M1 — Mindenki Akademiaja
20261012 065500 UTC
440 transcript segments
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[00:05:54] on the stage of everyone's academy tonight Gábor Szabó
[00:05:57] laser physicist, I am Gábor Szabó,
[00:06:00] laser physicist, professor of the SZTE optical department,
[00:06:03] member of the academy, I greet the
[00:06:07] dear viewers,
[00:06:09] my colleagues have recently primarily worked
[00:06:13] on developing methods that
[00:06:15] help us better understand the impact of humans on
[00:06:19] our environment.
[00:06:33] I usually tell my students that
[00:06:35] physicists specifically don't understand anything, but
[00:06:39] they understand everything better than anyone else. When I'm awake, I'm
[00:06:43] a physicist, which is important because
[00:06:46] being a physicist, in my opinion, is actually a kind of problem-solving
[00:06:50] ability.
[00:06:55] Gábor Szabó wanted to be a biologist before
[00:06:59] he started studying physics. He was born into a family with six
[00:07:02] children, his father was a doctor, his mother
[00:07:06] was a pharmacist. They often walked the forest together and
[00:07:09] observed animals. Perhaps that's why he thought
[00:07:13] he would become a zoologist or an ornithologist. Later, in physics classes, it turned out that
[00:07:16] he understood the tasks much faster than his classmates. I even
[00:07:20] say that I became a physicist because of my
[00:07:22] bad behavior, because my former physics teacher, after
[00:07:26] some time, started the mode of operation where he
[00:07:29] brought me examples on slips of paper, gave them to me to
[00:07:33] solve, and held physics
[00:07:35] class for the others.
[00:07:38] After much practice and extra tasks, he won the county
[00:07:42] physics competition, then entered the national competition
[00:07:45] final. Here he met the famous Professor
[00:07:48] Öveges, who held classes for him.
[00:07:51] Heki, does Heki the dog really hear the sound? I
[00:07:55] remembered him as old, and he really was, but he jumped onto the
[00:07:58] bench when he wanted to demonstrate something, just
[00:08:01] wow. Besides, of course, showing very professional and actually
[00:08:05] interesting experiments, the enthusiasm with which
[00:08:09] he did it, and from then on my fate was sealed.
[00:08:15] Gábor Szabó graduated from the Attila József University
[00:08:18] in Szeged, today he is the rector of the
[00:08:21] University of Szeged. Although he worked abroad for almost seven years,
[00:08:25] and was also Deputy State Secretary for Research and Development
[00:08:28] for two and a half years, he never broke away from his alma
[00:08:31] mater. For him, it is a special experience to see how the university
[00:08:35] changes and transforms over the years. I once said this at a
[00:08:38] faculty meeting that
[00:08:41] it's interesting for me to look around the room
[00:08:44] because my students are sitting in the front,
[00:08:48] behind them are my younger colleagues, who also,
[00:08:51] in some cases, were my students, then there are the colleagues,
[00:08:55] and then there are those who
[00:08:56] taught me.
[00:09:00] According to the rector, the university, which had a familial atmosphere
[00:09:03] and a few thousand students, has now become a significant
[00:09:07] institution that also sets international goals, where now almost
[00:09:09] 2500
[00:09:12] study.
[00:09:15] Among his many awards, he considers the Golden Chalk
[00:09:19] Award, which was voted for by students, to be one of the most
[00:09:23] important. I am convinced that it is not possible to impart
[00:09:26] knowledge through boring lectures. I really like to teach and work
[00:09:29] with young people, but teaching is not possible
[00:09:33] without research, and in fact, I believe that the most beautiful,
[00:09:37] let's say, the real peak of teaching,
[00:09:41] is working with doctoral students,
[00:09:44] young researchers, talking.
[00:09:47] Would you have thought that a
[00:09:50] terrorist attack would trigger a scientific thought process
[00:09:54] that leads to a better understanding of our environment?
