18.2.2017
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Dear Ivor,
Many thanks for the dinner invitation which I am happy to accept along with my
wife Rochelle, but with one condition:
That I pay for our share of the costs, otherwise I might feel constrained to
agree with all that you say, and that might spoil the occasion when I might
otherwise say different things.
Please do not feel any obligation to use the label 'professor' - there are
already too many of them and 'Tony' is perfectly adequate, and I assume that it
is OK for me to address you as 'Ivor'.
As a dinner location, my first suggestion is the "Old Manor" (Wylyotts) in Potters Bar,
just near the rail station and within a short walk from our home.
Need to book in advance but they have a nice corner table for four where it is
peaceful and possible to have a good conversation and a good choice of
meals. (I have a few restrictions based on medication and so
on, supposed to keep to low fat, low cholesterol, but otherwise eat most
things, and my wife has a few different food constraints too.)
Perhaps I should mention that her background is physics and mathematics but she
knows little about matters electrical or electronic.
How would you travel from St Albans? 84 Bus, car
or inconvenient train journey?
Some background comments about myself might be interesting and maybe useful
preliminaries:
I knew Arnold Lynch quite well, and often travelled by train with him from
Potters Bar - when I was at City University in the 1980s he was a visiting
academic there - going one or two days per week between time at NPL and
UCL. We had conversations about all sorts of interesting things and
occasionally I was even able to provide him with some solutions to the puzzles
and paradoxes which he so much enjoyed. I regarded him as much
cleverer than I could ever be, but having a different background, sometimes I
could provide a distinctive and useful viewpoint.
I also have often seen Cedric, and know something about his extraordinary
electric motor achievements. By a coincidence, I passed him this morning
as I was going to get some items from Sainsbury. He probably does not
remember me now.
My wife also knew Arnold and often reminds me of a detailed conversation she
had with him on the train to London about finding cube roots by the longhand
pencil and paper method which Arnold had been taught at school (an indicator of
how much our educational system had been downgraded in this respect).
Trying to repair IET (ex IEE) is, I fear, a lost cause, although your
perception of what parts are broken may be somewhat different from
mine. I devoted some time to trying to get the IEE name back, etc.
but it did not work. In IEEE, there are risks, because some,
principally senior staff, look at what IEE achieved and are envious, wishing to
do likewise. I hope that they do not win,
at least there is a strong opposition.
Now for a few technical aspects of my background, if you have the patience to
read further:
After two years military service in REME (actually very useful as it
turned out), I went to Southampton University and received a BSc(Eng) in
electrical engineering and then to GEC Telecoms at Coventry. Until I
went into the army no one mentioned to me that it was possible to study
engineering at a university.
While I was at Southampton University a new building was constructed for a
Ferranti Pegasus, but as engineering undergraduates we were not allowed in
there, it was more like a religious shrine where only the specially selected
high priests were permitted to enter and see and touch this inscrutible
deity.
From early on, my interests were in Circuit Theory and I knew that Field Theory
was much more difficult, but not quite too difficult for me to pass the
examinations and to understand enough to confuse the power engineers by talking
about Poynting Vectors and the direction in which
energy flows. They had this mistaken idea that the energy travelled
along the high voltage wires which they strung up across the countryside, and were reluctant to believe that it travelled in
the space outside the wires - some still do not believe that.
So, even then, my roots were in Circuit Theory and I knew that I dealt with
ideal components which could not exist in the real world but
from which practically useful things could be discovered and
designed. As time went by I made what I think were some useful
contributions in the Circuit Theory world resulting in becoming an IEEE Fellow.
I also therefore understood what many even today cannot comprehend, that in the Circuit Theory of lumped ideal elements there is no
dimension of distance: even with a model of a lossless transmission line
with 100 inductors and 100 capacitors, the sending end is in the same place as
the receiving end, and the whole thing could easily sit on the point of a pin
(and leave plenty of room for all the medieval angels that religious
philosophers used to debate about). The apparent 'delay' of a step
travelling from one end to the other therefore has nothing to do with moving in
space, unlike what may happen in a real physical transmission line. It
has to be explained in a quite different way.
