Ivor, About your remark: "...present urge to erase any achievements
by white heterosexual males from history,..." [https://www.ivorcatt.org/icr-ew47boole.pdf
] This does touch on a 'reality' of what is being encouraged today. There is no doubt that the achievements of those who do come in the
category of "white heterosexual males" are now often being
underrated or not spoken about, because of a wish to give prominence to those
in other categories whose ideas and achievements were either not recognised or
deliberately suppressed. In some cases the present approaches do bring
reasonable recognition more widely to those who really deserve it, but they
also bring risk of absurdities. I recall that quite a long time ago, there was an assertion being
promoted that had Isaac Newton been female instead of male, then Newton's
Laws would have been quite different. That made no sense to me at the
time and still does not make sense. Newton's Laws are a good
description of the dynamic behaviour of objects which are of a size and
motion which we typically encounter in day to
day life. In the atomic and subatomic world and in distant places in the
solar system, corrections are needed. So what could have
been different about the laws if it had been Mrs Newton who observed the
apple falling to the ground? Of course
this could be a good framework for a comedian giving a talk to conventional
scientists and engineers. The comedian might, for example, suggest that
the Isaac Newton was up in the apple tree picking apples, and picked a
particularly large and heavy one, and threw it at Mrs Newton because she was
just sitting sunbathing instead of collecting up the apples which he was
picking - but his aim was very bad and he missed her and the apple just hit
the lawn and stayed there - which led Mrs Newton to explain that by inventing
Newton's Laws - but of course that has nothing to do with the more
elusive concept of truth. As it happens, for all sorts of varying and curious reasons, I have
dabbled with random and pseudorandom numbers and sequences on and off for
most of my career, which inevitably brought me
into contact with what used to be called 'abstract algebra'.
However, I had no idea at all until quite recently that almost all of this
material has its origins in mathematics devised/invented by Emile Noether, who was a female German mathematician, living
from late 1880s until 1935. All the material about Rings and Fields in
algebra came from her. I think she has only recently received the
recognition generally among mathematicians for her extraordinary life and
achievements, and the problems which she faced doing mathematics in a
male-dominated environment. Political Correctness goes through bursts of extreme nonsense, and we
seem to be in the midst of one of those now. Some years ago I recall being at a university staff meeting when we
had to listen to a visitor advising us about racism and various other
prejudices. We were told that minorities were incapable of racism, by
'definition', it always arose only in the majority groups who were always
racists. I enquired about the Afrikaans in South Africa, since
this was in the days of rigid Apartheid. They were a minority but
according to this 'theory' they could not be racists although many were, and
since the black South Africans were the majority then according to this
'theory' they had to be racists - while most people objected to that idea and
considered that they were not. So care is needed, and that rarity,
common sense, needs to be preserved and conserved I
also recall a short time when speaking of 'white coffee' and 'black coffee'
was forbidden because it was considered 'racist'. As you may know, IEEE installs History Milestone Plaques made of
bronze in various places to recognise achievements or inventions. There
is strong pressure to try to avoid having the name of the person responsible
in the citation if possible - but recently I observe that is ONLY in the case
that the person is male - if female, then including the name appears to be
strongly encouraged by present policy. As far as the place of publication is concerned, it is necessary to
allow for changes in publications with time. When I was still at secondary school, Wireless World was considered
quite an advanced and highly respectable publication - much of the content
being rather beyond my understanding at the time, although I did try hard to
read it when I got the chance. Over time, the status of Wireless World
reduced until now what is left is more or less just a trade and advertising
magazine, and so a very unlikely place to publish novel serious research
results. Academics of a certain kind will always want their ideas to be
written up in as inscrutable way as possible, because they imagine that will
enhance their reputation. Short, easy to understand items, however
important and novel, are typically regarded by the ignorant as of small or
zero value. I have never been of that opinion, although I also have
felt that a nice elegant mathematically based justification of something, if
