been good at football. Rather, sports are part of the core mission of Notre Dame.

In keeping with this serious focus on sports, Notre Dame has developed a program for youth sports (middle school and younger), called Play Like a Champion Today, that encourages participants not to take sports too seriously. The following explains the problems the program was meant to address:

Why do we need PLC? There is growing unrest around youth sports in our country. Sports that were once seen as enjoyable and nurturing are becoming instead hard work and of questionable developmental value. This affects all people involved in youth sport: athletes, coaches and parents.

There is increasing pressure on young athletes to specialize year round in one sport. These sport programs are becoming increasingly expensive often characterized by high stakes travel teams. There is a great devotion of resources to elite athletes while fewer opportunities exist for all children to play and compete. There is pressure on coaches to put winning above the good of the children – a win at all costs mentality.
Many parents have sky high ambitions for their children and are taking extraordinary measures to advance their child’s athletic career. There are increasing incidents of “parent rage” at all levels of youth sport. Just one story is of the father who was unhappy about his son’s playing time, so he actually pulled a gun on his son’s football coach. This man’s son was 5 years old.

Play Like a Champion began in school year 2006-2007 and is a series of programs for coaches and parents.

• PLC is designed to educate all individuals responsible for ensuring that children have a positive and successful youth sport experience (coaches, parents, & administrators).
• Every aspect of the program is research-based, incorporating the latest research in sports psychology, moral development, and character education.
• Being child-centered, PLC works from the recognition that children are different than adults and a youth sports program should put the children’s needs first.

Several youth sports leagues across the country have been part of the pilot program for PLC, including St. Brigid of Kildare Parish in Columbus, Ohio.

Perhaps our club should make an effort to sponsor members who are coaches to attend one or more of the program's sessions?

First Post

Welcome to the Dayton Domer Digest, the blog of the Notre Dame Club of Dayton. It is accessible from the club's website, http://dayton.undclub.org. Stop back often for stories about Notre Dame and those who attempt to live according to its ideals.