The Search for the Absolute / Synthesis Lectures on Engineering, Science, and Technology (PDF)

Jeffrey H. Williams was born in Swansea, UK, in 1956. He attended the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and Cambridge University, being awarded a Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Cambridge in 1981. Subsequently, his career as a research scientist was in the physical sciences. First, as a research scientist in the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and Illinois, and subsequently as an experimental physicist at the Institute Laue-Langevin, Grenoble, which remains one of the world's leading centers for research involving neutrons, especially, neutron scattering and diffraction. During this research career, the author pub-lished more than seventy technical papers and invited review articles in the peer-reviewed literature. However, after much thought, the author chose to leave research in 1992 and moved to the world of science publishing and the communication of science by becoming the European editor for the physical sciences for the AAAS's Science. Subsequently, the author was Assistant Executive Secretary of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry; the agency responsible for the worldwide advancement of chemistry through international collaboration. And most recently, 2003-2008, he was the head of publications and communications at the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM), Sèvres. The BIPM is charged by the Meter Convention of 1875 with ensuring world-wide uniformity of measurements, and their traceability to the International System of Units (SI). It was during these years at the BIPM that the author became interested in, and familiar with the origin of the Metric System, its subsequent evolution into the SI, and the coming transformation into the Quantum-SI. Since retiring, the author has devoted myself to writing. In 2014, he published Defining and Measuring Nature: The Make of All Things in the IOP Concise Physics series. This publication out-lined the coming changes to the definitions of several of the