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Control Theory for Physicists
Control theory, an interdisciplinary concept dealing with the behavior of dynamical

systems, is an important but often overlooked aspect of physics. This book is the
first broad and complete treatment of the topic tailored for physicists, one that goes
from the basics right through to the most recent advances. Simple examples develop
a deep understanding and intuition for the systematic principles of control theory,
beyond the recipes given in standard engineering-focused texts. Up-to-date coverage
of control of networks and complex systems and a thorough discussion of the fun-
damental limits of control, including the limitations placed by causality, information
theory, and thermodynamics, are included. In addition, this text explores important
recent advances in stochastic thermodynamics on the thermodynamic costs of infor-
mation processing and control. For all students of physics interested in control theory,
this classroom-tested, comprehensive approach to the topic with online solutions and
further materials delivers both fundamental principles and current developments.
John Bechhoefer is Professor of Physics at Simon Fraser University and Fellow of the
American Physical Society. His research is at the intersection of thermodynamics,
statistical physics, control theory, and information theory.
Control Theory for Physicists
JOHN BECHHOEFER
Simon Fraser University
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India
79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107001183
DOI: 10.1017/9780511734809
© John Bechhoefer 2021
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2021
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Ltd, Padstow Cornwall.
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-107-00118-3 Hardback
Additional resources for this publication at www.cambridge.org/bechhoefer
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
Preface page ix
Part I Core Material 1
1 Historical Introduction 3
1.1 Historical Overview 4
1.2 Lessons from History 12
1.3 Control and Information 21
1.4 Notes and References 21
2 Dynamical Systems 24
2.1 Introduction: The Pendulum as a Dynamical System 25
2.2 General Formulation 28
2.3 Frequency Domain 36
2.4 Time Domain 46
2.5 Stability 52
2.6 Bifurcations 58
2.7 Summary 60
Problems 62
3 Frequency-Domain Control 67
3.1 Basic Feedback Ideas 68
3.2 Two Case Studies 75
3.3 Integral, Derivative, and PID 78
3.4 Feedforward 83
3.5 Stability of Closed-Loop Systems 88
3.6 Delays and Nonminimum Phase 92
3.7 Designing the Control 100
3.8 MIMO Systems 110
3.9 Summary 121
Problems 122
4 Time-Domain Control 129

4.1 Controllability and Observability 130
v
vi Contents
4.2 Control Based on the State 142

4.3 Control Based (Indirectly) on the Output 148
4.4 Summary 156
Problems 157
5 Discrete-Time Systems 161

5.1 Discretizing Signals 163
5.2 Tools for Discrete Dynamical Systems 175
5.3 Discretizing Dynamical Systems 181
5.4 Design of Digital Controllers 186
5.5 Summary 196
Problems 198
6 System Identification 205

6.1 Physics or Phenomenology? 206
6.2 Measuring Dynamics 207
6.3 Model Building 222
6.4 Model Selection 227
6.5 Model Reduction 233
6.6 Summary 236
Problems 238
Part II Advanced Ideas 249
7 Optimal Control 251

7.1 One-Dimensional Example 252
7.2 Continuous Systems 254
7.3 Linear Quadratic Regulator 259
7.4 Dynamic Programming 263
7.5 Hard Constraints 269
7.6 Feedback 276
7.7 Numerical Methods 286
7.8 Summary 288
Problems 291
8 Stochastic Systems 297

8.1 Kalman Filter 298
8.2 Linear Quadratic Gaussian Control 313
8.3 Bayesian Filtering 319
8.4 Nonlinear Filtering 326
8.5 Why State Estimation Can Be a Hard Problem 340
Contents vii
8.6 Stochastic Optimal Control 345

8.7 Smoothing and Prediction 348
8.8 Summary 352
Problems 355
9 Robust Control 363

9.1 Robust Feedforward 365
9.2 Robust Feedback 371
9.3 Risk 376
9.4 Worst-Case Methods: The H∞ Min-Max Approach 386
9.5 Summary 395
Problems 399
10 Adaptive Control 404

10.1 Direct Methods 407
10.2 Indirect Methods 413
10.3 Adaptive Feedforward Control 424
10.4 Optimal Adaptive Control 430
10.5 Neural Networks 437
10.6 Summary 443
Problems 446
11 Nonlinear Control 454

11.1 Feedback Linearization 455
11.2 Lyapunov-Based Design 466
11.3 Collective Dynamics 469
11.4 Controlling Chaos 476
11.5 Summary 480
Problems 481
Part III Special Topics 491
12 Discrete-State Systems 493

12.1 Discrete-State Models 493
12.2 Inferring States and Models 500
12.3 Control 508
12.4 Summary 511
Problems 513
13 Quantum Control 516

13.1 Quantum Mechanics 517
viii Contents
13.2 Three Types of Quantum Control 520

13.3 Physical Example 523
13.4 How Different Is Quantum Control? 526
13.5 Summary 528
Problems 531
14 Networks and Complex Systems 533

14.1 Networks in a Nutshell 535
14.2 From Dynamics to Graphs to Networks 540
14.3 Structural Controllability 541
14.4 Minimum Inputs Problem 543
14.5 Control Effort 546
14.6 Complex Systems 551
14.7 Summary 554
Problems 557
15 Limits to Control 561

15.1 Causal Limits 561
15.2 Information-Theoretic Limits 574
15.3 Thermodynamic Limits 588
15.4 Summary 608
Problems 613
References 619
Index 641
Preface
This book extends a tutorial I wrote on control theory (Bechhoefer, 2005). In both
the article and this book, my goal has been “to make the strange familiar, and the
familiar strange.”1 The strange is control theory – feedback and feedforward, transfer
functions and minimum phase, H∞ metrics and Z-transforms, and many other ideas
that are not usually part of the education of a physicist. The familiar includes notions
such as causality, measurement, robustness, and entropy – concepts physicists think
they know – that acquire new meanings in the light of control theory. I hope that this
book accomplishes both tasks.
If You Are an Experimental Physicist

Control techniques such as feedback can dramatically increase the performance of
your experimental apparatus, and most experimentalists, by necessity, pick up a cer-
tain amount of control theory informally. The results are often ok, but with a bit of
savvy, they can usually be made much better. In this book, you will learn how to set
the parameters and structure of a control system to maximize – by your own measure
– the performance of your experiment. This is optimal control.
If you have learned a bit about proportional-integral-differential (PID) control and
think that is enough, this book is for you: Although PID control is indeed a good
generic solution – especially if you know how to use the D – knowing something about
the dynamics of the system can lead to much better control. Generic solutions are fine
for the family sedan, but a race car needs to be tuned.
An instructive example is the atomic force microscope (AFM). The original instru-
ments were built by experimental physicists and were based on PI control (or slight
variations). Starting about 2005, people in the industry realized that more advanced
techniques could be valuable, and the current commercial AFM controllers now
employ the full panoply of techniques discussed in this book, with thousandfold
increases in scanning rates.2
1 Like many sayings, this one has a complicated history. Its origin is attributed to Novalis (Baron Friedrich
von Hardenberg, 1772–1801), poet, philosopher, and a founder of German Romanticism. In an unpub-
lished fragment, he wrote, “To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and
wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange,
the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite” (translated in Beiser, 1998). Subsequent reexpressions have
boiled this down and added the converse, ending up as the pithier phrase I quote.
2 Interestingly, the involvement of control specialists in the AFM industry came from the “top down.” The
National Science Foundation, a leading source of support for control theory in the United States, was
concerned about an overly mathematical bent to control-theory research and began actively encouraging
researchers to explore new applications, of which AFM was a prominent example.
ix
x Preface
If You Are a Theoretical Physicist

