Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API (Chirp) + Gemini 2.5 Flash Non-Thinking. Treat it as a searchable index of what was broadcast, not a quotation record.
00:05:54on the stage of everyone's academy tonight Gábor Szabó
00:05:57laser physicist, I am Gábor Szabó,
00:06:00laser physicist, professor of the SZTE optical department,
00:06:03member of the academy, I greet the
00:06:07dear viewers,
00:06:09my colleagues have recently primarily worked
00:06:13on developing methods that
00:06:15help us better understand the impact of humans on
00:06:19our environment.
00:06:33I usually tell my students that
00:06:35physicists specifically don't understand anything, but
00:06:39they understand everything better than anyone else. When I'm awake, I'm
00:06:43a physicist, which is important because
00:06:46being a physicist, in my opinion, is actually a kind of problem-solving
00:06:50ability.
00:06:55Gábor Szabó wanted to be a biologist before
00:06:59he started studying physics. He was born into a family with six
00:07:02children, his father was a doctor, his mother
00:07:06was a pharmacist. They often walked the forest together and
00:07:09observed animals. Perhaps that's why he thought
00:07:13he would become a zoologist or an ornithologist. Later, in physics classes, it turned out that
00:07:16he understood the tasks much faster than his classmates. I even
00:07:20say that I became a physicist because of my
00:07:22bad behavior, because my former physics teacher, after
00:07:26some time, started the mode of operation where he
00:07:29brought me examples on slips of paper, gave them to me to
00:07:33solve, and held physics
00:07:35class for the others.
00:07:38After much practice and extra tasks, he won the county
00:07:42physics competition, then entered the national competition
00:07:45final. Here he met the famous Professor
00:07:48Öveges, who held classes for him.
00:07:51Heki, does Heki the dog really hear the sound? I
00:07:55remembered him as old, and he really was, but he jumped onto the
00:07:58bench when he wanted to demonstrate something, just
00:08:01wow. Besides, of course, showing very professional and actually
00:08:05interesting experiments, the enthusiasm with which
00:08:09he did it, and from then on my fate was sealed.
00:08:15Gábor Szabó graduated from the Attila József University
00:08:18in Szeged, today he is the rector of the
00:08:21University of Szeged. Although he worked abroad for almost seven years,
00:08:25and was also Deputy State Secretary for Research and Development
00:08:28for two and a half years, he never broke away from his alma
00:08:31mater. For him, it is a special experience to see how the university
00:08:35changes and transforms over the years. I once said this at a
00:08:38faculty meeting that
00:08:41it's interesting for me to look around the room
00:08:44because my students are sitting in the front,
00:08:48behind them are my younger colleagues, who also,
00:08:51in some cases, were my students, then there are the colleagues,
00:08:55and then there are those who
00:08:56taught me.
00:09:00According to the rector, the university, which had a familial atmosphere
00:09:03and a few thousand students, has now become a significant
00:09:07institution that also sets international goals, where now almost
00:09:092500
00:09:12study.
00:09:15Among his many awards, he considers the Golden Chalk
00:09:19Award, which was voted for by students, to be one of the most
00:09:23important. I am convinced that it is not possible to impart
00:09:26knowledge through boring lectures. I really like to teach and work
00:09:29with young people, but teaching is not possible
00:09:33without research, and in fact, I believe that the most beautiful,
00:09:37let's say, the real peak of teaching,
00:09:41is working with doctoral students,
00:09:44young researchers, talking.
00:09:47Would you have thought that a
00:09:50terrorist attack would trigger a scientific thought process
00:09:54that leads to a better understanding of our environment?
00:09:57This will also be discussed in the
00:09:58lecture.
00:10:02This is one of the laboratories of the photoacoustic
00:10:05research group, where equipment is also
00:10:07found that is generally used for airborne
00:10:10dust.
00:10:13And here is the instrument they developed themselves.
