On Cybernetics

I went down on the fire-escape staircase of my office to the nearest smoking zone. A Senior German engineer from Siemens was already there and we exchanged a hearty hello, from one smoker to another. The camaraderie is strong because it is a dying breed. He told me he is responsible for compressors and I told him that my car A/C compressor which perhaps contained a non-return valve, 'O' rings and a drive was not working. We don't deal with those" he said in a slightly negative tone. "Pardon my ignorance", I replied, "I'm new to Offshore Engineering. Tell me about your machines". "Well," he said we have a succession of gas turbines compressing gas at each stage to narrower pipelines so that ultimately we can send gas over pipelines 9" in diameter to points on the shore which can be up to 1000 kilometers away. "Reminds me of transmission lines where we have to step up the voltage to transmit proportionately stepped down current over long distances.

The idea is to save metal and the equations are identical. The thought that the equations are identical led me to draw a parallel between the heart and blood vessels that are the lifeline of animal bodies to these compressors and pipelines that are the energy beats of a society. The biological system has been having one-way valves since millions of years. There is communication and control in computers and there are computers in control and communication leading to a positive growth in machines.

Things have become interesting with digital systems where Integrals and operational amplifiers have been succeeded by Summations and microprocessors. Not to say that analog circuits were uninteresting or have lost their importance. When I joined the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation at the Keshava Deva Malviya Institute of Petroleum Exploration the industry standard in seismic data acquisition was the Digital Field System -V, a jeep mounted, CMOS based seismic data acquisition which recorded the velocity of the seismic waves returning from 3kilometers under the ground with a reflection from every rock interface where the density changed. This data was recorded on 9-track tape and was processed digitally with the most powerful computers of the time. Then there was the circuit controlling the filament current of the 'Kratos' high resolution mass spectrometer and various kinds of temperature control systems. Not the least were the human networks behind all kinds of computer networks. How fascinating is this study of cybernetics where the function of a simple biological system can over the years be replicated in man made form.

Submitted by Mayank M Pande