From theoretical physicists, a remark about control theory that I have heard is, “That’s
just engineering and linear systems” – said, if not with a sneer, then with an implica-
tion that there is nothing fundamental to interest a theoretical physicist. I hope to
convince you that such sentiments give short shrift to one of the great ideas of the
twentieth century, worth knowing on its own and for the deeper understanding of
physical systems that it leads to.
What is different about control theory? In a word, purpose. Control always has a
goal, and control theory shows how to achieve that goal. By contrast, physical theories
describe nature, and historically physicists have gone to great lengths to remove the
subjective from their theories. Thus, to study control theory as a physicist is a bit like
licking the forbidden fruit. We know we are not supposed to do it, but it does seem
interesting. I hope to assuage such feelings of guilt, as much in the natural world
is designed, either explicitly by people, or implicitly through evolution and natural
selection. And even if you do not share this way of looking at the world, learning
about a great idea and its implications is worthy in itself, and the contrast can teach
you much about “nonpurposeful” dynamics.
Control theory also deepens our appreciation of physical systems. There has been a
steady expansion of physics and physical methods to the study of complex systems and
networks. In many of these systems (such as the earth’s climate, as discussed in Chap-
ter 1), the notion of feedback is important, and this book will help give perspective on
what those feedbacks can mean (Chapter 14). And, as we will discuss in Chapter 15,
there are fundamental limits set on control from thermodynamics and causality (as
well as information theory), and the effort to understand the interplay among these
topics has generated much recent effort, including in my own research. Notions such
as Maxwell’s demon and Szilard’s engine have evolved from thought experiments to
real ones, and those achievements have then stimulated much ongoing theoretical work
where control theory plays an important role.
If You Are a Control Theorist or Engineer

If you have a professional interest in control, you have many fine books to choose
from, ranging from those focused on particular applications for the engineer to more
theoretical books written for the control theorist and applied mathematician. What a
physicist can offer is a concise introduction that takes a broader view and devotes
more attention to the foundations of topics than is usual in textbook engineering
discussions. I have tried to sort through a vast field, epitomized by the 3,500-page,
three-volume series by Levine (2011b,c,a), and produce a broad, coherent view of
what control can mean. Also, physicists focus on foundational issues, and this book
includes topics rarely seen in introductory control-theory texts, such as the relations
between stochastic and worst-case approaches to robust control (Chapter 9) and
the limitations of control due to causality, information theory, and thermodynamics
(Chapter 15).
Preface xi
Keeping this book to a reasonable size led to a rather ruthless competition, and
much valuable material had to be cut. I apologize for all the pretty and important
topics – Nyquist stability criterion! – that are not present.
Why This Book?

University libraries have shelves full of control-theory books. Why write another?
Existing control-theory books are mostly written either for engineers or for control
theoreticians and mathematicians. For a physicist, neither type of book is quite right.
The mathematical approach is usually concise but not great at shaping intuitions. The
engineering approach uses different notation (j for – i, Laplace transforms rather than
Fourier transforms, factors of 2π, etc.) that can render familiar expressions mysterious.
Moreover, the engineering style is quite different, with more emphasis on numerical,
practical examples. Physicists prefer scaled variables and examples that are stylized to
illustrate concepts. Here, I follow physics conventions by default but compromise to
connect to control-theory texts.
This book has broader scope than most engineering texts. Because control theory is
an essential part of an engineering degree, introductory texts are broad but low level,
while advanced texts tend to be narrow. A similar problem exists with mathematics:
Most physics departments have one or more courses in “mathematics for physicists”
that compress half-a-dozen courses (tensors, boundary-value problems, partial differ-
ential equations, differential geometry, algebra, group theory, etc.) into a single course.
You can view this book similarly (hence its title). Our topics are distilled from what
is often covered in courses on classical, modern, digital, optimal, stochastic, robust,
adaptive, and nonlinear control. Indeed, each chapter can be – and often is – the sub-
ject of a semester-long course. What physicist has time to take so many courses on
control? Yet the answer is not the de facto current situation, where physicists get little
or no exposure to control ideas at all. This book attempts a rational compromise.3
Finally, this book includes topics of recent interest, such as the stochastic approach
to robust control, network control, quantum control, and the connections between
control and fundamental issues of thermodynamics and information theory. Indeed,
the period of writing this book has coincided with a renewed interest in the foun-
dations of control theory.4 Notions such as controllability, which seemed settled 50
years ago, have been reopened, with sometimes surprising results. And issues such as
Maxwell’s demon that had befuddled researchers since the dawn of statistical physics
150 years ago have been greatly clarified. While this book focuses on basic theory in
control, it also aims to show where new areas fit with more traditional ones and to be
a bridge to such recent work.
3 Åström and Murray (2008) have written an excellent control-theory book for general scientists. They
seek a wider audience, including those less comfortable with mathematics. Although full of insights and
a broad range of examples, the style, level, and choice of topics are collectively rather different from this
book.
4 The interest can be measured by the recent spate of control-theory articles in Nature, Physical Review
Letters, and PNAS. These journals had published little on these topics for many years, until recently.
xii Preface
A word on approach: a little intuition can be worth a lot of formalism, and intuition
can be formed through detailed analysis of simple representative examples. That was
Einstein’s sentiment when he stated that “Everything should be as simple as possible,
but not simpler.” Typically, I solve the simplest nontrivial example in the text (analyti-
cally, if possible) and then elaborate in the problems. There are only a few applications,
but there is a thorough treatment of familiar generic examples (e.g., first- and second-
order systems, the pendulum). Your job is to transfer acquired intuitions to your own
applications!
Figures and Style

The gray-scale figures in this book have been drawn using a minimalist style inspired by
the work of Edward Tufte and others (Tufte, 1990, 2001; Frankel and DePace, 2012).
Similarly, my writing tries to follow William Strunk’s famous advice to “Omit needless
words”:
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words,

a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing
should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This
requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all
detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
(Strunk, W., Jr., 1918)
Although the figure design tends to minimalism, there are hundreds of them:
control is a discipline that takes well to illustrations.
Problems
“The problems are an essential part of the text.” Such platitudes are often found in
textbook prefaces, but here it really is true. I try to demystify the problems as much
as possible, while still leaving something for you to do. The goal is that you should be
able to know whether you have done the problem correctly. Sometimes, I ask you to
“Show that,” or to add decimals to an approximate answer, or to reproduce a graph.
The main text tries to be “lean but friendly,” focusing on the main ideas. Hopefully,
this creates a clear narrative, while the problems fill in steps and explore further cases
and applications.
Solving problems is the difference between being a tourist in a new land and trying
to live there. And who knows? Perhaps you may even decide to stay awhile.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the support of many friends and colleagues: Albert Libchaber, Jean-
Christophe Géminard, Normand Fortier, and Ray Goldstein first encouraged me to
take my interest in control theory seriously. Simon Capelin proposed a book and was
incredibly patient; Nicholas Gibbons, along with Róisín Munnelly and Henry Cock-
burn, saw it to completion. Suckjoon Jun hosted a stay at the Harvard Bauer Center,
Preface xiii
where the first part of this book was written; Massimiliano Esposito invited me to Lux-
embourg to finish it off; and Stanislas Leibler invited me for brief but very productive
stays at the Simons Center for Systems Biology at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton. Thanks to all! I also thank Ben Adcock, Karl Åström, Leslie Ballentine,
Jules Bloomenthal, Braden Brinkman, Jean Carlson, Laurent Daudet, Jean-Charles
Delvenne, Michel Devoret, Steve Dodge, Max Donelan, Guy Dumont, Alex Fields,
Mark Freeman, Barbara Frisken, Harvey Gould, Paul Haljan, Shalev Itzkovitz,
Philipp Janert, Malcolm Kennett, John Milton, Elisha Moses, Dugan O’Neill, Rik
Pintelon, Max Puelma Touzel, Riccardo Rao, Henrik Sandberg, Pablo Sartori, David
Sivak, Philipp Strasberg, Juzar Thingna, Hugo Touchette, Anand Yethiraj, Joel Zyl-
berberg, and the students of Physics 493/881 for suggestions, critiques, and insights.
Raphaël Chétrite read the entire manuscript and caught many mistakes. The ones left
are my fault! In Canada, NSERC and Simon Fraser University supported my work
throughout the writing. I thank Guy Immega for supplying the cover image.
Most of all, I thank Adrienne, qui reste au coeur du tout.
Preface
This book extends a tutorial I wrote on control theory (Bechhoefer, 2005). In both
the article and this book, my goal has been “to make the strange familiar, and the
familiar strange.”1 The strange is control theory – feedback and feedforward, transfer
functions and minimum phase, H∞ metrics and Z-transforms, and many other ideas
that are not usually part of the education of a physicist. The familiar includes notions
such as causality, measurement, robustness, and entropy – concepts physicists think
they know – that acquire new meanings in the light of control theory. I hope that this
book accomplishes both tasks.
If You Are an Experimental Physicist