[00:09:57] This will also be discussed in the
[00:09:58] lecture.
[00:10:02] This is one of the laboratories of the photoacoustic
[00:10:05] research group, where equipment is also
[00:10:07] found that is generally used for airborne
[00:10:10] dust.
[00:10:13] And here is the instrument they developed themselves.
[00:10:17] The research group has achieved important results in connection
[00:10:20] with vehicle emissions recently. It
[00:10:23] is theoretically suitable for measuring
[00:10:27] airborne particles, dust, and then let's
[00:10:31] see what we should measure to be able to
[00:10:35] perform measurements that are more,
[00:10:38] more capable than the available methods, do
[00:10:42] we think that the photoacoustic method provides
[00:10:45] an opportunity to really say
[00:10:48] more about airborne dust by performing
[00:10:51] such online measurements? The answer was given by time,
[00:10:55] with 10 years of work we have reached a point where we can not
[00:10:58] only say that it exists, that it is possible, but I
[00:11:02] think we can safely say today that no one else in the
[00:11:05] world has such an instrument, so this is the result of a unique
[00:11:09] development. According to Gábor Szabó,
[00:11:12] we humans cannot live in the world without a trace,
[00:11:16] even our mere presence influences our environment.
[00:11:19] And with the photoacoustic instrument, it can even be detected if
[00:11:23] we enter a room.
[00:11:26] "We inevitably disturb the environment by
[00:11:30] living, but it matters a lot how much, it
[00:11:33] matters a lot what we emit into the environment, it matters
[00:11:37] to the environment and
[00:11:38] to us.
[00:11:42] On the podium, Gábor Szabó, laser physicist, and his
[00:11:45] topic is "Emitto Ergo Sum",
[00:11:49] we emit, therefore we are. In my
[00:11:51] lecture, I would like to present with three simple examples
[00:11:55] how we can affect our environment. The
[00:11:59] first example is related to water vapor. It is
[00:12:03] well known that water vapor is a very strong
[00:12:06] greenhouse gas, it is better than carbon dioxide,
[00:12:10] because we don't usually talk about water, although it plays a much
[00:12:14] larger role in the greenhouse effect. Of course, we can't do much about it, because
[00:12:17] water vapor comes from the oceans, and it's difficult to
[00:12:21] reduce it, but it's important to know that water vapor has
[00:12:25] a very important effect, which was not nearly as
[00:12:28] clear, that water vapor has very strange manifestations
[00:12:32] that can affect our environment.
[00:12:36] This problem was brought to attention by the fact
[00:12:40] that after the September
[00:12:42] 11th attacks, the United States was completely
[00:12:46] shut down for four days, and then they noticed
[00:12:49] that the daily temperature fluctuation increased.
[00:12:53] This was because there were no contrails in the
[00:12:57] sky for four days, because contrails
[00:12:59] are the basis of cloud
[00:13:03] formation, and these
[00:13:05] contribute to the formation of high-altitude
[00:13:08] clouds. At first we only
[00:13:12] see that they really exist in the form of streaks, but then
[00:13:15] later these streaks can become
[00:13:18] extensive clouds, which will have the
[00:13:21] effect of reducing daily temperature fluctuations,
[00:13:24] this... "phenomenon is not so easy to detect, of course,
[00:13:27] extensive scientific research has been conducted in this
[00:13:30] area since then, but now we can safely
[00:13:34] say that contrails have such an effect,
[00:13:38] which means that in fact, one of the important
[00:13:41] environmental effects of air traffic is not
[00:13:44] that planes emit carbon dioxide, but
[00:13:47] that contrails are formed. Paradoxically,
[00:13:50] contrail formation
[00:13:53] depends on what kind of engine the
[00:13:57] given aircraft has, and if someone perhaps says that in
[00:14:01] my youth there weren't so many contrails, they are
[00:14:04] right, because old, inefficient
[00:14:07] engines cause fewer contrails than modern, highly
[00:14:11] efficient engines. It's quite difficult to understand the details
[00:14:15] of exactly what happens there, but it's a very
[00:14:18] important thing that we need to know about this
[00:14:21] phenomenon, and I think that... "the
[00:14:25] pressure of the voters would be needed
[00:14:28] to take this into account. I think that
[00:14:32] sooner or later we should achieve such a regulation, obviously
[00:14:36] an international regulation, which would somehow
[00:14:39] penalize contrail formation,
[00:14:43] making the airline pay if it occurs. It is possible
[00:14:47] to fly on a route where no contrail forms, but this is not
[00:14:51] necessarily the straightest route. Certain
[00:14:54] air layers would have to be avoided, but if planes did
[00:14:58] this, we would see far fewer
[00:15:00] contrails, which
[00:15:04] would not cause such consequences as are already
[00:15:08] visible. A relatively recent
[00:15:11] scientific article contains the
[00:15:15] data that the daily
[00:15:18] temperature fluctuation can decrease by up to
[00:15:22] four degrees due to contrails, so it decreases.
