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Professor Louis Davies was interviewed in 1999 for the Australian Academy of Science's '100 Years of Australian Science' project funded by the National Council for the Centenary of Federation. This project is part of the Interviews with Australian scientists program. By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge.
The following summary of Davies's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers notes. The extract covers a discussion on the importance of a balance between basic and applied research and Davies' interest in solar energy. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Louis Davies was born in Sydney in1923. He was educated at Aberdeen Primary School, Muswellbrook District Rural School, Maitland High School and then at Shore – Sydney Church of England Grammar School. He began studying at the University of Sydney in 1941, but World War II interrupted his studies. He served as an air crew navigator in the Royal Australian Air Force, resuming his studies in 1945 while still on duty on an island northwest of New Guinea. He received a BSc Hons from the University of Sydney in 1948.
Davies was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study plasma physics at Oxford University receiving a DPhil in 1951. Here his studies involved attempts to constrain a plasma by subjecting it to a longitudinal magnetic field.
Back in Australia, Davies joined the Division of Radiophysics of CSIRO as a member of the radioastronomy group. His research initially involved microwave radiation in the solar atmosphere. His interest then moved to transistors and methods of purifying transistor materials.
In 1958 Davies visited the Bell Laboratories on a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship. He was interested in the semiconductor area, attempting to measure the temperature of hot electrons in silicon. He worked on zone refining, developing a theory of the ultimate distribution of impurities and proving the theory experimentally.
After returning to work at CSIRO for several years, in 1960 Davies became chief physicist at AWA (Amalgamated Wireless Australasia). Here he continued his work on semiconductors. Later, optical fibres became a substantial part of the work. He remained at AWA until 1985, combining this position with a professorship of electrical engineering at the University of New South Wales (1965-84). Throughout his career, Davies has maintained an interest in solar energy.
Davies became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering in 1975, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1976 and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., New York in 1981. He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1978.
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
Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion.
Find out more about semiconductors. Write a short essay on the uses of semiconductors.
photovoltaic cells
semiconductor
solar energy
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