Control techniques such as feedback can dramatically increase the performance of
your experimental apparatus, and most experimentalists, by necessity, pick up a cer-
tain amount of control theory informally. The results are often ok, but with a bit of
savvy, they can usually be made much better. In this book, you will learn how to set
the parameters and structure of a control system to maximize – by your own measure
– the performance of your experiment. This is optimal control.
If you have learned a bit about proportional-integral-differential (PID) control and
think that is enough, this book is for you: Although PID control is indeed a good
generic solution – especially if you know how to use the D – knowing something about
the dynamics of the system can lead to much better control. Generic solutions are fine
for the family sedan, but a race car needs to be tuned.
An instructive example is the atomic force microscope (AFM). The original instru-
ments were built by experimental physicists and were based on PI control (or slight
variations). Starting about 2005, people in the industry realized that more advanced
techniques could be valuable, and the current commercial AFM controllers now
employ the full panoply of techniques discussed in this book, with thousandfold
increases in scanning rates.2
1 Like many sayings, this one has a complicated history. Its origin is attributed to Novalis (Baron Friedrich
von Hardenberg, 1772–1801), poet, philosopher, and a founder of German Romanticism. In an unpub-
lished fragment, he wrote, “To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and
wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange,
the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite” (translated in Beiser, 1998). Subsequent reexpressions have
boiled this down and added the converse, ending up as the pithier phrase I quote.
2 Interestingly, the involvement of control specialists in the AFM industry came from the “top down.” The
National Science Foundation, a leading source of support for control theory in the United States, was
concerned about an overly mathematical bent to control-theory research and began actively encouraging
researchers to explore new applications, of which AFM was a prominent example.
ix
x Preface
If You Are a Theoretical Physicist

From theoretical physicists, a remark about control theory that I have heard is, “That’s
just engineering and linear systems” – said, if not with a sneer, then with an implica-
tion that there is nothing fundamental to interest a theoretical physicist. I hope to
convince you that such sentiments give short shrift to one of the great ideas of the
twentieth century, worth knowing on its own and for the deeper understanding of
physical systems that it leads to.
What is different about control theory? In a word, purpose. Control always has a
goal, and control theory shows how to achieve that goal. By contrast, physical theories
describe nature, and historically physicists have gone to great lengths to remove the
subjective from their theories. Thus, to study control theory as a physicist is a bit like
licking the forbidden fruit. We know we are not supposed to do it, but it does seem
interesting. I hope to assuage such feelings of guilt, as much in the natural world
is designed, either explicitly by people, or implicitly through evolution and natural
selection. And even if you do not share this way of looking at the world, learning
about a great idea and its implications is worthy in itself, and the contrast can teach
you much about “nonpurposeful” dynamics.
Control theory also deepens our appreciation of physical systems. There has been a
steady expansion of physics and physical methods to the study of complex systems and
networks. In many of these systems (such as the earth’s climate, as discussed in Chap-
ter 1), the notion of feedback is important, and this book will help give perspective on
what those feedbacks can mean (Chapter 14). And, as we will discuss in Chapter 15,
there are fundamental limits set on control from thermodynamics and causality (as
well as information theory), and the effort to understand the interplay among these
topics has generated much recent effort, including in my own research. Notions such
as Maxwell’s demon and Szilard’s engine have evolved from thought experiments to
real ones, and those achievements have then stimulated much ongoing theoretical work
where control theory plays an important role.
If You Are a Control Theorist or Engineer

If you have a professional interest in control, you have many fine books to choose
from, ranging from those focused on particular applications for the engineer to more
theoretical books written for the control theorist and applied mathematician. What a
physicist can offer is a concise introduction that takes a broader view and devotes
more attention to the foundations of topics than is usual in textbook engineering
discussions. I have tried to sort through a vast field, epitomized by the 3,500-page,
three-volume series by Levine (2011b,c,a), and produce a broad, coherent view of
what control can mean. Also, physicists focus on foundational issues, and this book
includes topics rarely seen in introductory control-theory texts, such as the relations
between stochastic and worst-case approaches to robust control (Chapter 9) and
the limitations of control due to causality, information theory, and thermodynamics
(Chapter 15).
Preface xi
Keeping this book to a reasonable size led to a rather ruthless competition, and
much valuable material had to be cut. I apologize for all the pretty and important
topics – Nyquist stability criterion! – that are not present.
Why This Book?

University libraries have shelves full of control-theory books. Why write another?
Existing control-theory books are mostly written either for engineers or for control
theoreticians and mathematicians. For a physicist, neither type of book is quite right.
The mathematical approach is usually concise but not great at shaping intuitions. The
engineering approach uses different notation (j for – i, Laplace transforms rather than
Fourier transforms, factors of 2π, etc.) that can render familiar expressions mysterious.
Moreover, the engineering style is quite different, with more emphasis on numerical,
practical examples. Physicists prefer scaled variables and examples that are stylized to
illustrate concepts. Here, I follow physics conventions by default but compromise to
connect to control-theory texts.
This book has broader scope than most engineering texts. Because control theory is
an essential part of an engineering degree, introductory texts are broad but low level,
while advanced texts tend to be narrow. A similar problem exists with mathematics:
Most physics departments have one or more courses in “mathematics for physicists”
that compress half-a-dozen courses (tensors, boundary-value problems, partial differ-
ential equations, differential geometry, algebra, group theory, etc.) into a single course.
You can view this book similarly (hence its title). Our topics are distilled from what
is often covered in courses on classical, modern, digital, optimal, stochastic, robust,
adaptive, and nonlinear control. Indeed, each chapter can be – and often is – the sub-
ject of a semester-long course. What physicist has time to take so many courses on
control? Yet the answer is not the de facto current situation, where physicists get little
or no exposure to control ideas at all. This book attempts a rational compromise.3
Finally, this book includes topics of recent interest, such as the stochastic approach
to robust control, network control, quantum control, and the connections between
control and fundamental issues of thermodynamics and information theory. Indeed,
the period of writing this book has coincided with a renewed interest in the foun-
dations of control theory.4 Notions such as controllability, which seemed settled 50
years ago, have been reopened, with sometimes surprising results. And issues such as
Maxwell’s demon that had befuddled researchers since the dawn of statistical physics
150 years ago have been greatly clarified. While this book focuses on basic theory in
control, it also aims to show where new areas fit with more traditional ones and to be
a bridge to such recent work.
3 Åström and Murray (2008) have written an excellent control-theory book for general scientists. They
seek a wider audience, including those less comfortable with mathematics. Although full of insights and
a broad range of examples, the style, level, and choice of topics are collectively rather different from this
book.
4 The interest can be measured by the recent spate of control-theory articles in Nature, Physical Review
Letters, and PNAS. These journals had published little on these topics for many years, until recently.
xii Preface
A word on approach: a little intuition can be worth a lot of formalism, and intuition
can be formed through detailed analysis of simple representative examples. That was
Einstein’s sentiment when he stated that “Everything should be as simple as possible,
but not simpler.” Typically, I solve the simplest nontrivial example in the text (analyti-
cally, if possible) and then elaborate in the problems. There are only a few applications,
but there is a thorough treatment of familiar generic examples (e.g., first- and second-
order systems, the pendulum). Your job is to transfer acquired intuitions to your own
applications!
Figures and Style