[00:15:25] the daily highest temperature, and
[00:15:28] somewhat increases the lowest temperature, so
[00:15:32] it has an effect on both sides of temperature
[00:15:35] development, but this was not a widely known phenomenon,
[00:15:39] and this also draws attention to the fact that nature
[00:15:41] is a very complex system, and if we interfere with it,
[00:15:45] it is not certain that it will have exactly the consequence
[00:15:49] that we expected. We have been dealing
[00:15:53] with this problem for some time, so we have developed
[00:15:56] a measuring device that can also perform measurements
[00:15:59] in the high atmosphere. We participated in an international
[00:16:02] project, the international project
[00:16:06] is shown in this
[00:16:08] figure. "the heart, the soul, this is a
[00:16:13] airports when these small electric
[00:16:17] vehicles pull suitcases, but in this container there are
[00:16:20] not suitcases, but measuring instruments. The
[00:16:23] measuring instrument, which has 'vazul' written on it,
[00:16:26] is not understood by foreign colleagues, what we
[00:16:30] meant by the name vazul, by the way, it's from
[00:16:33] water and sulfur, so from water and
[00:16:36] chemistry... "together, but Hungarians know what vazul
[00:16:40] means. This is especially interesting because our devices
[00:16:44] are so-called photoacoustic devices, which are based
[00:16:47] on sound detection, so if our devices go deaf,
[00:16:51] we can throw them away, but this is more just scaring ourselves with
[00:16:54] this name, so vazul serves the purpose of performing
[00:16:58] measurements in the high atmosphere. On the next
[00:17:02] chart, on the graph, a real
[00:17:05] flight, this was sometime in 2010. Our
[00:17:08] device worked on a Frankfurt-Osaka
[00:17:11] flight, and here you can see that
[00:17:14] when the plane took off, the sky was clear,
[00:17:17] at least our instrument shows that, then there was a cloudy
[00:17:21] section during the flight, and then it landed under a
[00:17:24] clear sky again. I don't want to go into detail about
[00:17:28] exactly what each curve means, but the essence of the matter is
[00:17:31] that this device is capable of determining
[00:17:35] the atmospheric conditions, it is even capable of providing
[00:17:38] data that can help avoid contrail
[00:17:41] formation. The next topic is a
[00:17:45] topic that we encounter quite often, and therefore
[00:17:48] we might think that it's a clear situation. This
[00:17:52] is the problem of aerosols. Aerosols are usually
[00:17:55] referred to as airborne particles, dust,
[00:17:58] soot. This can come from many sources.
