Author Archives: Eann Patterson

Nudging discoveries along the innovation path

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Decorative photograph of a Welsh hillThe path from a discovery to a successful innovation is often tortuous and many good ideas fall by the wayside.  I have periodically reported on progress along the path for our novel technique for extracting feature vectors from maps of strain data [see ‘Recognizing strain‘ on October 28th, 2015] and its application to validating models of structures by comparing predicted and measured data [see ‘Million to one‘ on November 21st, 2018], and to tracking damage in composite materials [see ‘Spatio-temporal damage maps‘ on May 6th, 2020] as well as in metallic aircraft structures [see ‘Out of the valley of death into a hype cycle‘ on February 24th 2021].  As industrial case studies, we have deployed the technology for validation of predictions of structural behaviour of a prototype aircraft cockpit [see ‘The blind leading the blind‘ on May 27th, 2020] as part of the MOTIVATE project and for damage detection during a wing test as part of the DIMES project.  As a result of the experience gained in these case studies, we recently published an enhanced version of our technique for extracting feature vectors that allows us to handle data from irregularly shaped objects or data sets with gaps in them [Christian et al, 2021].  Now, as part of the Smarter Testing project [see ‘Jigsaw puzzling without a picture‘ on October 27th, 2021] and in collaboration with Dassault Systemes, we have developed a web-based widget that implements the enhanced technique for extracting feature vectors and compares datasets from computational models and physical models.  The THEON web-based widget is available together with a video demonstration of its use and a user manual.  We supplied some exemplar datasets based on our work in structural mechanics as supplementary material associated with our publication; however, it is applicable across a wide range of fields including earth sciences, as we demonstrated in our recent work on El Niño events [see ‘From strain measurements to assessing El Niño events‘ on March 17th, 2021].  We feel that we have taken some significant steps along the innovation path which will lead to adoption of our technique by a wider community; but only time will tell whether this technology survives or falls by the wayside despite our efforts to keep it on track.

Bibliography

Christian WJR, Dvurecenska K, Amjad K, Pierce J, Przybyla C & Patterson EA, Real-time quantification of damage in structural materials during mechanical testing, Royal Society Open Science, 7:191407, 2020.

Christian WJ, Dean AD, Dvurecenska K, Middleton CA, Patterson EA. Comparing full-field data from structural components with complicated geometries. Royal Society open science. 8(9):210916, 2021

Dvurecenska K, Graham S, Patelli E & Patterson EA, A probabilistic metric for the validation of computational models, Royal Society Open Science, 5:1180687, 2018.

Middleton CA, Weihrauch M, Christian WJR, Greene RJ & Patterson EA, Detection and tracking of cracks based on thermoelastic stress analysis, R. Soc. Open Sci. 7:200823, 2020.

Wang W, Mottershead JE, Patki A, Patterson EA, Construction of shape features for the representation of full-field displacement/strain data, Applied Mechanics and Materials, 24-25:365-370, 2010.

The world is not our oyster

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We think it is all about us. The world is our oyster. We developed the current global economic structure in which the costs of environmental damage, labour exploitation, and socio-political disruption are ignored, or perhaps even celebrated, as the price of doing business. Our philosophy stumbles over the word ‘equal’ because it maintains that we have dominion over all that is nature. We struggle to imagine that others might know something we don’t, or that fish and trees have languages of their own. If such understanding was possible for us, life on earth would not becoming to an end.

The words are mine but I have borrowed very heavily from Geetanjali Shree in ‘The Tomb of Sand‘ for the first two and last two sentences. She is describing white people and the West. Also from Chandran Nair in ‘Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a post-Western World‘ in the third sentence and from Suzanne Simard in ‘Finding the Mother Tree‘.

Sources:

Chandran Nair, Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a post-Western World, Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc, 2022

Geetanjali Shree, The Tomb of Sand, Tilted Axis Press, 2021.

Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree, Penguin, 2021.

 

Change in focus

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Decorative image of a painting by Sarah Evans The new academic year is well and truly underway.  It was 2019 when we last welcomed students to campus in person for the start of the academic year.  In my role as Dean, I have been touring lecture theatres trying to speak to and welcome students in all of our taught programmes in the School of Engineering.  It is exciting to see packed lecture theatres full of students eager to listen and learn.  For the first time in a decade, I am not teaching this year so that I can focus on other activities.  I have mixed feelings about giving up teaching.  I taught my first class thirty-six years ago in Mechanics of Solids.  For the last eleven years I have been teaching Thermodynamics to first year students [see, for example ‘From nozzles and diffusers to stars and stripes‘ on March 30th, 2022].  So, teaching has been a substantial part of my working life and its absence will leave a large hole.  I will miss the excitement of standing in front of a class of hundreds of students as well as the rewards of interacting with undergraduate students who are encountering and engaging with a new subject.  One consequence of my change in focus is likely to be a decline in the frequency of blog posts featuring thermodynamics [you can read them all under ‘Thermodynamics’ in Categories], but perhaps that will be a relief to many readers.

Image: Painting by Sarah Evans owned by the author.

Are we in a simulation?

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Decorative photograph of trains at terminusThe concept of digital twins is gaining acceptance and our ability to generate them is advancing [see ‘Digital twins that thrive in the real-world’ on June 9th, 2021].  It is conceivable that we will be able to simulate many real-world systems in the not-too-distant future.  Perhaps not in my life-time but possibly in this century we will be able to connect these simulations together to create a computer-generated world.  This raises the possibility that other forms of life might have already reached this stage of technology development and that we are living in one of their simulations.  We cannot know for certain that we are not in a simulation but equally we cannot know for certain that we are in a simulation.  If some other life form had reached the stage of being able to simulate the universe then there is a possibility that they would do it for entertainment, so we might exist inside the equivalent of a teenager’s smart phone, or for scientific exploration in which case we might be inside one of thousands of simulations being performed simultaneously in a lab computer to gather statistical evidence on the development of universes.  It seems probable that there would be many more simulations performed for scientific research than for entertainment, so if we are in a simulation then it is more likely that the creator of the simulation is a scientist who is uninterested in this particular one in which we exist.  Of course, an alternative scenario is that humans become extinct before reaching the stage of being able to simulate the world or the universe.  If extinction occurs as a result of our inability to manage the technological advances, which would allow us to simulate the world, then it seems less likely that other life forms would have avoided this fate and so the probability that we are in a simulation should be reduced.  You could also question whether other life forms would have the same motivations or desires to create computer simulations of evolutionary history.  There are lots of reasons for doubting that we are in a computer simulation but it does not seem possible to be certain about it.

David J Chalmers explains the probability that we are in a simulation much more elegantly and comprehensively than me in his book Reality+; virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy, published by Penguin in 2022.