MOZART AND ENERGY PREDICTION

Once it is known that literacy follows a logistic law, one needs in principle only a starting point and the slope of the straight line (on semilogarithmic paper) to predict the future; for example, it should have been possible to predict from the known illiteracy rate in France from 1840 to 1850 that the rate in 1950 would be close to 5% (5 illiterates per 100 population), as seen in the figure, where F stands for the fraction of illiterates and 1 - F for the fraction of literates.

Now from the work of Prof. Cesare Marchetti, which has often been quoted in these pages [Apr 78 and many times since], we know that the rise and fall of fuels follows a very similar law; for example, oil's rise and beginning decline is almost unaffected by such minor events as two world wars or the 1973 oil embargo, and could have been predicted fairly accurately from the data available at the turn of the century. However, unlike the case of literacy or the rabies (now spreading westward through Europe toward England, which is still free of them), we have no inkling why the curve fits for oil and all other fuels, we only know that it does.

Prof. Marchetti has recently looked into other such cases (France's history of literacy is taken from one of his papers). The output of painters, composers, and other geniuses in time, for example, follows a logistic curve, so that from their early work one can "predict" (and check the prediction from the historical data) at what age they would reach, say, 95% of their total output, and what their total output (in opus numbers, for example) would be. Applied to Mozart, the curve states that at his death he had more or less said all he had to say; had he not died at age 35 in 1791, I take it, he might have retired from music like Rossini, who wrote his last opera at age 37, and not too much other music after that, though he lived to age 76 (Marchetti does not give his curve).

But this is, after all, an energy newsletter, and what all this leads up to is the prediction for nuclear power, for which sufficient data are now available to project the logistic curve into the future from its starting point and initial slope. The data show that the penetration of nuclear power in Western Europe and Japan does indeed follow a logistic curve.

But since we do not know why the logistic curve agrees so well, we have no guarantee that the 100% value (final count of plants or total capacity) is the final value for all times; it could, for example, be the final value of the first batch, with the next batch following a fresh logistic curve.

Indeed, there is one country that shows such behavior: the USA.