[00:18:02] Of course, one very important source, again, comes
[00:18:05] from humans, partly heating,
[00:18:07] partly from vehicle traffic. We have developed several
[00:18:11] measuring devices for measuring aerosols,
[00:18:14] and we have brought one of these measuring devices
[00:18:18] here, because I always like to carry iron with me, because everyone
[00:18:22] believes that it's there. Here in front of us is an
[00:18:25] aerosol measuring device that is capable of
[00:18:29] detecting airborne
[00:18:32] particles. When my colleague comes here, he will light the
[00:18:36] incense stick, and then we will see that
[00:18:40] the device, after it sucks in the
[00:18:43] smoke emitted by the
[00:18:45] incense stick,
[00:18:47] then the corresponding signal will appear on the
[00:18:51] screen. Gergő is now holding the incense stick
[00:18:54] to the suction nozzle, here the instrument is sucking in
[00:18:57] air that already contains smoke. Of course, we didn't develop
[00:19:01] the device to play with it and try to
[00:19:05] detect indoor incense sticks, but
[00:19:09] because what happens in aerosols
[00:19:13] is quite an important problem, this can be a particularly
[00:19:16] important problem in special situations,
[00:19:20] one such situation can occur
[00:19:22] when there is an environmental disaster,
[00:19:25] when we need to be able to detect
[00:19:28] the presence of some substance, we performed
[00:19:31] such measurements when
[00:19:35] some öö... a few
[00:19:37] weeks after the Devecser disaster, our task
[00:19:41] was to check whether the dust of red
[00:19:44] sludge could be detected in the air. Based on measurements
[00:19:47] carried out on site, it turned out that
[00:19:51] it could indeed be detected, here on the slide you can see
[00:19:55] my colleagues performing measurements on
[00:19:58] site, and I think that
[00:20:01] many people remember the terrible images
[00:20:05] that could be seen in many places
[00:20:08] after the disaster, showing what damage it caused,
[00:20:11] but what I would like to show here are the graphs
[00:20:15] that deal with airborne dust measurements.
[00:20:18] Here, the point is, on these graphs we see
[00:20:22] that the red sludge dust
[00:20:25] could indeed be detected roughly
[00:20:28] from 8 AM to 8 PM,
[00:20:30] the entire recording, by the way, for me is the
[00:20:34] life of a small town in Aerosol.
[00:20:37] What we see on this curve is that
[00:20:41] the residents come home and light their fires,
[00:20:44] at which point the amount of soot in the air increases
[00:20:47] incredibly, this goes up high
[00:20:50] in the afternoon, then we see a peak, if we look at
[00:20:54] what part of the day this is, it's 8 o'clock, they poke the
[00:20:58] fire and go to watch TV, then the
[00:21:01] amount of aerosol decreases a little, at 10 there is
[00:21:05] another peak, presumably they add
[00:21:08] fuel again, then they go to sleep, and then by
[00:21:11] dawn the amount of airborne soot decreases,
[00:21:14] so this also shows that
[00:21:17] it depends very much on how much aerosol and how much soot
[00:21:20] is in the air, what kind of heating systems we use. From
[00:21:24] this, it also follows that it is very important to be able
[00:21:28] to determine the source of the aerosol, because
[00:21:32] it's a simple idea to ban cars everywhere,
[00:21:35] but it's not certain that in a given case, in a given place, cars
[00:21:39] are really polluting the environment, it might be much more
[00:21:42] from combustion, from heating
[00:21:45] that that dust comes. It is clear
[00:21:48] that no emission. "is good, what cars
[00:21:52] emit is not good either, but
[00:21:55] I would also add
[00:21:58] that a modern diesel
[00:22:01] engine according to the latest Euro 6 standards
[00:22:04] has emission values
[00:22:07] that are lower than the pollution of the air in an