Moving on, in the late 1970s I became involved in teaching short courses
about microprocessors to engineers in all sorts of places, and from having been
a FORTRAN programmer using the ICT 1905 at Northampton College (by then
becoming The City University), I was teaching assembly language
programming to electrical engineers, and I realised the need to do this
differently and to use some sort of engineering-like approach from which I
became interested in Formal Methods, etc. and was teaching electrical
engineering students about axioms and theorems and pre- and post-conditions and
loop invariants, etc. - this was to the
puzzlement and incomprehension of the Computer Science Department people at the
time. By the mid 1980s I was becoming discouraged by the administrative
re-organisations going on at City University and went off to British Aerospace
Army Weapons Division for 12 months, with the naive idea of finding out how
Formal Methods might be used for Real-time Systems - since I supposed that
otherwise it would not be possible to have truly safe and reliable real-time
software.
One of the first problems presented to me at BAe was metastability. I had a hazy idea about what was
variously called the 'glitch' or Buridan's Ass, etc.
but soon I spent much time in writing simple simulation software and
encountered the wide range of opinions about whether this was a real problem or
some kind of unimportant matter which sensible people could and should
avoid. Attached is a scan of a print out from one of the first
simulations I did at British Aerospace to demonstrate metastable
transients in s flip-flop - this used an extremely simple model of each NAND
gate, just complicated enough to show the effects required. All the
coding was done in a version of Pascal that ran well on the PCs of 1988.
I returned to City University to discover that matters had become even worse,
the Vice Chancellor told me that the obligation to serve as a 'Head' for five
years if asked (a condition of being offered a chair in the first place) was a
perpetual one, and that doing it for five years had not removed the obligation
for another five years, then another five years - on an on until terminated
(for which the only alternatives were death or retirement). Indeed
this was an invariant of an iterative loop - from which I escaped by using the
forbidden (or at least discouraged) 'GOTO' and took up employment at King's
College London in the Electronic Engineering Department. I had a
decade of productive and varied activities there, and among other things had an
excellent research link and many joint projects with the Asynchronous Design
Group at Newcastle Univ - Alex Yakovlev
and David Kinniment - and with a number of EPSRC
projects. Because of my British Aerospace connection (by then having
changed its name a few times) we were involved with metastable
things, multi-way arbiters and so on. In parallel with that my
links with Dresden Technical University from the Communist era blossomed
because of the end of the Berlin Wall, bringing in the Chaos group there
(starting on my side with chaos in the overflow dynamics of digital filters).
Much followed from that, we initiated the Nonlinear Dynamics of
Electronic Systems (NDES) annual symposia going from Dresden to Krakow to Delft
to Budapest etc. which continues to travel
around the world on an appropriately chaotic path on an annual
basis.
When the wreckers moved in to reorganise engineering at King's College London I
took the opportunity to retire at the end of the 1990s, took all my research
grants and many colleagues to Kingston University, and kept this research going
quite productively for some years, while getting more and more embedded into
volunteer work in IEEE, being for a while on the Board of Directors, etc. and
Director of IEEE Region 8 (which includes interesting places like Siberia and
Iceland).
I still have quite a lot of IEEE activity although I have given up the
long--haul travel etc, and I still have good personal links with the Newcastle
people.
Regarding historical matters, some years ago I was 'persuaded' to attend a
conference organised by IEEE in Paris called HISTELCON, and not being a
historian, decided that I could present a paper about my Army experience and
how we were trained to repair Army radios and transmitters, etc. - somewhat to
my surprise, this created a lot of interest and I have been mixed up with
technology history (at an amateur level) and giving occasional talks on such
subjects ever since.
If you have reached this far, perhaps this will be a useful foundation for
whatever we talk about during our forthcoming lunch?
If it is not enough already, you could find out more about me from my
website
The question of peer review is another interesting issue: I do not doubt
at all that it acts to maintain established views, often wrong ones, and to
make it very difficult to introduce significant new ones. In
medieval times, it was, of course, the catholic church
which operated according to this principle, hence the problems of Galileo and
the like. Now one may say that it is the established physicists who may
block any suggestions that their incomprehensible subject could be faulty.
However, one can also now look back to the 'Cold Fusion' fiasco, which happened
because peer review was bypassed, combined with the greed and hope for fame of
the administrators at the University of Utah and their involvement of lawyers
(who, among other things, did not know the difference between power and
energy).
The IEE to IET transformation would have been excellent material for
Shakespeare (though I am not sure if he would have used it for a Comedy or a
Tragedy) - and failing that, Gilbert and Sullivan could have done wonders with
the story to create one more Savoy Operetta - and the locality is correct too.
Regards,
Tony Davies
2017 Feb 18th
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Anthony C Davies
Emeritus Professor, King's College London
Visiting Professor, Kingston University
IEEE Region 8 History Activities Coordination
IEEE Industry Applications Society Distinguished Lecturer 2017-2018
e-mail: tonydavies@ieee.org