About me

 

I studied physics at Imperial College, London in the 1980s when, as usual, so much was going in science & technology. My brother had bought me a copy of Douglas Hofstadter’s seminal Gödel, Escher, Bach: a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll which made much of implicit meanings in codes, and I took, for fun, a course unit in molecular biophysics and learned about structural biology including the photoreceptor protein rhodopsin – a fascinating micro-machine.

But I’d been grabbed by some of the amazing optical technology at the college, and left to build fibre-optic gyroscopes - rotation is absolute! (versus linear motion) - at the famous STL laboratory in Harlow where fibre optic transmission was first proposed by Kao and Hockham. I’ve had a fascinating time in science, technology and business and been involved in many exciting new industries in materials science, electro-optics and energy over the last 30 years, with wonderful periods for me and the family in France and upstate New York. I founded the world’s highest temperature gas-turbine instrumentation company, Oxsensis Ltd, which is enabling the future of clean aero-engines up to and including hydrogen combustion.

Music has been a constant companion with love of piano, classical guitar, folk-music and singing, choral and small consort, and I got bitten by composition in 2010 when I couldn’t persuade composer friends to try their hands at a draft libretto for a Darwin cantata. But how hard could it be? Very! Composition is 90% problem solving, not so different from product innovation. I was lucky to have patient, knowledgeable friends /mentors who gave invaluable feedback. My projects are very focused and I’m in awe of the skills of professionals which I’ve come to appreciate very deeply.

I’ve an abiding interest in how things work, including at the largest scales of the economy and the physical universe. I’d become interested in demographics from working with Japanese colleagues in the 1980s, and a very good friend who was the only professional woman in the company. I made my first projection of the downward world population trend over 20 years ago: shock! See the AMitE pages. How this led to me relaxing the time constraints on a practical method of making contact with extra-terrestrial intelligences may not be obvious, but from my engineering, problem-solving background I claim that it’s a logical response. I hope you’ll enjoy the music and the articles.

Sapphire / fibre-optic pressure sensor operating at 1200deg C