[00:22:11] average Hungarian city. So, if we take this
[00:22:14] thought a bit further, then we would probably have to
[00:22:18] put modern cars behind diesel buses, because
[00:22:22] they would then clean the air, an Euro 6 car that
[00:22:25] goes behind a bus sucks in the sooty air, and what
[00:22:29] it emits is much cleaner,
[00:22:32] it's worth dealing with this separately,
[00:22:35] we also did this, but for this, of course, it must
[00:22:38] also be realized that very complex things happen
[00:22:42] already around the exhaust pipe, as the next
[00:22:45] figure shows that inside the
[00:22:48] exhaust pipe, as the temperature changes,
[00:22:52] the soot changes very strongly in terms of soot
[00:22:55] emission, and even, which is a very interesting problem, and
[00:22:59] which other devices are currently not
[00:23:02] capable of, and we are very happy that recently
[00:23:06] we managed to show that the devices
[00:23:09] we developed are suitable for tracking
[00:23:12] this phenomenon, is that
[00:23:16] while the soot passes through the exhaust system
[00:23:20] and cools down, not only the soot
[00:23:24] itself changes, but it also changes inside the exhaust, at
[00:23:28] higher temperatures there are smaller soot particles,
[00:23:31] as they come out, they stick together
[00:23:35] in the colder parts, and even worse,
[00:23:37] if there is organic vapor
[00:23:41] in the exhaust, which there usually is, they bind
[00:23:44] it. Well, actually, just calling it
[00:23:47] soot is not enough, calling it dust
[00:23:51] is definitely not enough, just think about it, if someone
[00:23:54] walks on the beach, they breathe in that
[00:23:58] fresh sea air, what do they feel? That salt crystals
[00:24:01] get into their lungs, no one has ever gotten sick from
[00:24:05] that, so it's not simply a question of whether something gets into
[00:24:09] our lungs, the question is where exactly does what gets in
[00:24:12] go, this is in close connection with the size
[00:24:16] of the soot particles, we now know well that large
[00:24:20] soot particles, well, of course large is relative, since roughly
[00:24:24] 10 micrometers, or perhaps this could be better
[00:24:27] illustrated by the fact that the hair of a
[00:24:30] European person is about 20-25 micrometers thick,
[00:24:34] an Asian person's is about 30-35
[00:24:37] micrometers thick, so what we are talking about is one-third
[00:24:40] of the thickness of a hair, particles smaller than this
[00:24:44] are usually considered aerosols, particles in the
[00:24:48] order of 10 micrometers. most of the time reach the
[00:24:52] upper respiratory tract, these cause much
[00:24:56] less trouble, smaller particles reach the lower
[00:24:59] layers of the lungs, the alveoli, these are much
[00:25:03] more dangerous, for the past good few years
[00:25:06] there has been a separate regulation for particles smaller
[00:25:10] than 2.5 micrometers, so one thing that definitely
[00:25:13] needs to be dealt with is to know the size of these
[00:25:16] soot particles, and we should also know what is on
[00:25:20] their surface. Our measuring system
[00:25:23] is exactly suitable for detecting this. The
[00:25:27] graph shows that light is absorbed
[00:25:30] differently in our case, laser light,
[00:25:34] which is in this device, soot absorbs light
[00:25:37] differently when it has
[00:25:41] an organic shell, a liquid shell, and
[00:25:45] also when it doesn't. This can be distinguished,
[00:25:48] moreover, this can be done
[00:25:51] practically online, so
[00:25:54] that the vehicle
[00:25:57] can operate even under road conditions.
[00:26:00] This is actually one of the
[00:26:02] biggest challenges recently, many of us are also
[00:26:06] dealing with developing instruments that cannot
[00:26:10] be used on a dynamometer under artificial conditions,
[00:26:13] but can be mounted on the car and measure continuously.
