ABOUT ME
Born in London, England in 1948 I grew up in the northwest of the country and was educated at Kirkham Grammar School (founded in 1549 but updated a few times since then). For undergraduate study I returned to London, to Imperial College, from where I obtained a 1st class honors degree in Mechanical Engineering and the 1968 Henrici Medal, awarded to the engineering student with the highest marks in mathematics. A year's work in industry gave me an urge to get out and see the world, so I signed up with Voluntary Service Overseas who taught me a little Spanish and sent me off to teach "Termodinamica" and related subjects at the Universidad Technologica de Pereira in Colombia.
During my two years there I decided to leave my lifetime interest in all things automotive (design, repair, racing) as a hobby and devote my career to cleaning up the environment. Among Richard Nixon's forgotten accomplishments was his signature on the Clean Water Act which stimulated much research in the area at the time, so I applied to graduate schools in the U.S.A. and was accepted by Syracuse University. Here I discovered my natural role in life as a graduate student, free (under the loose but intellectually rigorous guidance of Prof. Chi Tien) to learn new things, think new thoughts, build and test new equipement, and do a little teaching. The pay however was not good, so in 1979 I received my Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering, got married and settled down on the faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo while my wife, Jessica, a mechanic by profession, set up an automotive technology program at a community college in Rochester.
Alas it could not last and, after the collapse of my marriage, I took a job as the Principal Engineer in the Biotechnology Group at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, a fine collection of microbiologists, geneticists and biochemists working mainly on the removal of sulfur from coal and clean-up of the many waste sites around the D.O.E. labs. Inter-disciplinary research is more talked about than done, but I can attest to its benefits in broadening one's horizons. Idaho Falls proved to be a delightful town, about equidistant from Sun Valley, Yellowstone Park and Jackson Hole. Having grown up in little old England I was amazed by the vast spaces of the west, hiking all over it in the summers and learning to ski to fill in the winters. My second (and final) wife Joanne, also a Ph.D. engineer, joined me there but since neither of us had children or expensive tastes I was able to retire early while she satisfied an ambition to re-train as a Naturopathic Physician. After the necessary four years in Portand OR we settled in Spokane WA, a suitable place to practice such medicine and conveniently close to the University of Idaho in Moscow, where I was still an affilate faculty member from my days at the I.N.E.L.
Freedom of thought of a retiree is even greater than that of a graduate student and I was soon reading deeply in physics, philosophy and neuroscience, pursuing a question that had always interested me, the nature of time. Not being a physicist I was not constrained by the rule of complete objectivity and was able to construct a parallel logic system that, while not affecting the substance of physics, incorporates the limitation on its completeness that is inevitably created by the finite speed of our brains. At the heart of this new system is the hypothesis that the individual perception of the passage of time, the kind that flies when you are having fun, is the source of the arrow of time that is missing from the fundamental laws. The fact that this new system gave a new and much simpler interpretation of the puzzles of quantum mechanics came as a shock, and stimulated further thinking that continues (the Research Blog page provides an update for the interested reader).