I was pickled in Star Trek juices and fermented with the spices of the NASA’s Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space missions when I was a kid. The pin-up poster on my wall was of Ed White in his first spacewalk.
The simultaneous excitement of the fictional view of space travel in Star Trek and the engineering feats of the real space program caught me in its web and infused me with a love of science and engineering.
I went to MIT as an undergraduate in course VIII, physics, from 1972 to 1976. I studied experimental physics, black holes, relativity and astrophysics from the world’s experts.
I then went to the University of Arizona in Tucson and studied lasers, quantum optics and cosmology. My PhD dissertation was “Three New High Precision Tests a Relativity and Mach’s Principle.” It brought together my three loves: experimental physics, relativity and cosmology, interests that have never left me.
I learned along the way the power of understanding a few essential principles, applying them the right way to the physical world and how to design, construct and perform experiments to test my understanding.
Through teaching Arduino workshops at TinkerMill in Longmont, CO, as an adjunct professor at University of Colorado, Boulder, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in electrical engineering, and lecturing around the world for Teledyne LeCroy about scopes and best measurement practices, I have come to appreciate the power of hands-on understanding.
I don’t think it is correct to say we learn by doing. As Confucius is quoted as saying, I think we understand by doing.
We learn by studying, listening to lectures, reading books, articles, blogs and papers. We really learn by actively studying- converting to muscle memory what we read or hear by writing down the important points.
But we really don’t understand until we do: we apply the principles we learn to solving problems, or we build something, measure something, think about we expect to see, tweak some knobs and compare our expectations to reality. This is how we exercise what we have learned and convert it into understanding.
This process of practicing anticipating what we expect to see before we do a measurement or simulation, is such an important process for any engineer or scientist, I have added it to my list of rules. It is rule #9:
“Never do a measurement or simulation before you have anticipated what you expect to see.”
By continually testing our understanding, we accelerate up the learning curve.
Over the years, I’ve random walked through a range of activities, dabbling in marketing, as Chief Technology Officer and VP of research and development in small companies, as an entrepreneurship starting and growing two successful companies which were later sold, writing seven textbooks and two science fiction novels, being a columnist for five different journals and technical editor of one, and teaching at the college and graduate level in various universities.
For the past ten years, I’ve been involved in the maker community, evangelizing the power of low-cost electronics to explore science related projects any one can do in their garage, basement or bedroom, on a personal budget.
The low-cost electronics revolution has grown to where it is today, enabling anyone with the right skills and information to explore science on their own. They just need the right guidance, the manual to get started, instead of having to re-invent the wheel each time.
This web site is the missing manual to launch yourself into the exciting world of low-cost electronics and science to explore the world around us.
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