Born: Philadelphia,
USA. Australian Resident since 1971.
As you hurtle down the information super highway,
spare a thought for the man who made it all possible by describing
how light travels down optical fibres: Allan Snyder. By simplifying
the description of how light would move down optical fibre, what dimension
the fibre should be, and the conceptual aspects of optical fibre telecommunications,
Snyder laid the foundations of optical fibre technology and revolutionised
modern telecommunications.
Allan Whitenack Snyder was born in Philadelphia,
USA. His home environment, with its encouragement of creativity, was
to have a profound effect, and while his brothers went on to become
artists, Allan decided that the greatest expression of creativity
could be achieved in the physical and biological sciences.
Proceeding through
Pennsylvania State University, then the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by the mid-1960s Snyder
arrived at Harvard, focussing
his studies on how visual photoreceptors in the human retina transmit
light images to the brain. At the time, Snyder had no particular interest
in telecommunications, but noticed the similar transmission properties
of both photo receptors and optical fibre, which at that stage existed
more in theory than in actuality.
Intrigued, he began to study how light travels
down optical fibre, and before long his work had become the foundation
of all theory on optical waveguide transmission and the key that opened
the doors to optical fibre technology.
Having moved to London, Snyder, with two colleagues,
provided the blueprint for optical fibre, and designed a range of
devices essential to the operation of the telecommunications network,
such as beam splitters and switches to route and control light as
it moves between optical fibres. This enabled millions of kilometres
of fibre optic cable, constructed to Snyder's specifications, to be
laid around the world. The result was the telecommunications revolution
from which we benefit today.
Eventually, Snyder's desire to pursue his research
in visual sciences, and particularly to work with the Department of
Neurobiology at the Australian National
University, brought him to Australia, but not before his interests
in anthropology had led him to explore the Pacific in a bark canoe
before alighting here.
Freely admitting that he's "not a competent
experimentalist" but prefers to hand over his ideas to someone
who is, Snyder had already moved on to his next idea by the time the
optical fibre network became a reality in the 1970s. By the late 1980s,
he was hypothesising whether optical fibre might be made redundant
by technology in which light would manipulate light; the results would
be much cheaper, much faster and more compact than current technology.
It's something of a quantum leap, but challenging conventions has
always been one of Allan Snyder's strengths: his research on optics
was described by the journal Nature
as "breaking a 19th century mindset".
In fact, challenging mindsets is now one of Snyder's
official projects, through the
Centre for the Mind, established as a joint venture between the
Australian National University
in Canberra and the University of
Sydney. Here, Snyder and his colleagues have studied creativity
and mindset breaking, inspired by their research on the astounding
abilities of autistic savants.
Together with John Mitchell, Snyder has published
a provocative theory suggesting that everyone possesses these spectacular
abilities - for example, the ability to do lightning fast, accurate
arithmetic, or to speak multiple languages, or draw perfectly from
memory. This theory has attracted both popular and mainstream scientific
attention: the paper was published last year by the Royal Society,
the prestigious representative of the scientific establishment, which
rarely publishes papers on the workings of the mind.
In addition to being Foundation Director of the
Centre for the Mind, Allan Snyder continues his research in optics
and vision as Foundation Head of the
Optical Sciences Centre at the ANU, where he holds the Chair of
Visual Sciences and the Chair of Optical Physics. Both Centres form
part of the ANU's Institute of Advanced Studies. The OSC performs
both basic and applied research in guided wave optics and the field
of light guiding light, subjects at the cutting edge of today's science,
with exciting prospects for technological application. The Centre
is a key player in the $100 million Australian Photonics Cooperative
Research Centre, where Snyder was a founding director.
Given his outstanding achievements, it comes as
no surprise that Allan Snyder has been the recipient of numerous awards
and honours, both within Australia and internationally. These include
the Edgeworth David Medal of the Royal Society of New South Wales
and the Research Medal of the Royal Society of Victoria (1974), Fellowship
of the Australian
Academy of Science, and award of its Thomas Rankin Lyle Medal
(1985), Fellowship of the Australian
Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (1988), Fellowship
of the Royal Society (1990),
the CSIRO Medal (1995), the Massey
Prize and Medal of the British Institute of Physics (1996), and the
Australia
Prize for excellence in the field of Telecommunications (1997).
On receipt of the Australia Prize, Allan Snyder
said, "It's a triumph for the Institute of Advanced Studies at
the ANU that a dreamer can be allowed to prosper". We are indeed
fortunate that this "dreamer" chooses to follow his dreams
here in Australia.