The gray-scale figures in this book have been drawn using a minimalist style inspired by
the work of Edward Tufte and others (Tufte, 1990, 2001; Frankel and DePace, 2012).
Similarly, my writing tries to follow William Strunk’s famous advice to “Omit needless
words”:
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words,

a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing
should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This
requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all
detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
(Strunk, W., Jr., 1918)
Although the figure design tends to minimalism, there are hundreds of them:
control is a discipline that takes well to illustrations.
Problems
“The problems are an essential part of the text.” Such platitudes are often found in
textbook prefaces, but here it really is true. I try to demystify the problems as much
as possible, while still leaving something for you to do. The goal is that you should be
able to know whether you have done the problem correctly. Sometimes, I ask you to
“Show that,” or to add decimals to an approximate answer, or to reproduce a graph.
The main text tries to be “lean but friendly,” focusing on the main ideas. Hopefully,
this creates a clear narrative, while the problems fill in steps and explore further cases
and applications.
Solving problems is the difference between being a tourist in a new land and trying
to live there. And who knows? Perhaps you may even decide to stay awhile.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the support of many friends and colleagues: Albert Libchaber, Jean-
Christophe Géminard, Normand Fortier, and Ray Goldstein first encouraged me to
take my interest in control theory seriously. Simon Capelin proposed a book and was
incredibly patient; Nicholas Gibbons, along with Róisín Munnelly and Henry Cock-
burn, saw it to completion. Suckjoon Jun hosted a stay at the Harvard Bauer Center,
Preface xiii
where the first part of this book was written; Massimiliano Esposito invited me to Lux-
embourg to finish it off; and Stanislas Leibler invited me for brief but very productive
stays at the Simons Center for Systems Biology at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton. Thanks to all! I also thank Ben Adcock, Karl Åström, Leslie Ballentine,
Jules Bloomenthal, Braden Brinkman, Jean Carlson, Laurent Daudet, Jean-Charles
Delvenne, Michel Devoret, Steve Dodge, Max Donelan, Guy Dumont, Alex Fields,
Mark Freeman, Barbara Frisken, Harvey Gould, Paul Haljan, Shalev Itzkovitz,
Philipp Janert, Malcolm Kennett, John Milton, Elisha Moses, Dugan O’Neill, Rik
Pintelon, Max Puelma Touzel, Riccardo Rao, Henrik Sandberg, Pablo Sartori, David
Sivak, Philipp Strasberg, Juzar Thingna, Hugo Touchette, Anand Yethiraj, Joel Zyl-
berberg, and the students of Physics 493/881 for suggestions, critiques, and insights.
Raphaël Chétrite read the entire manuscript and caught many mistakes. The ones left
are my fault! In Canada, NSERC and Simon Fraser University supported my work
throughout the writing. I thank Guy Immega for supplying the cover image.
Most of all, I thank Adrienne, qui reste au coeur du tout.
PART I
C O R E MAT E R I A L
Historical Introduction 1
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke1
This is a book about magic. Not the magic of wizardry and sorcerers, nor the magic of
fairy tales or fables, but real magic: the magic that powers planes and runs computers,
that keeps our investments high and our blood pressure low, our beer cold and our
bodies warm. It is the magic behind physics experiments of extraordinary precision,
from gravity-wave detectors that probe the cosmos to scanning probe microscopes that
image atoms. It is the magic that regulates biological processes from the pupil size in
our eyes to the gene expression in our cells. It is the magic made possible by control
theory.
The study of control theory can lead to something of a culture shock for physicists.
Of course, jargon, technical methods, and applications may all be new. But something
more fundamental is at play: As physicists, we study the world as it is. We look for the
fundamental laws that govern time and energy, fields and forces, matter and motion, at
the level of individual particles and collective phenomena. We do this in settings that
range from the very large scales of the cosmos to the very small scales of fundamental
particles to the very complex systems that rule the human scale. But we do all of this
on Nature’s terms, content to describe the actual dynamics of real “physical” systems.
Control theorists ask, instead, what might be. They seek to alter the states and
dynamics of a system to make it better. The word “better” already implies a human
element, or at least an active agent that can influence its environment. The Ancient
Greeks coined the notion of teleology to denote the purpose or end (telos) of an object.
While science has moved away from endowing objects in themselves with purpose,
engineers design machines or systems to accomplish predefined tasks. Control theory
tells, in a precise way, how to accomplish these tasks and indicates what is possible
or not. Uncertainty – about initial conditions, external disturbances, dynamical rules,
etc. – can limit possibilities.
Since all systems are physical ones, ruled by the laws of physics, physics will play a
role in our story. But in many ways, it will have a supporting role, as we seek to create
“augmented” systems that perform in ways that seemingly ignore the laws of physics.
Of course they do not. Even so, we will see that a larger, open, physical “supersystem”
can give a subsystem effective dynamics with new laws and properties.
1 Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry Into the Limits of the Possible, New York, Harper and Row, Rev. ed.,
1973.
3
4 Historical Introduction
In this book, we will take a broad look at control, from both the fundamental point
of view that seeks to understand what it can accomplish and what not, and how control
in general meshes with other topics in physics such as thermodynamics and statistical
physics. At the same time, we will also be interested in control for its practical appli-
cations. Just as control is fundamental to the technological devices of modern life, so
too does it play a key role in the techniques an experimental physicist should know.
Sometimes called the “hidden technology,” control is often invisible, despite its
omnipresence in modern technology. We do not notice it until something fails. Planes
are very safe, but occasionally they fall from the sky. Our bodies also depend on many
control loops. To name one: to survive, we must maintain a core temperature within
27–44 ◦ C, implying the need to keep maximum deviations to < ±3% and to regulate
typical fluctuations to be < ±0.3%. Again, we pay little attention to our body’s temper-
ature – except when it begins to deviate when we get sick or cold or hot. Our ability to
ignore control under normal circumstances is a testament to its robustness to specific
types of situations; our need to confront the often-drastic consequences of its failure
is a consequence of its fragility to unforeseen circumstances. As we will see, the two
aspects are linked.
In this introductory chapter, we present briefly the historical development of control
and its theory, which gives some insight as to what “better” dynamics might mean. We
then list some of these goals for control. Then we introduce, in an intuitive way, some
of the principal methods of control, notably feedback and feedforward. We conclude
with a discussion of the types of control systems.
1.1 Historical Overview
We can divide the development of control techniques and theory into five periods:
• Early control (before 1900)

