The spectrum linking basic science and commercial exploitation

Interviewer: You now have a Chair in the University of New South Wales, and you have had high posts in industry. What are your reflections on the relation between basic science and commercial exploitation?

They go together. In industry, people sometimes lose sight of the fact that they are working on ideas or products or processes which would not have existed if someone, somewhere, had not been let loose to work on what they wanted to. That certainly became clear to me when, under a somewhat informal arrangement between the Vice-Chancellor of the University of New South Wales and Sir Lionel Hooke, I was let off the leash by AWA – or, more accurately, rented out – for two days a week as Professor of Electrical Engineering and head of the Department of Solid-State Electronics in the university. One could work on some things in a fairly fundamental way in AWA, but other things such as solar energy and aspects of surface acoustic wave devices were better left to university research, so in a sense I had the best of both worlds. It was certainly hard work. My wife used to say, ‘He spends three days a week in AWA, two days a week at the university, and weekends alternately.’

You mentioned that Bell Labs had 5000 scientists, of whom 150 were in basic science. Did you feel that sort of balance was appropriate?

It seemed to be appropriate for Bell Labs 40 years ago. It is changing with time. Basic research, particularly in physics, involves more and more expensive equipment which means that more and more funds have got to be provided if that work is to be done, and it is a bigger drain on the provider. Naturally, governments are becoming resistant to the idea of keeping the same level of basic research going as before. In my retired state, for example, I am trying to devise some experimental work which I can do at negligible cost, or very close to it, while living out in the country!

I suppose we should be persuading government to support basic science in Australia.

Sure. Certainly it should not be cut to zero. In Bell Telephone Labs, somewhere around 2 to 3 per cent of the total R&D expenditure – even allowing for the extraordinary expenditure on equipment that would be needed in the applied areas, like new ways of making semiconductor devices or research in developing compound semiconductor transistors such as gallium arsenide – seemed to be quite appropriate to their activities. How that would work out on the Australian scene today I have not really calculated, but I suspect that Australia has spent well above that level in relation to the total government expenditure on research and development. It is the lack of expenditure other than by governments that has made life more difficult for the country to achieve an appropriate level of research, I think.

Applying solar energy

Lou, you have been interested for a long time in solar energy, in several different connections. Would you like to sketch for us how that has worked out for you?

I guess my first interest in solar energy arose from very early days of direct conversion to electricity using a p-n junction in a semiconductor. I think the first person to do so was Gerald Pearson, who was at Bell Telephone Labs when I was there. Since then there have been a lot of developments in that part of the conversion.

When I was in the AWA research lab I had some ideas on a different form of silicon-metal contact and managed to get a grant from the then Australian Research Grants Committee to do some work in that. It became pretty obvious that I would not be able to get the work done nearly as rapidly at AWA as I could at the University of New South Wales, so the ARGC agreed to the transfer of the grant there. Then Martin Green, in my department, joined me and, so to speak, took off with the baton. He and his colleague were awarded the Australia Prize this year for their outstanding developments in increasing the efficiency of conversion of solar energy to electricity and also because of the vastly deeper insights that they have into what is actually going on in the semiconductor structure when the sunlight hits it.

I also got interested in solar energy generally and other forms of conversion – principally mechanical through heating. I used to give a course of lectures at the university on solar energy conversion, doing quite a bit of work on biological techniques – plant growth, basically, or conversion into firewood, to put it into straightforward technology.

Broadly speaking, do you think the Martin Green approach is the most promising way forward in solar energy?

Well, solar energy has always had niche applications. There are many isolated repeater stations for cross-country microwave transmission and so forth which benefit from photovoltaic cells. But one always has to have storage associated with it for when the sun is not shining, mainly during night or heavy cloud – although even under heavy cloud conditions there is probably 25 to 30 per cent of the energy still falling on the cell. As the price of solar cells comes down, the potential applications for it increase, and they increase still further as the prices of coal and oil go up.

There is in Australia quite an extended range of tidal opportunities, which the French have shown work very well in generating electricity. The problem for us is that it is all up on the north-west coast, around Broome and Derby, where there aren’t any industries to use it. Once a way has been worked out to convert the electricity generated up there into a useful product, like aluminium or some other material that is readily transported, then it may take off. I am never too sure about heat applications, other than solar energy for architectural heating and so on.

Do you mean in capturing the sun’s rays and concentrating them?

Yes. If you are not dealing with direct sunlight but tracking and concentrating, you collect only about 70 per cent of the energy that is falling; the other 30 per cent comes from scatter in the rest of the sky. I think that ultimately, when we run out of stored energy resources like coal and oil, we will have to switch to nuclear generation or solar energy generation.

Focus questions

• In the late 1950s, Bell Laboratories in the US had 150 'basic' scientists out of 5000 scientists. What do you see as the difference between 'basic' and 'applied' research? How does one often help the other?

• Davies mentions the niche applications of solar energy. What are these? What are the characteristics of solar energy that, at the present time, restrict it to these niche applications? What factors might increase the potential applications for solar energy?