Alignment Beats Optimisation

A Lightomics Interlude

I began with a small, almost trivial experiment: boiling water.
Five hundred millilitres. A kettle. A microwave. A stopwatch. A calculator.

The numbers came out uncomfortably clear.
The microwave used more than twice the energy of the kettle to do the same job.
No trick. No rounding. No ideology.

And yet the conclusion was not what I expected.

Because the experiment wasn’t really about kettles, microwaves, or even heat.
It was about a deeper habit of mind: our instinct to optimise locally rather than align globally.

The microwave feels clever.
Invisible waves. Molecular excitation. Energy delivered directly into matter.
It feels like progress.

The kettle feels dull.
A resistive element. Heat by brute force. No finesse. No mystery.

And yet the kettle wins.

Why?

Because it is aligned with the task.

Optimisation is seductive — alignment is decisive

Optimisation asks:
How can I make this process more efficient within its own rules?

Alignment asks:
Are these the right rules at all?

Microwaves are optimised for selective excitation, not bulk heating.
They shine where structure matters — chemistry, materials, targeted energy deposition.
They fail where mass and continuity dominate.

A kettle does not pretend to be clever.
Electricity goes in. Heat comes out. Almost all of it ends up where it should.

There is no resonance to tune.
No wavelength to trap.
No cleverness to break.

It simply aligns electricity with heat.

The energy transition changes the question — not the answer

Once renewable electricity enters the picture, something important happens.

Efficiency stops being the sole judge.

If electricity becomes:

• Cheap
• Abundant
• Low-carbon

Then even “inefficient” electric heating beats gas on ecological terms.

This is already happening.

But here’s the crucial point:
Cheap, clean electricity does not make all electric methods equal.

Even with free energy, the hierarchy holds.

Resistive heating still beats microwaves — not on cost, but on coherence.

Why add complexity that buys nothing?

Why introduce:

• Magnetrons
• Shielding
• Control electronics
• Failure modes

…when the task is simply to make water hot?

The humble kettle as a philosophical object

Seen this way, the kettle becomes something else entirely.

It is not a stopgap.
It is not primitive.
It is not a failure of imagination.

It is a statement:

When the environment is aligned, simplicity outperforms ingenuity.

This is uncomfortable in a culture trained to worship cleverness.

We expect the future to be more complex, more tuned, more optimised.
But physics keeps offering the same quiet correction:

The shortest path between energy and outcome is often the best one.

Alignment is temporal, not technical

There is another layer here — a Lightomics layer.

Gas boilers are optimised marvels.
Decades of refinement. Heat exchangers. Condensing systems. Control logic.

But they are misaligned with time.

They cannot improve as the grid improves.
They cannot decarbonise by waiting.
They are locked to yesterday’s fuel.

Electric resistance heating, by contrast, improves without changing at all.
Every wind turbine, every solar farm, every grid upgrade makes it cleaner.

Nothing about the kettle needs to evolve — only the context around it.

That is alignment.

The lesson hidden in boiling water

The experiment did not reveal a new technology.
It revealed a pattern.

Optimisation asks:
How can I squeeze more performance out of this idea?

Alignment asks:
Is this idea facing the right direction?

The future belongs less to the most optimised systems
and more to the ones that sit quietly in the stream of change and let it carry them forward.

Sometimes the future looks like a heat pump.
Sometimes it looks like a grid.

And sometimes — unfashionably, unromantically —
it looks like a kettle.