• Preclassical period (1900–1940)
• Classical period (1930–1960)
• Modern control (1945–2000)
• Contemporary control (after 2000)
The overlaps are deliberate, as actual developments are not as well ordered chrono-
logically as the classifications would imply. Although it seems logical to “begin at the
beginning,” this summary may be easier to follow after you have learned some of the
material from later chapters. Partly for this reason, the discussion is relatively brief,
with some aspects deferred to the relevant later chapters. Of course, a short exposition
inevitably simplifies a complex story. The notes and references give pointers to more
extensive presentations.
1.1.1 Early Control (before 1900)

The word feedback is of relatively recent origin, with the Oxford English Dictionary
reporting its first use in 1920, in connection with an electrical circuit.2 However, uses
of feedback and the broader notion of control are far more ancient. Ktesibios (285–
222 BC), a Greek working in Alexandria, Egypt, used feedback to improve the stability
of water clocks, vessels that measure time by the outflow of water. However, as the fluid
level in a vessel decreases, so too will its outflow rate. Keeping the level constant, or
regulating it, stabilizes the rate of outflow. There are no original records of the device,
but reconstructions based on Vitruvius’s De architectura (∼ 30–15 BC) and later Arab
water clocks indicate that the mechanism was the same as that used in the modern
flush toilet: a ball floating in the tank follows the water level. When the level is low, a
float lets in more water, raising the level and increasing qout ; when high, the float shuts
off the valve, decreasing qout (see right).
In the Middle Ages, mechanical clocks powered by falling weights or springs were
developed, with various ratchets (“escapements”) that translate oscillating into rota-
tional motion. These clocks also have feedback mechanisms to ensure constant
rotation rates.
Because fluid density depends on temperature, the level of a fluid can be used
to regulate temperature. René-Antoine Ferchault de Réamur (1683–1757) invented
such a device, based on the temperature sensor of Cornelius Drebbel (1572–1663), a
Dutch engineer working in England. In France, Jean-Simon Bonnemain (1743–1830)
patented in 1783 an improved temperature controller based on a bimetallic rod that
flexed when the temperature changed. He used it to make practical hot-water central
heating for buildings.
The beginning of the Industrial Revolution, centered on England in the second half
of the eighteenth century, led to the first important applications of feedback. The
most prominent was the governor, which was developed to keep windmills turning
at a constant rate and then adapted to the steam engine for more general purposes
by James Watt in the late 1780s.3 The issue was that variable loads would alter the
rotation rate of the engine. To keep it constant, Watt and his partner Matthew Boulton
adapted a flyball sensor for rotation rates that had been patented by Thomas Mead in
1787. As illustrated in Figure 1.1, the sensor has two heavy balls that rotate with the
engine shaft. If the engine rotates too quickly, centrifugal force pushes the balls out,
pulling down a lever and shutting off the throttle valve that lets steam in, thus slowing
the motor. If it rotates too slowly, the balls fall in, pushing up the lever, opening
the value, letting more steam in, and speeding up the motor. If all goes well, the
steam-engine rotation rate settles at a desired value.
The nineteenth century saw a steady improvement in the technology of governors.
The 1868 paper On governors by James Clerk Maxwell gave the first theoretical anal-
ysis. A flaw of governors was their tendency to make the engine “hunt” for the right
2 The related term feedforward was first used even more recently, in 1952 (also according to the OED).
3 By the 1670s, Christiaan Huygens had invented a governor to regulate pendulum clocks (Bateman, 1945).
t
Fig. 1.1 Flyball governor and throttle valve, with rotation around the indicated axis. Flyballs move out, lever at F is pulled
down, pivots about G, and pushes up at H, closing the throttle valve at lower right. Adapted from Routledge (1900).
rotation speed. In more modern language, there could be long-lived oscillatory tran-
sients before settling to a steady state. Even worse, the engine could become unstable
and show erratic motion. Maxwell analyzed the conditions for stability of regulation
against small perturbations using linear stability analysis. His stability conditions were
generalized by Edward J. Routh and Adolf Hurwitz later in the nineteenth century.
Although these early analyses of control systems eventually became part of the tech-
niques of control theory in the mid twentieth century, they had little immediate impact
on practical realizations, which was driven by the innovations of “tinkerers.” Another
emerging class of control applications concerned the position of a moving object.
Thus, ships needed steering and missiles guiding to their target. In England, J. McFar-
lane Gray patented in 1866 a steering engine using feedback. In France, Jean Joseph
Farcot introduced a range of position-control devices that he called servomotors. More
generally, servomechanisms were used to track desired time-dependent trajectories, a
generalization of the simpler goal of regulation, where the desired trajectory is simply
a constant.
1.1.2 Preclassical Period (1900–1940)

Pre-1900 regulators were all direct acting: the elements that measured the quantity
being regulated also had to change the system. The lever in a fluid-level regulator that
moves in response to a change in level also opens the value that lets in more water.
Of course, there is a “power source” (a high-pressure supply of water) that makes the
response possible, but one “gadget” must still carry out two actions. Around 1900 a
long process of abstraction began that led to distinct notions of sensors, controllers,
and actuators. The sensor measures a quantity of concern, the controller decides how
to respond, and the actuator executes the response. Each element can have its own,
independent source of power. Such ideas, however, took several decades to become
clear.
Meanwhile, the first decades of the twentieth century saw the beginnings of indus-
trial process control. Applications included boiler control for steam generation,
electric motor speed regulation, steering for ships and airplanes, temperature and pres-
sure control, and more. A key development was of stand-alone controllers that could
be added on to existing equipment. For example, around 1910, Elmer Sperry greatly
improved the gyrocompass and designed a gyroscope autopilot to steer ships. The
Sperry Gyroscope Company supplied the US Navy with navigational aids, as well as
bomb sights and fire-control systems.
In 1922, Nicholas Minorsky gave a detailed analysis of such mechanisms, introduc-
ing the notion of three types of control. The first is proportional to the error between
set point and actual signal, the second to the integral of that error, and the third to
its derivative. Together, they form the three-term regulator, or proportional-integral-
derivative (PID) control, which is discussed in Chapter 3. Although these ideas now
seem very general, they were at first encountered separately in each domain of applica-
tion. Thus, Minorsky’s analyses were little known in the broader technical community
for a number of years.
Another important development was the first airplane flight by Orville and Wilbur
Wright. Others had built (and sometimes died testing) unsuccessful flying machines.
The Wright brothers’ success was based on their mastery of control, using flaps to
alter yaw, pitch, and roll (three axes). Moreover, they recognized the advantages of an
inherently unstable design stabilized by control (e.g., a human pilot). Unstable systems
are more maneuverable than stable ones. They need active feedback to produce stable
motion but can respond to disturbances (gusts of wind, abrupt change in terrain, etc.)
much more quickly. The concept should be familiar: when we stand upright, we are
unstable and must use (unconscious) small muscle movements to prevent ourselves
from falling over. Indeed, the ability to walk on two legs is what distinguished the first
hominids from other apes.4
Along with developments in mechanical control systems came parallel ones in elec-
trical circuits. By the end of the nineteenth century, there was already a division
between the power and signal applications of electricity. In both, the amplifier was
a key element, allowing separation of the functions of sensor and actuator. Early high-
power amplifiers took the form of relays and spring-based solenoids, which became
the basis of many kinds of actuators.
For low-power electrical signals and their circuits, a key development was Lee de
Forest’s 1906 grid audion, a vacuum-tube amplifier that could boost the voltage level
of a weak signal, compensating for signal losses in transmission and making possible
4 What were the evolutionary advantages of walking upright? Darwin thought that it improved our abil-
ity to fight. But walking is also more efficient for traveling large distances on the ground (e.g., over
grasslands). As with many evolutionary developments, the “why” is elusive (Wayman, 2012).
long-distance telephone networks. But the amplifiers had serious flaws: the signal gain
was both nonlinear and prone to drifts, which led to distortion and volume variations.
Finally, there was a transformation in our view of living beings. Life in the nine-
teenth century was fixed on Newtonian, mechanical motion. Things alive moved,
powered perhaps by the electric spark that jolted Frankenstein’s monster to life or by
some other unknown vital force. In the 1920s, the physiologist Walter Cannon intro-
duced the term homeostasis, the ability to maintain conditions in the face of external
perturbations. These conditions include the core temperature of the body and the
concentrations of glucose, iron, oxygen, calcium, sodium, potassium, and other chem-
icals or ions. All these quantities are closely regulated, even when external conditions
change dramatically: through hot or cold, our core temperatures are close to 37◦ C,
our sodium levels stay between 135 and 145 milliequivalents per liter, and so on. The
ability to regulate so many quantities in the body using multiple, hierarchical systems
is one of the defining features of the modern view of life. Conversely, death is associ-
ated with a failure cascade that shuts down the essential functions of the body with its
nested control loops, often one after the other. Understanding homeostasis was a goal
of Wiener’s influential book Cybernetics, a founding text of control theory, discussed
below.
1.1.3 Classical Period (1930–1960)

