Minerals, Models and Metaphors
A Potted History
Bill Phillips was born at Twickenham, Middlesex in 1930. He was educated at a boarding school in Suffolk and studied mining engineering at the Royal School of Mines in London. During his vacations he worked at mines in the Midlands, Sweden and Morocco. After graduation he worked in Canada at the Sudbury nickel mines and prospected for uranium in Southern Ontario. He was subsequently offered a position as an Inspector of Mines in Tanganyika where he was responsible for mine safety and the control of explosives. During his period of service Tanzania became an independent member of the Commonwealth. Bill was stationed up country near the the Great Rift Valley and on Lake Victoria giving easy access Serengeti, Ngorongoro and Kilimanjaro. After working seven years in East Africa he decided to read economics and econometrics at the London School of Economics. Following graduation he took up an appointment as a minerals economist with the Bureau of Mineral Resources in Canberra and travelled widely to study the Australian mining industry.
When the Department of the Environment in London set up the Systems Analysis Research Unit he was invited to join a group of specialists to study the long term availability of mineral, water and agricultural resources. Under his leadership the Unit constructed a systems model of the world economic system and published their findings in a sequence of papers and reports. Presentations were made to the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, to the Royal Society in London and to members of the French Senate at the Palais Luxembourg in Paris. After appointment as Head of the Professional Geologists' Unit, Bill was mainly concerned with the management of geological and land reclamation research and the underground disposal of colliery spoil. For the latter project he visited Poland, the Ruhr and the Saar to collect first hand information. He subsequently became involved with research into the disposal of radio-active waste and administrative duties within H.M. Inspectorate of Pollution. In the last few years before his retirement he was located at the Fire Research Station, Borehamwood where he set up the Fire Risk Unit and developed an innovative method of probabilistic risk assessment based on systems models and Monte Carlo methods.
Now retired, Bill lives with his wife in Buckinghamshire. He has a long term interest in philosophy and science and some of the books he has recently found interesting are listed here. In his spare time he keeps fit by regular visits to a gym and frequent walks.
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