the Owner of this Blog Site
Pietro P. Altermatt
Although I draw on scientific evidence as much as I can in my blogs, my background certainly influences my choice of topics and my emphasis on certain aspects.
Instead of showing just one side of me, and maybe formally with a professional photo, I like to show a few sides of me that influence this blog.
Working on silicon solar cells has been my passion since I studied physics, with math and photochemistry as minor subjects, in Switzerland and Germany.
I was very fortunate to start working on solar cells at UNSW in Sydney, and I have followed them through to mass production and now to scaling up the industry to meet the Paris Climate Agreement.
Today, I am the Principal Scientist at one of the largest solar cell manufacturers. This photo shows both my urban life in China and my networking in a growing industry. My training I gained at the Australian Graduate School of Management helps me to take on roles in higher management while supporting researchers and engineers in their daily research and development work. On my academic side, I mentor PhD students at Oxford University as a Visiting Professor and publish in peer-reviewed journals.
I have worked 50% part-time for money throughout my career. This has given me time to engage with my children, and later for stillness, to discover and pursue additional intentions in my own space. And to do things I would never do otherwise.
For example in this photo, I was helping to collect geese in the autumn before the rice is ripe so the geese don’t gorge themselves on the rice. These geese are released into the rice fields in the spring to eat the bugs so no pesticides are needed, and in the autumn they are collected and given old grains and then sold as Peking ducks. Experiencing these people in their evolved system makes a deep impression on me.
Besides technology and people, a strong motivation for this blog is my love of nature. I have especially enjoyed having my two daughters show me the nature.
When our first daughter was born, my wife took us on a year-long relaxed drive through the outback. When our second daughter was born, we expected the older one wouldn’t enjoy driving, so we lived in a tent in the south-eastern forests for a few months, like in this photo. The undisturbed nature made me feel like a guest and behave like a guest. This made me think that we are part of this planet, but the planet is not only ours, we share it with plants and animals that are our foundation, and we share it with future generations when we are all long gone.
At the same time, I am not idealistically sentimental about nature. Every being needs a footprint to live. Here I was assisting ecologists with data collection at a disused aluminium mine.
Early in the morning we inspected the dragons, sleepy from the cold night, and after a few days I could just feel if they were well fed or distressed before we measured their length and weight. During the hot days we set insect traps to analyse their food chain. Quantification gives a tiny insight into the complexity that stabilises nature and its response to our footprints. I love complexity and get restless if I am not engaged with complex matters for a while.
I stood in awe in a huge abandoned uranium mine like this one, or in a huge iron ore mine in full operation (third photo). It gave me a realistic sense of what it means to develop and scale up technology. And a motivation to get our footprint under control in a time of stomping on a wonderful but increasingly rowdy dance party.
It is dawning on us.
Still, since many aspects of climate change are related to technology, and we are constantly changing technology anyway, I am confident that we achieve our climate goals. How else can we do that but with confidence and optimism?
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