00:10:17The research group has achieved important results in connection
00:10:20with vehicle emissions recently. It
00:10:23is theoretically suitable for measuring
00:10:27airborne particles, dust, and then let's
00:10:31see what we should measure to be able to
00:10:35perform measurements that are more,
00:10:38more capable than the available methods, do
00:10:42we think that the photoacoustic method provides
00:10:45an opportunity to really say
00:10:48more about airborne dust by performing
00:10:51such online measurements? The answer was given by time,
00:10:55with 10 years of work we have reached a point where we can not
00:10:58only say that it exists, that it is possible, but I
00:11:02think we can safely say today that no one else in the
00:11:05world has such an instrument, so this is the result of a unique
00:11:09development. According to Gábor Szabó,
00:11:12we humans cannot live in the world without a trace,
00:11:16even our mere presence influences our environment.
00:11:19And with the photoacoustic instrument, it can even be detected if
00:11:23we enter a room.
00:11:26"We inevitably disturb the environment by
00:11:30living, but it matters a lot how much, it
00:11:33matters a lot what we emit into the environment, it matters
00:11:37to the environment and
00:11:38to us.
00:11:42On the podium, Gábor Szabó, laser physicist, and his
00:11:45topic is "Emitto Ergo Sum",
00:11:49we emit, therefore we are. In my
00:11:51lecture, I would like to present with three simple examples
00:11:55how we can affect our environment. The
00:11:59first example is related to water vapor. It is
00:12:03well known that water vapor is a very strong
00:12:06greenhouse gas, it is better than carbon dioxide,
00:12:10because we don't usually talk about water, although it plays a much
00:12:14larger role in the greenhouse effect. Of course, we can't do much about it, because
00:12:17water vapor comes from the oceans, and it's difficult to
00:12:21reduce it, but it's important to know that water vapor has
00:12:25a very important effect, which was not nearly as
00:12:28clear, that water vapor has very strange manifestations
00:12:32that can affect our environment.
00:12:36This problem was brought to attention by the fact
00:12:40that after the September
00:12:4211th attacks, the United States was completely
00:12:46shut down for four days, and then they noticed
00:12:49that the daily temperature fluctuation increased.
00:12:53This was because there were no contrails in the
00:12:57sky for four days, because contrails
00:12:59are the basis of cloud
00:13:03formation, and these
00:13:05contribute to the formation of high-altitude
00:13:08clouds. At first we only
00:13:12see that they really exist in the form of streaks, but then
00:13:15later these streaks can become
00:13:18extensive clouds, which will have the
00:13:21effect of reducing daily temperature fluctuations,
00:13:24this... "phenomenon is not so easy to detect, of course,
00:13:27extensive scientific research has been conducted in this
00:13:30area since then, but now we can safely
00:13:34say that contrails have such an effect,
00:13:38which means that in fact, one of the important
00:13:41environmental effects of air traffic is not
00:13:44that planes emit carbon dioxide, but
00:13:47that contrails are formed. Paradoxically,
00:13:50contrail formation
00:13:53depends on what kind of engine the
00:13:57given aircraft has, and if someone perhaps says that in
00:14:01my youth there weren't so many contrails, they are
00:14:04right, because old, inefficient
00:14:07engines cause fewer contrails than modern, highly
00:14:11efficient engines. It's quite difficult to understand the details
00:14:15of exactly what happens there, but it's a very
00:14:18important thing that we need to know about this
00:14:21phenomenon, and I think that... "the
00:14:25pressure of the voters would be needed
00:14:28to take this into account. I think that
00:14:32sooner or later we should achieve such a regulation, obviously
00:14:36an international regulation, which would somehow
00:14:39penalize contrail formation,
00:14:43making the airline pay if it occurs. It is possible
00:14:47to fly on a route where no contrail forms, but this is not
00:14:51necessarily the straightest route. Certain
00:14:54air layers would have to be avoided, but if planes did
00:14:58this, we would see far fewer
00:15:00contrails, which
00:15:04would not cause such consequences as are already
00:15:08visible. A relatively recent
00:15:11scientific article contains the
00:15:15data that the daily
00:15:18temperature fluctuation can decrease by up to
00:15:22four degrees due to contrails, so it decreases.
