scientists as superstars

I do much the same - ask them to describe in great detail how something they designed works. They can choose any system they worked on.

The highlight was a young fellow who claimed to have worked on some school project that involved a computer and mechanical motion. (This was before robots were the craze.) He claimed that if one sent the motion commands to the PROM, there would be motion, even after I questioned that step.

Hmm. He knew enough detail that someone from the team must have briefed him, but he was clearly not directly involved. And PROM was just a word to him.

Right. I'd get blank looks, but they were afraid to argue.

We have much the same in the US. I'd have used a larger hammer, though. Or a 16 oz framing hammer swung with conviction.

Now days, they just use a pneumatic nail driver and a perforated metal nail plate. Probably the same in the UK as well.

Joe Gwinn

Sir (William) Lawrence? (I was going to be an X-ray crystallographer until I realized 2 things. There weren't very many jobs and I never had a good mental model for reciprocal space.)

There are lots of MIT folk that would not know much about such things, and should not be trusted alone with a soldering iron, but can explain EM Field Theory in every detail.

Anyway, my favorite story is when I was interviewing June grads for EE jobs, many moons ago. I was talking to one of these EE June Grads, and was getting nowhere with technical stuff. This went on for 10-15 minutes, and then I had an evil thought: I asked him about Ohms Law

-- and drew a blank. And a glare.

Turns out he was a football player, and probably spent most of his time on the field in practice.

Anyway, I passed on him, as it would have done him no favors to hire him as an EE. He didn't know enough to survive his first assignment.

Joe Gwinn

William Henry and Lawrence were the forebears.

e:

ote:

A curious resonance. My interview for the first job I got after I'd finishe d my Ph.D. included the question "how does a Xerox machine work".

I told them - selenium coated drum, coroana charged, exposed to optical ima ge, no charge left in illuminated areas, while the charged areas pick up pl astic coated carbon black dust from an air bath, which is then squeezed off onto paper, and fixed by warming the paper enough to melt the plastic.

The response was "you've got the job" which wasn't entirely serious, though I did. I spent most of my time working on unconventional high speed printe rs for a military digital fax system - part of Project Mallard, which was g oing to be a joint US,UK, Canadian and Australian digital communications ne twork for their military forces, until the US defence contractors found out about it and realised that it would give some of their market to UK, Canad ian and Australian manufacturers, prompting them to get their US congressme n to kill it.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney 
>  
> I made my bed, and I'm happy lying in it. 
>  
>  
> > Yeah they're are a lot of newly-minted EEs that can't design circuits o 
r know  
> > what a transistor is but they'll get hired. some geek off the street wh 
o can do  
> > it is not intrinsically exciting to anyone there. Not been my experienc 
e so far,  
> > at least... 
>  
> If they can't design /and/ can't analyse, then it 
> is difficult for me to regard them as engineers. 
> But there's nothing intrinsically wrong with being 
> a project manager or salesman, provided the engineer 
> is top dog ;)

til I

mental

William Henry was professor of Physics in Adelaide (south Australia) around the time my parents were born there. I ran into Lawrence once at the Royal Institution when I was postdoc at Southampton. He knew enough to know that single photon counting was a good thing, but was less clear on why it was

- he'd got into an argument with a phase sensitive detection enthusiast, an d I expressed the opinion that they were both over-simplifying what was goi ng on. By that time it was clear that I wasn't going to have an academic ca reer, so it didn't matter.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Another victim of fame.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

Science teaches us to doubt. 

  Claude Bernard

Like Marie Sklowdowska, who got a Nobel prize, and was so distracted by that fame, and raising small chidren, and her husband's untimely death, that she didn't get another Nobel prize for eight years.

Fame doesn't usually make victims. Fatuous articles on Breitbart are really scary.

I was an undergrad there 75-78.

On the 40th anniversary of our graduation I met some friends there on the open day, and toured the Electronics and Computer Science building.

They still have the old ethos: great mixture of theory and practical, with students allowed to use the equipment for their home projects. The main difference was that the projects I saw were done in groups of four students, which enables more complex projects to be tackled but has the problem of teamwork and weaker members.

Is it less scary when NPR reports it?

I suppose talk shows, $40K speeches at obscure conventions, and book advances are next. Maybe a new girlfriend, like Algore.

