Soft Energy Paths

In the last century water policies relied on the construction of massive infrastructure in the form of dams, pipelines, and complex centralized treatment plants to meet human demands. These facilities brought tremendous benefits, but they also had serious and often unanticipated social, economic and environmental costs. Demand for water is one of the major challenges of the current century, but past approaches are no longer sufficient.

Imagine fuel without fear. No climate change. No oil spills, no dead coalminers, no dirty air, no devastated lands, no lost wildlife. No energy poverty. No oil-fed wars, tyrannies, or terrorists. No leaking nuclear wastes or spreading nuclear weapons. Nothing to run out. Nothing to cut off. Nothing to worry about. Just energy abundance, benign and affordable, for all, forever. That richer, fairer, cooler, safer world is possible, practical, even profitable-because saving and replacing fossil fuels now works better and costs no more than buying and burning them. Reinventing Fire shows how business-motivated by profit, supported by civil society, sped by smart policy-can get the US completely off oil and coal by 2050, and later beyond natural gas as well. Authored by a world leader on energy and innovation, the book maps a robust path for integrating real, here-and-now, comprehensive energy solutions in four industries-transportation, buildings, electricity, and manufacturing-melding radically efficient energy use with reliable, secure, renewable energy supplies.Popular in tone and rooted in applied hope, Reinventing Fire shows how smart businesses are creating a potent, global, market-driven, and explosively growing movement to defossilize fuels. It points readers to trillions in savings over the next 40 years, and trillions more in new business opportunities.Whether you care most about national security, or jobs and competitive advantage, or climate and environment, this major contribution by world leaders in energy innovation offers startling innovations will support your values, inspire your support, and transform your sense of possibility.Pragmatic citizens today are more interested in outcomes than motives. Reinventing Fire answers this trans-ideological call. Whether you care most about national security, or jobs and competitive advantage, or climate and environment, its startling innovations will support your values, inspire your support, and transform your sense of possibility.

The school held at Villa Marigola, Lerici, Italy, in July 1997 was very much an educational experiment aimed not just at teaching a new generation of students the latest developments in computer simulation methods and theory, but also at bringing together researchers from the condensed matter computer simulation community, the biophysical chemistry community and the quantum dynamics community to confront the shared problem: the development of methods to treat the dynamics of quantum condensed phase systems. This volume collects the lectures delivered there. Due to the focus of the school, the contributions divide along natural lines into two broad groups: (1) the most sophisticated forms of the art of computer simulation, including biased phase space sampling schemes, methods which address the multiplicity of time scales in condensed phase problems, and static equilibrium methods for treating quantum systems; (2) the contributions on quantum dynamics, including methods for mixing quantum and classical dynamics in condensed phase simulations and methods capable of treating all degrees of freedom quantum-mechanically. Contents:Barrier Crossing: Classical Theory of Rare but Important Events (D Chandler)Monte Carlo Simulations (D Frenkel)Molecular Dynamics Methods for the Enhanced Sampling of Phase Space (B J Berne)Constrained and Nonequilibrium Molecular Dynamics (G Ciccotti & M Ferrario)From Erying to Kramers: Computation of Diffusive Barrier Crossing Rates (M J Ruiz-Montero)Monte Carlo Methods for Sampling of Rare Event States (W Janke)Proton Transfer in Ice (D Marx)Nudged Elastic Band Method for Finding Minimum Energy Paths of Transitions (H Jónsson et al.)RAW Quantum Transition State Theory (G Mills et al.)Dynamics of Peptide Folding (R Elber et al.)Theoretical Studies of Activated Processes in Biological Ion Channels (B Roux & S Crouzy)The Semiclassical Initial Value Representation for Including Quantum Effects in Molecular Dynamics Simulations (W H Miller)Tunneling in the Condensed Phase: Barrier Crossing and Dynamical Control (N Makri)Feynman Path Centroid Methods for Condensed Phase Quantum Dynamics (G A Voth)Quantum Molecular Dynamics Using Wigner Representation (V S Filinov et al.)Nonadiabatic Molecular Dynamics Methods for Diffusion (D Laria et al.)and other papers Readership: Computational and statistical physicists. Keywords:Quantum;Molecular Dynamics;DynamicsReviews: “… this volume is a useful introduction to currently popular, and widely-used techniques in chemical and statistical physics. The authors are well-respected researchers in the field and the level is appropriate to graduate students and researchers.” Journal of Statistical Physics