00:15:25the daily highest temperature, and
00:15:28somewhat increases the lowest temperature, so
00:15:32it has an effect on both sides of temperature
00:15:35development, but this was not a widely known phenomenon,
00:15:39and this also draws attention to the fact that nature
00:15:41is a very complex system, and if we interfere with it,
00:15:45it is not certain that it will have exactly the consequence
00:15:49that we expected. We have been dealing
00:15:53with this problem for some time, so we have developed
00:15:56a measuring device that can also perform measurements
00:15:59in the high atmosphere. We participated in an international
00:16:02project, the international project
00:16:06is shown in this
00:16:08figure. "the heart, the soul, this is a
00:16:13airports when these small electric
00:16:17vehicles pull suitcases, but in this container there are
00:16:20not suitcases, but measuring instruments. The
00:16:23measuring instrument, which has 'vazul' written on it,
00:16:26is not understood by foreign colleagues, what we
00:16:30meant by the name vazul, by the way, it's from
00:16:33water and sulfur, so from water and
00:16:36chemistry... "together, but Hungarians know what vazul
00:16:40means. This is especially interesting because our devices
00:16:44are so-called photoacoustic devices, which are based
00:16:47on sound detection, so if our devices go deaf,
00:16:51we can throw them away, but this is more just scaring ourselves with
00:16:54this name, so vazul serves the purpose of performing
00:16:58measurements in the high atmosphere. On the next
00:17:02chart, on the graph, a real
00:17:05flight, this was sometime in 2010. Our
00:17:08device worked on a Frankfurt-Osaka
00:17:11flight, and here you can see that
00:17:14when the plane took off, the sky was clear,
00:17:17at least our instrument shows that, then there was a cloudy
00:17:21section during the flight, and then it landed under a
00:17:24clear sky again. I don't want to go into detail about
00:17:28exactly what each curve means, but the essence of the matter is
00:17:31that this device is capable of determining
00:17:35the atmospheric conditions, it is even capable of providing
00:17:38data that can help avoid contrail
00:17:41formation. The next topic is a
00:17:45topic that we encounter quite often, and therefore
00:17:48we might think that it's a clear situation. This
00:17:52is the problem of aerosols. Aerosols are usually
00:17:55referred to as airborne particles, dust,
00:17:58soot. This can come from many sources.
00:18:02Of course, one very important source, again, comes
00:18:05from humans, partly heating,
00:18:07partly from vehicle traffic. We have developed several
00:18:11measuring devices for measuring aerosols,
00:18:14and we have brought one of these measuring devices
00:18:18here, because I always like to carry iron with me, because everyone
00:18:22believes that it's there. Here in front of us is an
00:18:25aerosol measuring device that is capable of
00:18:29detecting airborne
00:18:32particles. When my colleague comes here, he will light the
00:18:36incense stick, and then we will see that
00:18:40the device, after it sucks in the
00:18:43smoke emitted by the
00:18:45incense stick,
00:18:47then the corresponding signal will appear on the
00:18:51screen. Gergő is now holding the incense stick
00:18:54to the suction nozzle, here the instrument is sucking in
00:18:57air that already contains smoke. Of course, we didn't develop
00:19:01the device to play with it and try to
00:19:05detect indoor incense sticks, but
00:19:09because what happens in aerosols
00:19:13is quite an important problem, this can be a particularly
00:19:16important problem in special situations,
00:19:20one such situation can occur
00:19:22when there is an environmental disaster,
00:19:25when we need to be able to detect
00:19:28the presence of some substance, we performed
00:19:31such measurements when
00:19:35some öö... a few
00:19:37weeks after the Devecser disaster, our task
00:19:41was to check whether the dust of red
00:19:44sludge could be detected in the air. Based on measurements
00:19:47carried out on site, it turned out that
00:19:51it could indeed be detected, here on the slide you can see
00:19:55my colleagues performing measurements on
00:19:58site, and I think that
00:20:01many people remember the terrible images
00:20:05that could be seen in many places
00:20:08after the disaster, showing what damage it caused,
00:20:11but what I would like to show here are the graphs
00:20:15that deal with airborne dust measurements.
00:20:18Here, the point is, on these graphs we see
00:20:22that the red sludge dust
00:20:25could indeed be detected roughly
00:20:28from 8 AM to 8 PM,
00:20:30the entire recording, by the way, for me is the
00:20:34life of a small town in Aerosol.