understandable, can be of high value, and something its creator can be proud
of. Rgds Tony Davies 2020 Feb 26th On 21/02/2020 11:37, Ivor Catt wrote: This anti-social article could not be published today, only 16 years
later. Society has progressed rapidly. Ivor Catt https://www.ivorcatt.org/icr-ew47boole.pdf
"However, even without the present urge to erase any achievements by
white heterosexual males from history, .... " -- Anthony C Davies Emeritus
Professor, King's College London IEEE Region 8
History Activities Coordination IEEE Industry
Applications Society Distinguished Lecturer 2017-2018 e-mail: tonydavies@ieee.org
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Parasites do not understand the true purpose of the
organism they invade, and in the end destroy. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/tonyglitch.htm
Ivor (et al), Noting that in one of your many e-mails I have been promoted to the category
of 'parasite' (is that an honour and a privilege ?), and seeing your remarks
about the 'take over' of science by mathematicians who, in your view, have
brought science to a standstill, not to be resolved for another half century
or so, I have many remarks that I could make, and will try to restrict myself
to just a few: 1. Geometry was put on an axiomatic basis by the Greeks, and
seems to have been a very successful development. But it involved
'unreal' objects - such as a point and a line with idealised properties, so
was only an 'approximation' to the real world, yet an exceptionally good and
useful one. 2. Hilbert, among his well
known large set of 23 (?) difficult mathematical problems, included
as his 6th problem, the 'axiomatisation of physics'. However he then seems to have stepped away from that by
interpreting it as meaning only the axiomatsation
of probability, etc. If physics means observation of the world around
us and trying to explain what we observe, that will never take us to any kind
of 'truth' or 'certainty' - we can only say that the evidence 'suggests ...',
and further observations can only either support (but not prove) it or
invalidate it, and in the latter case, we make some other hypothesis.
Despite that, huge progress has been made, but 'corrections' are
regularly needed. The idea that the earth is flat gave way to the idea
that it is a sphere, the idea that it is at the centre of the cosmos gave way
to the idea that it revolves around the sun ...etc. until we now conclude
that the sun is just one of huge numbers of suns in our galaxy, and our
galaxy is just one of vast numbers of galaxies. Now we can make
convincing observations of exoplanets - e.g. planets around 'suns' far away
in our galaxy, and we can make reasonable deductions about the nature of
these exoplanets and the materials of which they are made, etc. If
doing all this is compatible with the 'end of science' ,
what do you call this activity? Just applied engineering and
technology? Hilbert's challenge was, as far as I understand, undermined by Goedel, who showed that there were some true statements
that could not be proved to be true. 3. There was a time when I and others (1980s and 1990s) hoped
that software design might be built on an axiomatic basis, with an ability to
formally prove the correctness of software - and in this context you have
referred favourably to Edgar Dijkstra - however, although that did lead to
some small achievements in safety-critical software for military and
aerospace applications, it had no real impact on the vast and complex sofware systems (e.g. from Microsoft, Apple, etc) on
which our welfare now depends, and for which there is no prospect of proving
any kind of correctness in a formal sense. 4. Now about the 'glitch' for which you seem to imply there has
been a conspiracy to block publications about it and this is an example of
the problems you claim to address. It happens that I can say some
things about that from first hand experience and I
believe that completely disproves your assertions. I dimly remember
reading your brief letter about the 'glitch' in an IEEE Computer journal in
1966?) - and I am sure that I did not understand it then. However, in
1987 when I went to British Aerospace Army Weapons Division, investigation of
the 'glitch' (e.g. metastability in flip flops) was about the first thing
that I was asked to look into, and after some work on that I also realised
that the same problem applied to multiprocessor arbiters. I can say
that among the skilled electronic engineers at BAe involved in designing
control systems for real missiles, many did not believe metastablity
was a problem in real systems and others believed (wrongly) that there were
design-tricks they could use to get rid of it. One example was belief
that by having hysteresis built into the front end of analog-to
digital data capture systems the glitch could not happen. I was able to
easily disprove that. The view developed that by careful design the
probability of error from the glitch could be made so small that it was
