R. Stephen Berry

Officially emeritus, I continue to teach and to do research.  My teaching, for the past several years, has been a course on Energy and Energy Policy, which I give together with (emeritus) economist George Tolley.  It's a course for upper-class undergraduates and graduate students; the students work in interdisciplinary teams, each team required to write a single paper on a topic either from a list of suggestions we provide or one we approve.  All the papers from past years' courses are posted and available publicly at the URL  http://franke.uchicago.edu/bigproblems/bp-energy.html  Of course I continue to maintain my interest in energy, resources and sustainability--but I become increasingly pessimistic about our species' capability to respond and adapt to the climate changes we are producing, and about what seems to be our inability to recognize the threat we generate to the continuance of human life as we now know it. 

My research interests currently, which grew out of several years' study of atomic and molecular clusters and how they behave in ways different from the predictions of traditional macro science, notably thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, have turned to the "macro-micro boundary" and reconciliation of macro and micro descriptions. Specifically, we examine phenomena in which very small systems seem to violate what macro science predicts, by finding the approximate size of systems below which such violations should be detectable experimentally, i.e. the effective boundary of validity of the macro picture.