About George Zimmerman

Past Times

Explore the Milky Way’s outer limits to search for extraterrestrial life

Coach baseball

Writing random philosophical ramblings

Fascinations

Life’s frailties; space technology; the vastness of the universe; communications near theoretical limits; my three kids: I spend a lot of time looking at the world around me and considering all the things I’ve seen happen that at some level were or would be considered impossible. It helps to see the way things work, the way everything seems to fit together and the remarkable things that come from it.

Personal Philosophy

I take a very dim view of what you can’t do. Maybe according to your understanding you don’t know how to do something. That is one thing. But unless there is some kind of physical principle standing in your way, then it just becomes a matter of understanding the underlying physical principle well enough to know how to change the basic assumptions to make it possible.

In engineering terms, we live in a world of ‘closed-loop control,’ where everything happening now will affect events that will eventually occur, and the key idea is to keep a close eye and open mind on how things are progressing. If I can see that something is possible, and a few ways forward, then I have confidence that proceeding towards that goal will lead to a solution. 10GBASE-T was like that – we didn’t have all the answers when we started, but solved the problems along the way. Big change comes from daily incremental work, rarely from single-point breakthroughs. When people ask if I could do only one thing to change the world what would that be I say the question really is what can I do today, tomorrow and through the next year to make the world a better place.

Personal Observations

When I had kids, one of the things I wasn’t prepared for was how much of basic ordinary life you have to learn. You sit and watch a baby, and you rediscover that even the simplest act of reaching out and touching something is a learned function. Something we can take for granted. If you try to think about the difficulty of designing a machine that would learn the motor control necessary to walk, or, much less, hit a fastball (without the advantages of machine speed over human speed), you get an idea of how we’re surrounded by solutions to problems that seem infeasible, and it’s just a matter of finding them with the right approach.

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