At Bell Telephone Laboratories, a group of engineers was set up to address quality
problems in the growing telephone network. Initial progress was slow, but on Tuesday
morning, August 2, 1927, Harold Black had an epiphany while riding the Lackawanna
Ferry across the Hudson to Manhattan to get to work. His idea, sketched out on a
blank page of the New York Times, was that by taking a portion of the amplifier out-
put signal and subtracting it from the input, one could reduce distortion, at the cost of
a reduced gain. Thus was born the negative-feedback amplifier, which had the imme-
diate effect of improving long-distance telephone calls and was a key development in
the history of control. Its descendant, the operational amplifier, is described in Chap-
ter 3. More broadly, efforts to understand what Black had created led to a “classical”
formulation of control theory.
In the 1930s, Black’s colleagues at Bell Labs, Harold Nyquist and Hendrik Bode,
contributed theoretical analyses that put negative feedback and other ideas of classi-
cal control on a firmer footing. Work by Harold Hazen and Gordon Brown at MIT
also was influential. In contrast to earlier studies based on solving ordinary differ-
ential equations in the time domain, they used frequency-domain methods based on
the Laplace transform to derive a set of heuristic rules (often expressed in graphi-
cal form) for controllers of reasonable performance that work well for a relatively
large class of systems. Bode’s 1945 book Network Analysis and Feedback Amplifier
Design, delayed because of the war, is perhaps the apotheosis of classical control. It
considered robustness in depth, pointing out the fundamental compromises inherent
in control: feedback that suppresses the response to disturbances at some frequencies
will inevitably boost that response at other frequencies.
The next great impetus to the fledgling field of control engineering (and its coun-
terpart, control theory) came with World War II. Engineers worked on a variety of
control problems, notably the aiming of antiaircraft guns and automatic radar track-
ing. The Radiation Lab at MIT was a particularly important center for such research.
To the scientists and engineers working at such centers, the war made particularly clear
the need for unified, abstracted treatments of control based on concepts that were inde-
pendent of specific applications. The classified results released en masse at the end of
the war spurred rapid progress afterwards.
1.1.4 Modern Control (1945–2000)

After the end of World War II, control emerged as a distinct technical discipline. Engi-
neering societies such as the American Society for Mechanical Engineers (AMSE), the
Instrument Society of America (ISA), and the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE, later
the IEEE) all launched subgroups, and new professional societies such as the Ameri-
can Automatic Control Council (AACC) and International Federation of Automatic
Control (IFAC) were created. Where MIT had stood almost alone as an academic cen-
ter, many universities around the world added groups focusing on automatic control.
The military-industrial complex took shape: think tanks such as the RAND corpora-
tion in Santa Monica, California and the Research Institute for Advanced Study in
Baltimore and companies blurred military and industrial roles on scales larger than
had been known before the War.5 Prominent companies included IBM, General Elec-
tric, Hughes Aircraft, Bell Labs, Honeywell, Westinghouse, Leeds and Northrup in
the United States, and Siemens (Germany), Schneider (France), ASEA (Sweden), and
Yokogawa and Mitsubishi (Japan). Regular national and international conferences
began: The first IFAC World Conference, in 1960 in Moscow at the height of the Cold
War, marked the emergence of modern control.6
Modern control introduced state-space methods that marked a return to analysis in
the time domain, in contrast to the frequency-domain methods characterizing classical
control. The latter is fine for time-invariant, linear systems but cannot describe easily
time-varying, nonlinear dynamics, which is omnipresent in applications. Although
“modern,” the state-space approach reaches back to the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. and includes figures such as Aleksandr Lyapunov in Russia and
Henri Poincaré in France. A key insight was that knowing the system dynamics
could improve performance spectacularly relative to the classical methods, which were
developed assuming much less about the system under control. The resulting optimal
control gave a systematic way to generate “the best” controller for a given task. With
key contributions from Richard Bellman and Rudolph Kalman in the US and Lev Pon-
tryagin in the Soviet Union, optimal control had spectacularly successful applications
in the space program, particularly the Apollo moon-landing project.
5 The RIAS was absorbed into the Martin Marietta Corporation, which survives as Lockheed Martin.
6 Obviously, this use of “modern” is dated, as is “modern physics” (relativity and quantum mechanics),
“modern art” (Impressionism, Dada, etc.), and “modern architecture” (Bauhaus, International Style,
etc.).
The digital computer had a long gestation that was greatly advanced by war efforts –
e.g., to formulate tables to aid in fire control. The history of computers is a sep-
arate story; in control, there was a gradual shift from analog controllers to digital
controllers. The former had been implemented by external electrical, hydraulic, or
mechanical circuits. Then came a long evolution to digital mainframes, minicomput-
ers, microcomputers, laptops, and microcontrollers. In parallel came a shift from
analog control methods for continuous-time dynamical systems to digital control
methods for discrete dynamical systems.
At MIT in World War II, Norbert Wiener, introduced the stochastic analysis of
control problems at roughly the same time and independently of efforts in the Soviet
Union led by Andrei Kolmogorov. Wiener’s primary technical publication, The
Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Time Series with Engineering Appli-
cations, was circulated as a classified report in 1942 and eventually published in 1949.7
His famous 1948 contribution, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Ani-
mal and the Machine, showed that control theory applied not only to engineering
systems but also to human, biological, and social systems. The book was inspired
by the notion of homeostasis in organisms and by similar issues in controlling com-
plex systems. Coined by Wiener from the Greek word for “governance,” the word
“cybernetics” was a tribute to Maxwell’s 1868 governor paper.
The successes of optimal- and stochastic-control methods during the 1960s soon led
to overconfidence, as it was forgotten how much the optimized performance depends
on knowing system dynamics. In the 1970s and 1980s, control theory underwent some-
thing of an identity crisis. While state-space methods work well in the aerospace
industry, where dynamics can be known accurately, they do poorly in industrial set-
tings where the dynamics are more complex and harder to characterize (paper mills,
chemical plants, etc.). This disenchantment led many practical engineers (and physi-
cists) to avoid advanced techniques in favor of the tried-and-true PID controller.
Indeed, academic research on control theory from 1960 through at least the 1970s had
“negligible” impact on industrial applications. In response came a new subfield, robust
control, to optimize the performance of systems whose underlying dynamics had at
least moderate uncertainty. Its goal was to merge the robustness of classical control
methods with the performance of modern control. In parallel came the subfields of
system identification and adaptive control, where the goal was to learn better the system
dynamics, either through independent or online measurements. Common applications
of adaptive algorithms include noise-cancelling headsets, automobile cruise control,
and thermostats.
1.1.5 Contemporary Control (after 2000)

