January 2015

In this last address to all members of the Antennas and Propagation Society, I wish everyone a very happy and prosperous New Year. It has been a great privilege and honor to serve you as president of the society. I would like to thank all of you who have helped me in this endeavor, in particular Dr. Trevor Bird, our most recent past president, the incoming president Prof. Roberto Graglia, all AdCom members, EiCs, the various committees chairs and members, and representatives.

A special word of thanks to those AdCom members who are finishing their term: Profs. Bob Nevels, Danilo Erricolo, Lluis Jofre, Christian Pichot and Dr. Norma Riley.

We have had a new election. Let us welcome the 2015 President-elect, Prof. Mike Jensen, and the four new AdCom members: Profs. Cristophe Caloz, Karu Esselle, Mahta Moghaddam and Jamesina Simpson.

In November of this year, we had the first edition of the new AP-S conference on Antenna Applications and Measurements in Antibes, France. It was very well organized by the General Chairs, Profs. C. Pichot and K. M. Luk. The technical program organized by Prof. C. Migliacco was superb. The next edition of this conference will be held in November 2015 in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Two new awards, namely the Ulrich L. Rohde innovative paper awards, were also given out at this conference for the first time.

A second new AP-S conference on Computational Methods (IEEE-ICCEM 2015) will be held in February 2015 on the campus of Hong Kong City University organized by Profs. C. H. Chan and J. F. Lee. Hope to see you there!

Profs. Graglia, Jensen and me attended the IEEE Technical Activities Board meeting in New Brunswick earlier last month. We were delighted to see in the Division IV director’s report that out of the seven societies/council in Division IV (Antennas and Propagation Society; Broadcast Technology Society; Consumer Electronics Society; Electromagnetic Compatibility Society; Magnetics Society; Microwave Theory and Techniques Society; Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society; and Council on Superconductivity) Antennas and Propagation showed a gain of 4% in membership while the rest were having either a 0% or a negative growth. Perhaps the membership initiatives that we have started in Region 9 headed by Prof. S. Barbin, the ASEAN initiative headed by Prof. M. Krairiksh, the Region 8 initiative for East European countries headed by Prof. A Sivola and the African Initiative headed by Prof. V. Monebhurrun could be the cause of such positive membership growth!

Finally it would be interesting to draw the curtain on James Clerk Maxwell. It is important to note that many people have questioned after my first expose in this column on Maxwell that what exactly did he do except just combining all the laws that have been developed before him on electricity and magnetism. Such a statement is ironic coming from followers of Maxwell as in his hands Electricity became an exact science and this can be said of many other branches of Physics. In fact, it is not well appreciated that Maxwell can be called the greatest scientist of the last century even if he did nothing on electromagnetics. His contributions are everywhere and often we are not aware of them. To list a few:

1. It is true that G. R. Kirchoff wrote the laws related to the voltages and currents in a circuit but as Sir Ambrose Fleming pointed out the method to solve for the loop (and the node) equations for a general circuit by assuming flow of current in each wire to be the difference between two imaginary currents circulating in opposite directions in the network and then writing the solution as a ratio of two determinants was invented by him.
2. Maxwell showed how a circuit containing both capacitance and inductance would respond when connected to ac generators of different frequencies. He developed the phenomenon of electrical resonance in parallel to acoustic resonance developed by Lord Rayleigh. Maxwell developed the electrical analog when reviewing Rayleigh’s paper and wrote about it to Rayleigh. He introduced a simpler concept for the group and the phase velocities.
3. Maxwell developed a coherent set of units of measurement of electricity and magnetism. They were later adopted almost unchanged as the first internationally accepted system of units, which became known misleadingly as the Gaussian system, which is a combination of the Electrostatic units and the Electromagnetic units. He introduced the M, L, T notation in dimensional analysis.
4. He developed an experiment to measure the velocity of light from purely electrical means. He measured the speed of light by using 2,600 batteries to produce 3,000 volts. The goal was to balance the electrostatic attraction between two charged metal plates against the magnetic repulsion between two current carrying coils and built a balance arm to do this. He got a result of 288,000 km/sec as compared to the current accepted value of 299,792.5 km/sec. This was a direct application of his dimensional analysis, namely to find how many esu are there in one emu,
5. He wrote on the various ways to assess the color of the macula which in the eye is responsible for the quality of the vision. Nowadays when an ophthalmologist is checking the quality of the macula in a person’s eyes he/she is performing what is known as Maxwell’s yellow spot test.
6. He chose the three primary colors as red, green, and blue to produce white light. Today, color television works on this principle, but Maxwell’s name is rarely mentioned. However, other choices for the primary colors are equally viable.
7. A normal eye has three sorts of receptors for color. Maxwell demonstrated that in color blind people their eyes are sensitive to only two rather than to three.
8. He took the first color photograph using the same principles as is done today!
9. He developed the fish eye lens to look into the retina of the eye.
10. He also showed that radiation pressure from the sun exists, which has a force of 4 pounds per square mile.
11. He introduced and first applied a statistical law to a physical process. His discovery opened up an entirely new approach to physics, which led to statistical mechanics, and to the use of probability distributions in quantum mechanics.
12. He introduced the concept of ensemble averaging. This enabled people to explain the properties of matter in terms of the behavior, en masse, of its molecules. Thus using the method of ensemble averaging, the whole system is much easier to analyze, rather than dealing with individual components.
13. He produced a standard for electrical resistance.
14. When creating his standard for electrical resistance, he designed a governor to keep a coil spinning at a constant rate. He made the system stable by using the idea of negative feedback. He worked out the conditions of stability under various feedback arrangements. This was the first mathematical analysis of control systems. This work did not get any attention till 1940, when gun control radars were in demand during the Second World War. After the war the American mathematician Norbert Wiener took things further and developed the science of cybernetics.
15. He introduced the idea of relaxation time into physics, engineering and glaciology, by drawing on a suggestion of the Scottish physicist J. D. Forbes that a glacier behaves as a solid at times shorter than the relaxation time but like a liquid at longer times. This is related to the collision between gas molecules and replacing the concept of mean free path between collisions as a function of temperature
16. In the 1870s during two discussions he first emphasized what we now call the butterfly effect − the fact that tiny differences in initial conditions can produce huge final effects, the starting point of chaos theory.
17. Maxwell also wrote a paper on the Protection of Building from Lightning. In that paper he pointed out that most of the published writing dealt with were on the necessity of obtaining what Telegraph engineers call a good earth connection. The telegraphist uses the earth to complete his circuit, therefore it is of great importance to him; but the protection of buildings from electric discharges has a different aim and a different method.
18. He also extended the work of the English mathematician A. Cayley published in 1859. The surface of the Earth has high areas or hills and low areas with a bottom point. There are also ridges, valleys, or dales, and passes. He thought that the numbers of each of these features must be somehow related by mathematical rules. His original ideas about the Earth’s surface have now evolved into a branch of topology called global analysis.
19. Maxwell introduced Hamilton’s word RELATIVITY, in the way that physicists now understand it, in his small book Matter and Motion of 1877. He had noticed that the interpretation of electromagnetic induction was different depending on whether one considers a magnet approaching a wire loop or a loop approaching a magnet. The French mathematician, physicist and engineer J. H. Poincaré read the work; A. Einstein learned of it from Poincaré; and the rest is history.

Before concluding, I would like to request every member to take interest in the diverse committees and initiatives of the Society and to contribute to it. Please do not hesitate to contact the incoming President Prof. Graglia if you have any suggestions or ideas for the betterment of our Society. With best wishes and adieu, adiós, adéu, addio, aloha, arrivederci, auf Wiedersehen, tschüss, hejdå, totsiens, au revoir, adeus, bye, bye-bye, cheerio, cheers, ciao, farewell, good-by, good-bye, goodbye, sayonara, andio sas, shalom, so long, tot ziens, la revedere, farvel, do svidaniya, doviđenja, sbohem, żegnaj, nasvidenje, zài jiàn, joigin, annyeong, namaste, alvida, bidāẏa, ma'a as-salaam, viszlát, näkemiin, selamat jalan, sampai jumpa, …

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