The meaning of life

Citation

Loughlin, C. (2002), "The meaning of life", Assembly Automation, Vol. 22 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/aa.2002.03322aaa.001

The meaning of life

The meaning of life

Our joint themes for this issue are "Actuators + Micro Assembly" and the intention has been to take a look at the technologies and techniques that are required for assembling components with sub-millimetre dimensions.

The absolute numbers associated to abstract concepts of size, such as large or small, very much depend on your point of view. To an astrophysicist something the size of our planet is small while nanotechnologist operate at the molecular level and anything over a millimetre is generally regarded as seriously huge.

From my perspective I see lots of work going on at the atomic level where electrical forces are used as the tweezers for material fabrication. I also see steady progress with machining and adhesive technologies for parts several millimetres on a side and above. But to me there seems to be a less happening at the sub-millimetre assembly level.

MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) have given us a lot of the technology for fabricating very small parts, such as levers and gears, that are less than a tenth of a millimetre across. However when it comes to assembling these components into something that will actually do something useful, it is the room for further progress that is seriously huge.

Perhaps if digital watches had never come along we may have already developed the technologies for fabricating these structures? Imagine Charles Babbage's computer fabricated as originally intended but everything scaled down by a thousand.

Of course, the same semiconductor technology that has given us the ability to make these tiny gears and levers, is also the same technology that has given us digital watches and personal computers.

This irony also leads us to the most exciting prospect for sub-millimetre devices. As both camps are dependant on semiconductor technology, the real opportunities will come when we combine electronic circuits and micro-actuators within the same device. Imagine the applications for sensors that can move around at the microscopic level and having found something interesting actually do something with it. I cannot think of many applications in the automotive field, but it is hard not to come up with a long list of medical applications.

Over the years there has been a lot of talk about artificial intelligence and "life". Show someone an amoeba scurrying around in primordial soup and everyone agrees that it is alive. Looking at my computer lcd screen as I type this, I cannot really ever see me thinking of my computer as a living thing. Regardless of however many MHz it thinks at, or the number of processing elements, it will always be just a computer. To me the key elements of "life" are the ability to move and the ability to reproduce. Perhaps micro-assembly will give us the key to life itself?

Jack Hollingum

It is with great sadness that I report the death of Jack Hollingum at the age of 76 following a succession of heart problems. Jack was one of the founding editors of Assembly Automation as well as our sister journals Industrial Robot and Sensor Review. Over the years he has written countless articles and has remained a regular contributor right up to having a stroke in April 2001.

He started his engineering career with the aircraft manufacturer Vickers Armstrong Weybridge, before turning his hand to engineering journalism and working for many prestigious publications including "Metalworking Production" and "The Engineer". He was also the author of several books spanning topics as diverse as smart cards and machine vision.

Engineers are people who aim to make things better, and an engineering journalist aims to give them the knowledge and information to make this possible by reporting on up-and-coming research and working systems. The secret is to make articles interesting and informative and of practical benefit to those who read them. Giving other engineers ideas that they can use in their own systems, and warning them of problems and how they can be overcome.

Jack was a master of the art, and managed to ask incisive questions with great courtesy and charm. He also had a boundless enthusiasm for all things technical and led the way in the adoption of the new technology that we now all take for granted.

Prolific as he was as an engineering journalist, Jack was also a devout Christian and devoted a lot of his time and energy to the ecumenical Church. This work included two years as the full time Industrial Secretary of the Student Christian Movement. He was a devoted family man and leaves a wife and three sons.

I will greatly miss his contributions to the journal and the support of a colleague and much admired friend.

Clive Loughlin