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My father was an eminent surgeon and a very great inventor. Actually,
he was a great inventor, and I think he opened the doors for me.
I have him to blame. He encouraged me to try to solve problems, physical problems,
and come up with solutions myself, although he must have known the solutions himself.
So I ended up filing my first patent when I was 13 years old.
The story goes back a long time. My daughter, when she was three years old,
she started playing the cello. And it was a very heavy, big instrument.
So I – and she said, you know, this is a heavy instrument.
So I said maybe we can make it light. So what’s lighter than light?
And it just so turned out and developed like that, that we
realized that we could replace the strings of the – all the strings
of the guitar with one single fibre.
So let’s take the example of a normal guitar string. How does
it make a sound? It makes a sound by stretching the string between two points
and tensioning it, and it’s a certain length. And that determines the frequency with
which it oscillates. And when it oscillates – when you pluck it, it’ll oscillate, and it’ll
set up a sound wave. And this sound wave is through
the movement of atoms, the air that is around the string.
Now, how do we translate this into light, into a light pickup?
And we do this by launching light into this optical fibre, which we
now replace the string with. And what happens is that there are
many rays of light that are going inside this fibre. And what we
are interested in is how the difference in the time that light takes to reach
the output of the fibre, how that varies as a function of time.
We are picking up the difference in the change in length of the output,
or the time of arrival of light at the output, from between these two rays of light.
And when we look at the difference, the variation in that, that is giving
us the signature of the vibration of that string.
I think in particular the Discovery Grants Program has been a key cornerstone of research.
This is also been an envy of a lot of people, even in America, because they
have to fight for their money very hard because that includes
all sorts of different things. This allows you to engage maybe a
research assistant or a couple of PhD students and work with
them over the long term. And this has also been
instrumental in building this optical guitar that you’ve seen today.