Well, he wasn't much of a scientist. Maybe he'll be a better entertainer. The pay is sure better.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

Science teaches us to doubt. 

  Claude Bernard

Me too. With my new astronomy and physics bachelor's degree, and a hobby background in electronics. I got hired to do 2/3 of the timing and frequency control electronics for the first civilian direct-broadcast satellite system. I'd heard of PLLs but had never actually come across one to know what it was. Talk about drinking from a fire hose.

The times I've made the most progress in my life are the times I jumped off a cliff--that satcom job, getting married, going off to grad school in another country with a family to support, yada yada.

It's been a good ride so far. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com

I've been influenced by Frank Herbert's ?And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning 'That path leads ever down into stagnation.?

After a few years in my first job the company was sold and my (very small) division disbanded. I had a choice: - stay on the site in a very humdrum jub - intolerable travel to another site, to an unknowable job

I decided on the "intolerable" option, that /required/ I make a choice. If the job was good I would would move there. If merely OK, then I would move somewhere else.

It was OK-ish, so I moved elsewhere, with an excellent outcome. Yes, I was lucky, but I actively searched for that luck!

My first job involved that newfangled digital logic; easy.

It also involved creating a test set for the newfangled multimode optical fibres that were just being installed between exchanges. My knowledge: zero.

I ended up with a receiver with 180dB electrical (90dB optical) dynamic range, using a large photodiode (BPW34) and a LF351 based transimpedance amp. To recover the signal I decided I couldn't predict how a PLL would work in a range switched design, so I made a filter with a Q of 4000 using 10% components. The noise equivalent power was 1pW.

I've always wanted to revisit that N-path filter for RF work, since it has interesting properties. When I finally looked, I found the Tayloe mixer had been patented, dammit.

I was lucky to get a college-freshman job with a company that had no coherent business plan or marketing. They would take an order for anything and assume the engineers could do it. Learned a lot.

They paid me $400 a month, which was a fortune in New Orleans back then.

Good ride indeed. Electronics is universal and gets us into all sorts on interesting situations.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

Science teaches us to doubt. 

  Claude Bernard

Beg to differ. Early integrated logic chips (RTL, DTL, weird stuff, TTL) were horrible.

It is annoying to invent things, and have someone else patent them and get rich.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

Science teaches us to doubt. 

  Claude Bernard

I often use TIAs with two outputs, one low and one high gain. One approach is to hang an op amp on each end of the PD, and clamp the high-gain one so it doesn't lose control of its summing junction at large signals. You can apply bias between the + inputs of the op amps and let feedback force that across the PD. Needs a diff amp on one side, of course.

The Tayloe thing was actually published by Ed Oxner of Siliconix some years earlier, so don't feel so bad. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com

Agree, but the early plastic DIPs failed a lot.

I invented the dual-slope ADC when I was a kid, but I figured that relay bounce would make it inaccurate. Relays were the only analog switches I could imagine then.

I also invented the successive log RF detector, but my boss thought it was useless.

In about 25 years of ttl, I have not had any chip failure. ( Lab equipment, computer interfaces, experiment controls, etc.) Computers with ttl abandoned, but never failed.

Well, spark gaps might have worked. ;)

Successive-detection DLVAs are cool. It's fun explaining the idea to a bright youngster--you can see the light go on.

I invented the modulation-generated carrier approach to phase-sensitive interferometry a couple of years after somebody else published it. You FM a diode laser with a modulation index of 2.405 where the carrier disappears, and detect Q at f_mod and I at 2f_mod. The J1 and J2 terms are the same strength (or very nearly) and together account for about

85% of the signal power. Very pretty for things with unstable phases such as fibre interferometers, for instance.

My fanciest PLL to date was from 1982--it controlled a VCXO by using a fractional-N synth made out of a regular dual-modulus prescaler, two synchronously cascaded 74S161 decade counters, and two decades of 4527 rate multipliers twiddling the carry input of the bottom counter.

It made a fair amount of jitter, of course, but it was all well outside the loop bandwidth and so it all worked fine. Increasing the comparison frequency from 9.09 kHz to 909 kHz improved the phase noise on the 14 GHz output a fair amount.

(When I started that job I had no idea how demanding some communications applications can be.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com