negligible compared to other unlikely causes of failure which could not be
eliminated, therefore no need to worry about the glitch. Since it would
always be unrepeatable in testing, it would never be possible to do more than
speculate that a failure had been caused by 'glitch' and so no need to do
more than ensure it was very low probability. Much more probable
explanations are usually available for aerospace disasters. So there was no active suppression of information either in the company
nor in the world of publications. After I left BAe, things related to metastabilty were a significant part of research in which
I was involved (at King's College London and later at Kingston
University: this was well supported financially by the research
councils and with some ongoing support from BAe, and provided funding for
hiring researchers and travelling to conferences etc. etc. and was how I came
into contact with the Newcastle people. This shows that for this subject there was never any discouragement to
publishing or working on the subject, and in the general area of non-linear
dynamics in electronics, it was a continuing and popular topic for papers
submitted and published, etc. So no
'conspiracy' to prevent this, quite the opposite. I had read some parts of the 'book' by David Kinniment
- so I was glad that you supplied the link to it which meant that I could
download and read it all. Although very general, it gives a very good
overall long-term view of this subject, but stops short of going on into the
implications for the design of real-time multiprocessor control systems
etc. However, I see no sign of your claims that the 'scientific
establishment' is trying to block publication in this area. There may
be plagiarism, there may be burying of simple concepts in obscure
mathematics, and so on, but that is not the same as your accusations. 5. A few of the contributors to all of these e-mail interactions seem to imply that the discussion is
really about seeking 'truth' and some relate that to 'religion'. While
some people do appear to need some kind of religion as a form of 'support' in
their lives, It is, in my view, very dangerous to
bring either religion or seeking absolute truth into engineering and
technology. My opinion is that it should be kept well away from scientific
research as well, and that the nearest we can come to 'truth' is in things
which appear to have been correctly and believably proven in mathematics.
Newton gave us some 'laws of motion' which were for a long time believed to
be exactly and universally true - but more careful investigation of a few phenomena which failed to fit led to the need for
Einstein's adjustments which have been validated as a necessary improvement,
by explaining the orbit of mercury, enabling our satnavs to work much better
than would otherwise be the case, and to underpin the extraordinary orbits of
man-made satellites making journeys around the solar system and now even beginning
to be beyond that (as with the two Pioneer spacecraft). None of that
would be possible if we had only Newton's laws and believed them to be exact
reality. Rgds Tony Davies 2020 Feb 26th Prof Anthony C
Davies Emeritus
Professor, King's College London IEEE R8 History
Activities coordination IEEE Industry Applications Society Distinguished Lecturer 2017-2018 e-mail: tonydavies@ieee.org web: www.tonydavies.org.uk On Sunday, 16 February 2020, 20:22:56 GMT, Ivor Catt <ivorcatt@gmail.com>
wrote: Alex, http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/yak.htm Next, in the same
2013, by sheer coincidence I exchanged emails with Mr Ivor Catt about the
late Professor David Kinniment, my colleague
and mentor of many years, who studied an interesting and challenging
phenomenon called metastability (connected to the philosophical problem of
choice and the story of Buridan's ass) [4,5] in digital
circuits during his 45-year academic career. From David Kinniment http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x8bkinn.pdf I
had known that Ivor Catt
was one of the early discoverers of this phenomenon, which he called The
Glitch [6].
http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x84gglitch.pdf ; http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x1bn.pdf ; http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x5a6.htm . It is shocking that I never told you about the play on the Glitch. (Or
did I tell you?) http://midsomermurders.org/theglitch2.htm http://midsomermurders.org/theglitch.htm Chris Penfold put an enormous amount of effort into it. The whole two
hours was somewhere on youtube, and I've lost it
again. Your mentor, the late Kinniment, wrote the book about it. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/DJKinniment-He-Who-Hesitates-is-Lost.pdf http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x5a6.htm
; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x1bn.pdf I suggest the 737 fiasco is not due to the Glitch, although apparently
it has five computers. Ivor
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