00:20:37What we see on this curve is that
00:20:41the residents come home and light their fires,
00:20:44at which point the amount of soot in the air increases
00:20:47incredibly, this goes up high
00:20:50in the afternoon, then we see a peak, if we look at
00:20:54what part of the day this is, it's 8 o'clock, they poke the
00:20:58fire and go to watch TV, then the
00:21:01amount of aerosol decreases a little, at 10 there is
00:21:05another peak, presumably they add
00:21:08fuel again, then they go to sleep, and then by
00:21:11dawn the amount of airborne soot decreases,
00:21:14so this also shows that
00:21:17it depends very much on how much aerosol and how much soot
00:21:20is in the air, what kind of heating systems we use. From
00:21:24this, it also follows that it is very important to be able
00:21:28to determine the source of the aerosol, because
00:21:32it's a simple idea to ban cars everywhere,
00:21:35but it's not certain that in a given case, in a given place, cars
00:21:39are really polluting the environment, it might be much more
00:21:42from combustion, from heating
00:21:45that that dust comes. It is clear
00:21:48that no emission. "is good, what cars
00:21:52emit is not good either, but
00:21:55I would also add
00:21:58that a modern diesel
00:22:01engine according to the latest Euro 6 standards
00:22:04has emission values
00:22:07that are lower than the pollution of the air in an
00:22:11average Hungarian city. So, if we take this
00:22:14thought a bit further, then we would probably have to
00:22:18put modern cars behind diesel buses, because
00:22:22they would then clean the air, an Euro 6 car that
00:22:25goes behind a bus sucks in the sooty air, and what
00:22:29it emits is much cleaner,
00:22:32it's worth dealing with this separately,
00:22:35we also did this, but for this, of course, it must
00:22:38also be realized that very complex things happen
00:22:42already around the exhaust pipe, as the next
00:22:45figure shows that inside the
00:22:48exhaust pipe, as the temperature changes,
00:22:52the soot changes very strongly in terms of soot
00:22:55emission, and even, which is a very interesting problem, and
00:22:59which other devices are currently not
00:23:02capable of, and we are very happy that recently
00:23:06we managed to show that the devices
00:23:09we developed are suitable for tracking
00:23:12this phenomenon, is that
00:23:16while the soot passes through the exhaust system
00:23:20and cools down, not only the soot
00:23:24itself changes, but it also changes inside the exhaust, at
00:23:28higher temperatures there are smaller soot particles,
00:23:31as they come out, they stick together
00:23:35in the colder parts, and even worse,
00:23:37if there is organic vapor
00:23:41in the exhaust, which there usually is, they bind
00:23:44it. Well, actually, just calling it
00:23:47soot is not enough, calling it dust
00:23:51is definitely not enough, just think about it, if someone
00:23:54walks on the beach, they breathe in that
00:23:58fresh sea air, what do they feel? That salt crystals
00:24:01get into their lungs, no one has ever gotten sick from
00:24:05that, so it's not simply a question of whether something gets into
00:24:09our lungs, the question is where exactly does what gets in
00:24:12go, this is in close connection with the size
00:24:16of the soot particles, we now know well that large
00:24:20soot particles, well, of course large is relative, since roughly
00:24:2410 micrometers, or perhaps this could be better
00:24:27illustrated by the fact that the hair of a
00:24:30European person is about 20-25 micrometers thick,
00:24:34an Asian person's is about 30-35
00:24:37micrometers thick, so what we are talking about is one-third
00:24:40of the thickness of a hair, particles smaller than this
00:24:44are usually considered aerosols, particles in the
00:24:48order of 10 micrometers. most of the time reach the
00:24:52upper respiratory tract, these cause much
00:24:56less trouble, smaller particles reach the lower
00:24:59layers of the lungs, the alveoli, these are much
00:25:03more dangerous, for the past good few years
00:25:06there has been a separate regulation for particles smaller
00:25:10than 2.5 micrometers, so one thing that definitely
00:25:13needs to be dealt with is to know the size of these
00:25:16soot particles, and we should also know what is on
00:25:20their surface. Our measuring system
00:25:23is exactly suitable for detecting this. The
00:25:27graph shows that light is absorbed
00:25:30differently in our case, laser light,
00:25:34which is in this device, soot absorbs light
00:25:37differently when it has
00:25:41an organic shell, a liquid shell, and
00:25:45also when it doesn't. This can be distinguished,
00:25:48moreover, this can be done
00:25:51practically online, so
00:25:54that the vehicle
00:25:57can operate even under road conditions.