[00:26:17] Not long ago, the Volkswagen scandal received a
[00:26:21] lot of attention, partly because the measurement
[00:26:24] itself is done under artificial conditions, it's much
[00:26:27] easier to hack the system there, if it
[00:26:31] measured all the time, "it would show completely different
[00:26:34] values. If someone looks at fuel consumption
[00:26:38] values, I have never met anyone who could drive a car in such
[00:26:41] a way that they got the factory fuel consumption values,
[00:26:45] it's also something that is measured under some artificial
[00:26:48] conditions, of course they can be compared to each other,
[00:26:51] but that's not the fuel consumption value that
[00:26:54] the car shows with János Horvát's use of the gas
[00:26:58] pedal, obviously this is also true for emissions, exactly
[00:27:02] what a car emits should be measured
[00:27:06] while driving, the device that we
[00:27:09] developed, it appears from a fairly recent
[00:27:12] publication that it is capable of measuring
[00:27:16] the toxicity of emitted
[00:27:18] soot,
[00:27:20] vehicle emission measurement is otherwise a very important
[00:27:24] problem, a very important problem also because here again
[00:27:27] it's also about not always asking the right
[00:27:31] question. I don't think it's
[00:27:34] a proper thing to fool the buyers, but I do
[00:27:38] think that the question is more complicated than it
[00:27:41] sounded, it was about, it was about that somehow during measurement
[00:27:45] they falsified those measurement data
[00:27:49] concerning nitrogen oxide emissions.
[00:27:52] However, the question is not
[00:27:55] well posed, because a diesel car emits
[00:27:58] nitrogen oxides, and also emits carbon dioxide.
[00:28:02] "The real question is, what is more important for the environment?
[00:28:06] 100-1000 carbon dioxide molecules
[00:28:09] emitted, or one
[00:28:13] nitrogen dioxide molecule emitted, because this is what the
[00:28:16] story is about: with diesels, the carbon dioxide emission is
[00:28:19] lower, but there is some nitrogen dioxide
[00:28:23] emission. It's no coincidence that the whole story started in America,
[00:28:27] there they haven't really cared about carbon dioxide quotas
[00:28:30] so far, so it's not that.
[00:28:32] we are comparing the question again, which is the really important question.
[00:28:36] The last very short example is only about what we also
[00:28:40] emit gases that we don't know we emit, for example,
[00:28:43] humans emit methane in their breath. Measuring
[00:28:47] this is an important task, not primarily
[00:28:50] because we are polluting the environment with it, but
[00:28:53] because it carries
[00:28:56] important data concerning us.
[00:28:59] We have developed a methane meter. "which is suitable
[00:29:03] as a breath analyzer, we used
[00:29:06] it during practice, we used it
[00:29:09] during surgeries, it could be shown that
[00:29:12] for example, this is a very important indicator of the human body's
[00:29:15] stress state, so during a serious surgery, measuring
[00:29:19] how much methane the human body emits, that's important,
[00:29:22] we cannot control this, so this is an
[00:29:26] indicator that appears independently of our will, and this can be an important
[00:29:29] information for the doctors, once again,
[00:29:36] we don't emit that much methane, by the way, methane is 12 times stronger greenhouse
[00:29:39] gas than carbon dioxide, but it's so little, so it has no
[00:29:43] effect whatsoever. Dear audience,
[00:29:46] what I wanted to talk about in this lecture
[00:29:49] is that well, first of all, we only have
[00:29:53] one Earth, let's try to take care of it, but
[00:29:55] with reason, it's not at all simple what the
[00:29:59] consequence of something is, obviously, if you do nothing.
[00:30:02] at our place, let's start with not even breathing, that's
[00:30:06] the best, but we won't be able to sustain that for too long, then
[00:30:10] one thing, one thing we can ask is, how can
[00:30:13] we do it so that we cause the least harm to our environment,
[00:30:17] and the answers to this are not at all simple, here
[00:30:20] I'm talking about something like
[00:30:23] while we know artists
[00:30:26] who can carve very beautiful sculptures with an axe,
[00:30:29] I don't think that starting from this. "Swiss
[00:30:33] watches should be repaired with an axe, let's understand
[00:30:36] that our environment, Earth, is a Swiss watch, very
[00:30:39] complicated, consisting of interconnected
[00:30:42] parts, and we can only take care
[00:30:45] of it if we take care of it
[00:30:48] with reason, thank you for your kind
[00:30:49] attention.