That's a great point. And I guess the power thing would be very nice. And maybe that I mean, maybe that's a beautiful segue to one of your projects, managing scarcity and sustainability, the oil industry, environmentalism and alternative energy in the age of scarcity. So why don't you just tell people a bit about this project, which, I mean, has the potential to take over your life until you die, I think, because it's so potentially so big. But yeah, tell the people about the thing.

so the origins of this project were when I was at Rice University in Houston. So, you know, oil is everywhere. My department, the history department owned a natural gas well. Okay. It's really hard to escape in Houston. Amazing. And, you know, there's this fantastic group of oil historians down the road at University of Houston that I would go see. Yeah, yeah, those

guys are great. So, and

then at Rice, Dominic Boyer's, and many how a few others mostly coming out of anthropology, putting the other way. what the acronym was C-E but it stood for Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences.

Oh, very nice. Yeah. So basically an

energy humanities center. Yeah. And I got sucked into that. So I had oil and energy on my brain. I was writing the Moore's Law book. So I was reading a lot of stuff about Silicon Valley and other high-tech industries, especially in the San Francisco Bay area, and I kept noticing oil come up over and over and over again, especially in histories of biotechnology. There's all these great books about early biotech companies, and they all have this paragraph where they're like, oh, yeah, and this company was floated by, you know, these oil companies in its early years. And and that's never really commented on.

Yeah. And

it's definitely never commented on that. This is true of all of the most important early biotech companies.

So

I started to toy with the idea of making that my next project, you know, it was originally kind of a sort of innovation studies oriented, right, you know, let's, let's look at where oil flows into all these non oil high tech areas. Then in the middle of that, I moved to the Netherlands, which ended up being great for this project. I mean, great for many ways, but great for this project because here it's possible to get funding to do real team research.

Yes. It's important. Yep.

Yeah, so I have this grant managing scarcity, which supports myself and a postdoc Odin Elstad and two PhD candidates, Jelen Nastankovic and Michiel Rohn.

Oh, wonderful. Yeah.

And when I put it together, I sort of said, yeah, okay, let's, we're all going to kind of look at some non-oil area where oil has been really important. So Yellen is looking at oil and solar, Meheel is looking at oil and nuclear, Odin oil and geothermal. Nice. I'm doing these non-energy things, biotech, artificial intelligence, computing, nano again. Cool. But as we dove into it, like you say, it could take over my life because I've realized recently, but this was coming for a while, that actually it's two projects.

Okay.

Okay. So one is looking at kind of the business and technological dimensions of how oil companies made it through the oil crises of this. Uh-huh, right, right. And, you know, one thing they were doing was they were experimenting with all of these other... They

were diversifying as a possible path. Yeah. Yeah.

Mm hmm. Which they mostly gave up in the 80s. Right. Exactly. That's the big thing we want to explain in the book. Why did they do it in the first place? Yes. Also, why did they get out of it? Yeah. But then in parallel with that, there were some big eaters in the oil industry.

Yeah.

So definitely not every company or every executive, but some prominent figures who got interested in not just the business and the technology side, but also they made some kind of bridge to the environmental movement. to some of the institutions of global environmental governance that are still with us today. UN Environment Program, first director, Mora Strong was an oil guy. These are the people who kind of helped enshrine sustainable development for people of environmental governance. Okay. Wow,

man, it's so great. And yeah, I mean, who was I talking with? I was talking to Dana Boyd recently. That episode's not even out yet. And she was talking about a book she produced with the research team. And I was like, you know, I think Europe's better at this, though. Sometimes it gets kind of hung up in anticipatory governance land or whatever, instead of like, research project, empiricist land. But you know, there's just things that teams can do. I learned this through Pierre Bourdieu's work, actually, like some of those, some of his most important books, it was entire armies of folks he had doing, you know, stuff. And, and so I just think these big topics like this oil thing, yeah, oil ends up everywhere. And how are you gonna write about that other than to have a team? You know, it is impossible. Yeah.

I mean, a great example is the PhD candidate, Michiel was working on oil and nuclear. I mean, when I designed that bit of the proposal, I thought, well, isn't it interesting there are all these oil companies who get into nuclear power in the late 60s? Let's have a PhD. Look at that. Yeah. And he's taking it and he's run with it. And he can draw that story back to the 1920s.

Now. Oh, exactly. Oh, that's so good. Yes. There's

so much more going on with that. So I could never have gotten to myself.

Oh, that's beautiful. I actually you know, and I think that the nano group around Patrick that included you and young sub, you know, it was much more informal. It wasn't a planned thing, but it had that it ended up doing something like that and that's why I think you know, I am well known for beating up on the anticipatory governance kind of ASU model of the nano stuff. But I really think that that group around with Anne and Patrick and you and Youngsub, I think that stuff came out of there that holds up. And I think it's going to be continued to be cited for, you know, generations of people moving forward if they want to talk about rebranding or material science or whatever. I mean, they will go back to that work. And so, you know, I think the same thing is going to be two of this oil project. And the other thing I wanted to ask you about, so I kind of forgot that you were all tied up in the nano bubbles project. And I haven't had a chance to hang out with these characters yet, but there's one one of your colleagues his name is max rossman is it or Rossman and then there's a Freddy Borden your is and Mary Ann Noel and there's these other folks that I haven't had a chance to hang out with yet But is destined to happen because I'm really into this, this kind of hype studies going on. And so yeah, tell people about nano bubbles and what it is first, I think. And then maybe you can say a bit about what you're up to with it. Yeah.