Beginning around 2000, control theorists began to tackle increasingly complex sys-
tems. One notable example is the attempt to understand biological systems from
7 Its nickname “Yellow Peril” came from the color of its cover, difficulty of its contents, and racism of its
times.
an engineering perspective emphasizing control especially. The resulting field of sys-

tems biology contrasts, occasionally sharply, with a parallel effort in physics known as
biological physics. Perhaps the most striking conclusion concerning control is strong
empirical evidence that organisms have internal models of the world that allow them
to anticipate and plan ahead. Recognizing the role of such planning and anticipation
has been key to understanding how humans move and act in the world. See Exam-
ple 3.4 for an application in connection with human balance – how we manage to
stand upright without falling down. Later, in Chapter 10 we introduce reinforcement
learning, a technique for learning how to plan and anticipate from repeated supervised
trials.
Another example is the development of autonomous, self-driving vehicles. Indeed,
the development of the automobile recapitulates the entire history of control. The
early twentieth-century automobile was a mechanical device, like the governor and
steam engine. In the 1970s, a variety of electrical control systems appeared, many
based on microcontrollers that implemented feedback loops. By 2007, the typical
automobile had 20–80 microprocessors, dealing with powertrain control to reduce
emissions (e.g., by controlling the air-fuel ratio), performance optimization (e.g., vari-
able cam timing), and driver assistance (e.g., cruise control and antilock brakes),
and more. And, while the driver – the “human in the loop” – remains the ultimate
controller for an automobile, many responsibilities are off-loaded (e.g., GPS and its
associated navigational aids). At present, many companies seek to eliminate the driver
from these control loops, a goal that must integrate many subproblems and use tech-
niques from fields such as machine learning, big data, and wireless communications.
Finally, control is expanding beyond the scale of single vehicles. Highways and smart
phones already give real-time information on traffic for more efficient routing. In
the future, platoons of trucks may travel in closely spaced groups that reduce traf-
fic and increase fuel efficiency by controlling the collective air flow around the group
(drafting).
Another application is to climate science and models of climate change, where it is
crucial to understand feedbacks on both fast and slow timescales. On the one hand,
water vapor is an effective greenhouse gas that is a “fast feedback” because the amount
of water vapor in the air adjusts within days to changes in temperature. On the other
hand, the area of land covered by glaciers and ice sheets adjusts much more slowly.
(Glaciers melt, exposing darker surfaces, which absorb more sunlight.) Such positive
feedback can lead to instability that will drive a dynamical system to another attractor
(a new steady state or, sometimes, an oscillatory one). Negative feedbacks occur in
climate models, too. As warmer temperatures lead to greater cloud cover, more light
will be reflected away by the clouds, lessening absorption. Unfortunately, positive
feedbacks seem likely to dominate.
The desire to understand complex systems has led to a discipline of network science.
In the context of control, the goal is to understand collective network dynamics rather
than individual dynamical systems. One focus has been to understand how the struc-
ture of a network affects one’s ability to control it. Applications are widespread, as
networks are everywhere, from the world-wide web to the proteins that control cellular
processes, to control of the brain and neurological disorders, to ecological species inter-
actions, to sets of friends and other social networks. See Chapter 14 for background
on the principles.
In parallel with distributed systems came distributed control. The world is mov-
ing rapidly to an Internet of things, where everyday objects are networked together
but also have autonomous controllers. The cities of today and homes of tomorrow
are or will be filled with intelligent devices that communicate with and among each
other.
These developments have been accompanied by an increasing awareness of the role
of information in control. Information theory is an older topic, born in the work of
Claude Shannon at Bell Labs, whose 1949 book The Mathematical Theory of Commu-
nication had an enormous impact, spread over many fields. Curiously, it did not have
much initial impact on control theory. But by the 2000s, it was clear that many of the
laws due to Bode, Nyquist, and others that limit what is possible in control have con-
nections to information theory. Their complicated frequency-domain expressions turn
out to have simpler time-domain versions when expressed in information-theoretic
terms. See Chapter 15.
In parallel, there has been a renewed interest from physicists in control. In addi-
tion to his paper on governors, Maxwell actually made a second, nearly simultaneous
contribution to control in 1867.8 Asked to review a draft of an early treatise on ther-
modynamics by Peter Guthrie Tait, Maxwell responded with a letter outlining the
thought experiment now known as Maxwell’s demon. In Chapter 15, we discuss how
this thought experiment led eventually to an understanding of some of the fundamen-
tal limits of control and to deep connections among thermodynamics, information
theory, and feedback.
Finally, there has been great theoretical interest and practical success in controlling
quantum systems. We give a brief introduction in Chapter 13.
1.2 Lessons from History
History can be very interesting on its own and can illuminate the sociology of a
profession – where engineers are “coming from.” But we can also learn lessons from
history. From control applications, we can extract the types of goals or objectives that
control can have. We can also attempt to define terms such as feedback and feedback
loop that can be slippery when tested against the full range of situations where the
terms are used. Finally, we can classify control – open and closed loop, autonomous
and nonautonomous, simple and complex controller – to help make sense of the
various historical examples.
8 Maxwell’s two contributions to control theory are considered to be among his “minor work,” but
only compared to those on kinetic theory and, especially, on the unified description of electricity and
magnetism.
1.2.1 Goals of Control

From the historical development, we can abstract several goals for control systems. To
best express these goals, we define an internal state x, a real-valued vector that evolves
continuously in time t and obeys an ordinary differential equation, ẋ(t) = f (x), a case
that we shall study a lot in this book.9 The internal state might correspond to a point
in phase space, as in classical mechanics, but the notion is more general in that any
dynamical rule will do, including ones with phenomenological damping terms, and the
like. We will discuss this notion of internal state in more detail beginning in Chapter 2.
Here, we just list some goals for control and illustrate them in sketches at right:
1 Regulation. The internal state should be kept constant (e.g., x(t) = x∗ ). This was
historically perhaps the first goal of control. The idea is to fix a system’s state in
the face of perturbations of various sorts. Thus, at home, we regulate temperature
against cold and hot swings of the environment. Our body does much the same
for our internal body temperature. And temperature control is often an important
requirement in an experiment. Of course, many other quantities such as pressure,
position, velocity, concentration – any kind of internal state or quantity related to
such a state – can be regulated.
2 Tracking. The system state vector x(t) should approximate a desired time-dependent
trajectory x∗ (t) as closely as possible. That is, we generalize regulation about a
constant to regulation about a curve in state space.
3 Changing the attractor. Rather than trying to generate a particular trajectory, we
can change the type of motion that a dynamical system can generate. For example,
a system that would normally oscillate might be altered to have a steady state. More
complicated motion such as chaos can also be suppressed. Conversely, you might
want to induce any of these types of motion.
4 Collective dynamics. The goal is to induce multiple dynamical systems to work
together to accomplish some task. An example is synchronization, where two or
more systems evolve identically in time, even in the absence of “target” system
dynamics. Temporal behavior can also be correlated according to more complex
rules, as found in musical ensembles and dancing. By contrast, swarming, illustrated
at right, refers to correlated spatial motion.
While not exhaustive, the above list gives a sense of the broad range of possibilities.
Mostly, we will focus on regulation and tracking, as they involve most of the basic
ideas and issues in control theory. In Chapter 11, we discuss some of the other types
of goals.
1.2.2 What is a Feedback Loop?

