Quasars and how I ended with them...

[James D]

Max asked me to give an account of how I arrved at the Quasars - its a long and rambling road but here is the start of it...

Some background.

I started with valves at 8 years old - really. Dad would come home from work and find I had the radiogram apart, or the radio apart with bits all over the floor and me poking about inside... and then putting it back together and fidling with it to get it to work... No amount of him telling me off would stop me doing this for long and after a couple of brush by shocks he realised I needed proper instruction before I killed myself or worse

One evening Dad took me to round to an old chap he knew who had homebuilt Radios and amplifiers and even a TV!!! Heaven! He was a retired electronics engineer and a radioham and audio enthusiast. Dad asked him to look after me for a couple of hours and he took me into his workshop and sat me down whilst he was making an amplifier and he just started asking me questions about various things and showing me how things went together... My eyes were popping out of my head - I was in heaven surrounded by so many bits of kit with knobs and dials on - some with displays as well and hundreds of valves... Well by the end of the evening I had done my first soldering and after about the first 30 minutes not stopped asking questions about how things worked and what each bit did. When Dad return I dragged him into the workshop and spent the next 10 mintes telling him everything I had seen and learnt with a sort of maniacal glow coming from me (apparently!) I didn't realise at the time but I passed the test to see if I was really interested in learning this elec-trickery stuff and so the rest is history... I learned how to design and build amplifiers and radios and televisions and along the way loudspeakers. By the time I went to university I was building 400W valve amplifiers for the local disco and the speaker sets to go with them (18" Guass bass unit and twin Tannoy 10" drivers)... Happy days alright but I think my output trannie designs could have been better

On a more sensible scale I was building EL84 PP amps but triode mode and no feedback. My mentor, Dennis, didn't like global feedback in audio amps. Thought the Williamson had not enough stability margin on real world loads and thought that ultralinear was awful as the worst of both worlds not the best... but the thing he taught me that I value most was to listen over an extended period and believe my ears not the test kit Not bad advice from someone with a forty year career as an engineer...

SO the point of this is that by 17 I had designed and built a real hifi system for myself that was musically very satisfying. Oh the speakers... I'm afraid they were 10" Tannoys in a corner box that was half BR and half horn and what furustrated me was that I had good bass from the Tannoys in the box but it wasn't as dynamic and free sonding as the Tannoys on an open baffle - but I couldn't fit the OBs in my room... (The OBs were 4 feet by 5 feet in size...)... But I loved the sound of that system and thought it was better than my Dads - Some Leak amplifier and a big pair of Whardale speakers (Airdales or was that later???)

----more to follow - it is relevant honest

[andrew ivimey]

we believe you James!

[IslandPink]

In the beginning there was a very small point of almost infinite energy , but it was uneven on the scale of 10e-33 cm or so , then it began to expand , cooling as it did ,
etc etc ...

MJ

[Max N]

Great stuff James, keep it coming :-)

[NickG]

Mark. how can something be "almost infinite", isn't that the same value as almost zero?

[Andrew]

Originally Posted by IslandPink

In the beginning there was a very small point of almost infinite energy , but it was uneven on the scale of 10e-33 cm or so , then it began to expand , cooling as it did ,
etc etc ...

MJ

Chee-key

[IslandPink]

Nick ,

I should have had a book to hand for more detail - perhaps 'The first three minutes' was it by mathematician Steve Kaufmann ? That would be the proper into to James's story .

Mark

[NickG]

As you say a proper intro to just about everything :-)

Who was the author, Steve or was it Andy :-)

[James D]

It was Steven Wienberg...

I must admit I preferred "The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime" by Hawking and was somewhat dissappointed when he described that book as unreadable in the intro to "A Brief history of Spacetime" as I had just spent two years reading the damn thing But then I majored in General Relativity and Cosmology for two years at Uni so I was expected to read it...

I found the Weinberg book unsatisfying as he really scoots around the good stuff which makes his book bland - and it is out of date nowadays too... oh well - Physics has yet to rediscover its golden age and hark back to the past... instead its onwards ever onwards...

Maybe I should start again - mu oldest is studying evolutionary palentology so I could do the physica stuff up to the establishment of the planets and moon and then I could get him to do the development of life and dinosaurs and so on to modern man and and early civilisations and I could pick it up again with the Greeks and the Romans and ampitheatre design (to bring audio into it) and so on up to where I got to think about the Quasars

What do you think? Should I?

James

[IslandPink]

Carry on where you left off James , that'll be fine !!

( It certainly wasn't Andy Kaufmann , Nick, I know that much )

MJ