The author

Sustainable Energy – without the hot air

David JC MacKay

(Figure omitted from this edition: third-party rights.)

The author, July 2008. Photo by David Stern.

About the author

David MacKay is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and then obtained his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. He returned to Cambridge as a Royal Society research fellow at Darwin College. He is internationally known for his research in machine learning, information theory, and communication systems, including the invention of Dasher, a software interface that enables efficient communication in any language with any muscle. He has taught Physics in Cambridge since 1995. Since 2005, he has devoted much of his time to public teaching about energy. He is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Climate Change.

Note added in the 2026 revision

Editor’s note (2026 revision): this section is not David MacKay’s writing. Added by Örjan Lundberg.

The biography above is the one printed in 2008, and it is left in the present tense as the book had it. It needs an ending.

Sir David John Cameron MacKay was born in Stoke-on-Trent on 22 April 1967 and died in Cambridge on 14 April 2016, eight days short of his forty-ninth birthday, of stomach cancer diagnosed the previous July. In the years between the book and his death he served as Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change from 2009 to 2014 — the job this book effectively auditioned for — and became Regius Professor of Engineering at Cambridge in 2013. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2009 and knighted in the 2016 New Year Honours, months before he died, “for services to scientific advice in government and science outreach”.

His scientific reputation did not rest on energy at all. He worked on Bayesian methods for neural networks, co-rediscovered low-density parity-check codes — which now carry a large share of the world’s digital communication — and wrote Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms, a textbook still in use. He built Dasher, a text-entry interface driven by continuous gestures, so that people who cannot use a keyboard can write at speed in any language with any muscle they can still control. He gave it away, as he gave this book away.

That last habit is the one the tributes kept returning to. He put Sustainable Energy – without the hot air online free, in full, and it reached a readership no priced edition would have found. Tom Blees, writing for the Science Council for Global Initiatives, records that the example directly persuaded him to do the same with his own book, and quotes MacKay’s motive in his own words: he wanted to write about energy options “in a neutral, human-accessible form”, because he was distressed by the “poor quality of the debate surrounding energy” and by “greenwash from politicians and big business”.1

The same eulogy records something rarer than it sounds. When Blees brought him a fast-reactor proposal for disposing of Britain’s plutonium stockpile that was being passed over in favour of a MOX solution, MacKay — then the department’s chief scientific adviser — arranged for it to be heard on its merits. Whether or not one agrees with where that led, it is the behaviour this book argues for: numbers first, then the position.

He was, by every account, a warm and generous friend. He was also right about most of this. This edition exists because being right in 2008 is not the same as being right in 2026, and he would have been the first to say so.

Sources

  1. The eulogy is linked under Sources above. It is a personal tribute by a colleague who worked with MacKay on nuclear policy and largely shares his views on it, not a neutral account, and the reactor episode is told from the proposer’s side. Biographical dates and titles are from the Wikipedia article linked above.↩︎