Okay. So my involvement with nano bubbles actually is an algorithm of Patrick's group at the. At Center for Nanomark Society. Patrick had a blog on, you know. Yeah, Leaping Robot. Yeah. Exactly. And he asked me to do a guest post looking at this controversy about what we called stripy nanoparticles. So these are nanoparticles that supposedly you can put other molecules on the outside of the particle and they'll make stripes. And another nanoscientist, Raphael Levy, had looked at these things. He looked at the atomic force microscope images of these particles and said, yeah, this is an imaging artifact. There's those actual stripes there. And so it was a big controversy. And Patrick asked me to look at it through the lens of, through historical lens, particularly the history of probe microscopy and

yeah debates

about artifacts with those microscopes. So I wrote a guest post about that, and Raphael read it, and I guess liked it. Because then a number of years later, he contacted me out of the blue and he said, Look, you know, I like that post you wrote. I've gotten involved in other controversies since then. And I want to put together a project to look at these kinds of controversies. Okay, right.

So you will like a workshop or something on controversies. Okay. Well,

some kind of something. Yeah, okay, he pulled it he pulled together Yeah Okay a small meeting at the French Embassy in London, okay, I kind of know this is making sense I remember when that happened yeah, yeah He organized it with the Macheme Noel. Oh you mentioned who? originally a chemist. She became a science diplomat. So she worked at the French embassy in South Korea during the whole Huang scandal about cloning. Oh,

yeah.

Yeah. So after that meeting, Rafael said, yeah, there's definitely enough interesting stuff going on here. Let's let's do it. So we pulled together a group to apply for European Research Council synergy grant. You know, thinking we wouldn't get it on the first try. Yeah, it was nice to bring the group together and get some ideas on paper. But then we ended up, we did get so much for that. Yeah. So, yeah, now we have this very cool, highly interdisciplinary project. Cool. With, yeah, there's four co-PIs, Rafael, nanoscientist, me, and Willem Hulfmann, representing STS. and Sir Le Bay is a computer scientist. And then we also have library scientists like Frederic Baudignon, you mentioned, philosophers, Roger and Frederic O'Boham, innovation studies, technology assessment people like Max Rossman.

Yeah.

And then we're spread over a bunch of sites in the Netherlands and France, about 25 people total. It's so cool. And our tagline is, we try to understand how, when and why scientists fail to correct the scientific record. Okay. And

so I was about to ask you about that. That was my next question. It's like it says, the project focuses on how, when, and why science fails to correct itself. So you're looking at nano bubbles, you know, there's hype involved, but what is, why is that failure to correct itself like a good frame for working through the issue?

so it's partly from Raphael's personal experience of having tried to get the scientific correct. Yes, corrected several times now for different controversies and either failing completely or finding it much, much, much more difficult than he expected it to be. So there's all of these institutions and incentives that are made to really discourage it, right? Generals hate to correct stuff. Universities hate it when someone tries to get one of their staff members articles retracted. Conferences are often kind of organized in a way that, where if you ask probing questions, people take offense. And they get real defensive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's just much more difficult than it should be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For us to kind of honestly talk through what's going on. Yes. And correct things if it if it's needed. Yeah.

Well, and I also think that there's, you know, I, this is one of the one of those great tragedies in research life. But I bumped into Twitter like three or four years ago now, a recent ish article that was saying, you know, that was making the argument that kind of obvious when you think about it, is that the way we structure our funding programs, it encourages hyperbole and even outright lies about what our research is going to deliver, right? structures around encouraging over claiming and such and then you know and then that goes hand-in with this kind of defensiveness and these other things that you mentioned it's yeah it's a really fascinating social scientific issue actually you know and I also think you know I I'm kind of recently you know for the last couple years I've been kind of in this kind of like hype critique mode that came out of like maintain stuff and thinking about the lack of technological change, even though there's a lot of hype out there. Some people, I think, have accused me of... I think my point is, some people think I'm not also recognizing that hype and imaginaries and stuff like guide action, which is like, you know, like is part of your bat signal stuff with, with, you know, chips and stuff is that like, well, hype plays a sociological role in, you know, guiding investment and all these kinds of things, right? I think that's true. And I think we should study that too. And I think there's good people doing it like Neil Pollock and Devin Powers and other kinds of characters. But it doesn't kind of get us away from this rub that your colleague is focusing on here of like how, I'm sorry, I forgot his name. Max Brod. Raphael. Oh, Raphael. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this rub that like, well, but there's not a lack of correction there. That's a problem actually. Right. Yeah. It's really interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. And there's also, I mean, think about the flip side, right? Like there's all kinds of work that's presented more modestly, more plausibly, more true to the empirical base, and it gets ignored. Yeah. Amen,

man.