00:26:00This is actually one of the
00:26:02biggest challenges recently, many of us are also
00:26:06dealing with developing instruments that cannot
00:26:10be used on a dynamometer under artificial conditions,
00:26:13but can be mounted on the car and measure continuously.
00:26:17Not long ago, the Volkswagen scandal received a
00:26:21lot of attention, partly because the measurement
00:26:24itself is done under artificial conditions, it's much
00:26:27easier to hack the system there, if it
00:26:31measured all the time, "it would show completely different
00:26:34values. If someone looks at fuel consumption
00:26:38values, I have never met anyone who could drive a car in such
00:26:41a way that they got the factory fuel consumption values,
00:26:45it's also something that is measured under some artificial
00:26:48conditions, of course they can be compared to each other,
00:26:51but that's not the fuel consumption value that
00:26:54the car shows with János Horvát's use of the gas
00:26:58pedal, obviously this is also true for emissions, exactly
00:27:02what a car emits should be measured
00:27:06while driving, the device that we
00:27:09developed, it appears from a fairly recent
00:27:12publication that it is capable of measuring
00:27:16the toxicity of emitted
00:27:18soot,
00:27:20vehicle emission measurement is otherwise a very important
00:27:24problem, a very important problem also because here again
00:27:27it's also about not always asking the right
00:27:31question. I don't think it's
00:27:34a proper thing to fool the buyers, but I do
00:27:38think that the question is more complicated than it
00:27:41sounded, it was about, it was about that somehow during measurement
00:27:45they falsified those measurement data
00:27:49concerning nitrogen oxide emissions.
00:27:52However, the question is not
00:27:55well posed, because a diesel car emits
00:27:58nitrogen oxides, and also emits carbon dioxide.
00:28:02"The real question is, what is more important for the environment?
00:28:06100-1000 carbon dioxide molecules
00:28:09emitted, or one
00:28:13nitrogen dioxide molecule emitted, because this is what the
00:28:16story is about: with diesels, the carbon dioxide emission is
00:28:19lower, but there is some nitrogen dioxide
00:28:23emission. It's no coincidence that the whole story started in America,
00:28:27there they haven't really cared about carbon dioxide quotas
00:28:30so far, so it's not that.
00:28:32we are comparing the question again, which is the really important question.
00:28:36The last very short example is only about what we also
00:28:40emit gases that we don't know we emit, for example,
00:28:43humans emit methane in their breath. Measuring
00:28:47this is an important task, not primarily
00:28:50because we are polluting the environment with it, but
00:28:53because it carries
00:28:56important data concerning us.
00:28:59We have developed a methane meter. "which is suitable
00:29:03as a breath analyzer, we used
00:29:06it during practice, we used it
00:29:09during surgeries, it could be shown that
00:29:12for example, this is a very important indicator of the human body's
00:29:15stress state, so during a serious surgery, measuring
00:29:19how much methane the human body emits, that's important,
00:29:22we cannot control this, so this is an
00:29:26indicator that appears independently of our will, and this can be an important
00:29:29information for the doctors, once again,
00:29:36we don't emit that much methane, by the way, methane is 12 times stronger greenhouse
00:29:39gas than carbon dioxide, but it's so little, so it has no
00:29:43effect whatsoever. Dear audience,
00:29:46what I wanted to talk about in this lecture
00:29:49is that well, first of all, we only have
00:29:53one Earth, let's try to take care of it, but
00:29:55with reason, it's not at all simple what the
00:29:59consequence of something is, obviously, if you do nothing.
00:30:02at our place, let's start with not even breathing, that's
00:30:06the best, but we won't be able to sustain that for too long, then
00:30:10one thing, one thing we can ask is, how can
00:30:13we do it so that we cause the least harm to our environment,
00:30:17and the answers to this are not at all simple, here
00:30:20I'm talking about something like
00:30:23while we know artists
00:30:26who can carve very beautiful sculptures with an axe,
00:30:29I don't think that starting from this. "Swiss
00:30:33watches should be repaired with an axe, let's understand
00:30:36that our environment, Earth, is a Swiss watch, very
00:30:39complicated, consisting of interconnected
00:30:42parts, and we can only take care
00:30:45of it if we take care of it
00:30:48with reason, thank you for your kind
00:30:49attention.