Examining the historical development shows an evolution in the different types of
control and controllers. Figure 1.2 shows four examples. In (a), we show the governor
9 We shall also study many other types of dynamical systems, such as extended systems, discrete-time
evolution, and discrete states.
t
Fig. 1.2 Four examples of feedback systems. (a) Watt’s steam engine with governor (labeled D). Adapted from Routledge
(1900). (b) Positive feedback loop can reinforce climate change. Author’s adaptation of photograph supplied by
Monica Bertolazzi/Getty Images. (c) Analog feedback controller with accompanying sensor and power ampliﬁer. (d)
Digital feedback controller with digital-analog and analog-digital converters.
depicted previously in Figure 1.1 integrated into the full steam engine designed by
Watt. The governor is indicated by “D” in the drawing. If you had not already seen
a governor (e.g., in Figure 1.1), you might have difficulty identifying it amid all the
clutter of parts. The whole “contraption” is one physical system consisting of many
wheels, rods, and the like joined together in complicated ways, and nothing in particu-
lar distinguishes the pieces that form part of the engine from those that form part of
the controller. Both are obviously physical subsystems.
In (b), we set history aside to consider a “natural system,” where it is difficult to
distinguish the controller from the system. The system is the earth, or at least its
climate system, and control (in this case, an undesirable destabilizing control) is given
by sea ice and ocean.
In (c), we show the kind of analog controller that evolved in the first half of the
twentieth century. It consists of the physical system of interest, plus some add-ons:
controller, sensor, power amplifier, and power supply (not shown). In contrast to the
cases of (a) and (b), it is easy to identify all elements – they are connected by wires –
and each is obviously a physical (sub)system on its own. The add-ons are analog
circuits. The system of interest can range widely (e.g., a block of metal to keep at
constant temperature). In Chapter 3, we will see how to make a controller circuit
using operational amplifiers.
In (d), we have transitioned from analog to digital control. The controller is
now implemented as a program on a computer (or microcontroller or other similar
digital device). The computer communicates in 1s and 0s to the analog world via
converters that take a number and output a corresponding voltage, and vice versa.
After conversion to analog signals, the other elements are the same as in (c). See
Chapter 5.
One of the most important concepts expressed in Figure 1.2 is the notion of a feed-
back loop, where the output is “fed back” to the input. The system thus affects the
controller (via a measurement) and, conversely, the controller affects the system (by
sending out a response). In the sketch at right, we show the structure of this basic,
stripped-down notion of a feedback loop. Its two distinct parts, the system of interest
x and controller y, typically obey coupled dynamical equations, such as
ẋ = f (x, y) , ẏ = g(x, y) . (1.1)
The sketch illustrates two essential features of a feedback loop: separability and
causality.
Separability implies that the dynamics can be decoupled into two coupled (vector)
equations (here into x and y) in a way that makes sense physically. That is, x and
y should each describe physically distinct systems with a meaningful identity when
considered in isolation. Mathematically, in the equation ẋ = f (x, y), we could freeze
y at some constant value (e.g., 0) and then look at the “pure” x dynamics. Or we
could do the same with the y dynamics. But physically, the separation should make
sense. For example, the N identical molecules in a gas are typically described as a
single N-particle system of interacting particles, whereas two large particles in a gas of
N molecules are usefully described separately, and one can imagine the motion of one
“controlling” the motion of the other.
Causality is linked with notions of time: The controller first measures and then
responds. Or, x affects y, which then affects x. In Eq. (1.1), imagine that the coupled
system settles to a fixed point {x∗ , y∗ }. If the response to fast variations goes to zero
as the frequency characterizing the variation increases, then some kind of notion of
causality is present. In Chapter 15, we will develop the formal links between causality
and response functions, beginning with the classic Kramers–Kronig relations.
Not all coupled systems form feedback loops. Imagine a simpler set of equations,
f (x, y) = 0, g(x, y) = 0, which also have solution {x∗ , y∗ }. But now if we perturb one of
these equations, the equilibrium solution will be modified instantaneously, because we
are just solving an algebraic set of equations. Even though it is still true that x affects
y and vice versa, we would probably not call this a case of feedback – it would just be
coupling.
We might try to formalize this notion by comparing the interaction time scales, the
time it takes x to affect y or vice versa, with time scales within each system. Typically,
the interaction times will be faster than most time scales in the system. If not, as in
the “instantaneous” case from the previous paragraph, we would hesitate to call the
interaction a feedback loop. I am sure that one can find violations of any specific
requirement, making these criteria heuristic, not rigorous. But I think they can be
useful in understanding the different types of systems that different communities call
“feedback loops.”
“Feedback loop” is thus a theoretical construct imposed on a system. In a modern
version of a controlled system where each element (controller, amplifier, sensor, sys-
tem, etc.) is housed in its own box and connected to other elements by wires, it is easy
to see the loop. The governor and similar devices lack the wires, but we can still easily
distinguish system from controller. In the climate-change example, still more imagina-
tion is required. Indeed, in a number of fields such as biophysics, identifying feedback
loops is an important research topic. The cell is a complicated pile of proteins, but the
proteins function as machines – of a different sort, since they live in a strongly fluc-
tuating environment, but machines nonetheless. They are every bit as complex as the
mechanical factories of the machine age, and there has been a long effort to identify
functions such as gene regulation, where feedback plays a key role.
Finally, one aspect that is implicit in the notion of feedback loops but not readily
apparent visually, is the notion of correcting against uncertainty of various types. We
will see that the major – some would argue the only – reason to use feedback is to
compensate for unknown disturbances and system dynamics. If there is no uncertainty,
then other types of control such as feedforward (see below) will be more appropriate.
1.2.3 Progression of Control Types
In Figure 1.2, we see a progression in abstraction of control systems, from “con-

traptions” – machines that are constructed to improve a particular performance
characteristic such as engine rotation rate – to an ensemble of physical subsystems
to digital systems that seem quite divorced from the original physical phenomena,
even though computers are, of course, physical systems in themselves. This increas-
ing abstraction has been useful in understanding key issues: the need for feedback
loops, the role of time delays and noise, and so on. It is at the cost of an analysis that
strays far from any given particular system, and one must be careful in applications
that too much has not been lost. For example, we will see that all controller design
implies a model of the system, whether explicitly expressed or not. The quality of
control will then be linked to the quality of the model.
How does feedback in natural systems fit into the above picture? For example, we
have seen that in climate science, positive and negative feedback is an important part of
understanding the earth’s climate and its response to man-made changes. On the one
hand, you might take the view that, since these are entirely natural systems that have
not been engineered, feedback is not an appropriate concept. On the other hand, the
terms are in common use and well accepted. They are best applied to situations where
one can distinguish subsystems that operate independently, at least to some extent. In
the example shown in Figure 1.2b, the different parts (air temperature, sea ice, and so
on) each have distinct identities and can be measured independently. Thus, it acts very
similarly to engineered systems such as the steam-engine governor, and using the term
“feedback” seems reasonable. But even in climate science, identifying all such relevant
feedbacks is far from clear, never mind quantifying their potential impacts.
1.2.4 Classifying Control and Controllers

We introduce a few distinctions that will be useful in organizing our understanding
of control. In particular, we distinguish between open-loop and closed-loop designs,
between feedforward and feedback control algorithms, and between autonomous and
non-autonomous systems. We will not try for rigorous definitions because these terms
are used inconsistently in different communities. Moreover, without learning more
about the subject, it is difficult to appreciate fine points. Nonetheless, there are general
ideas and useful distinctions that are worth making.
Open and Closed Loops

We have already met the concept of feedback and the feedback loop in Section 1.2.2.
We view feedback as a technique for closed-loop control, which is a design where the
control is based on the system’s current (and past) states. So pervasive is closed-loop
control that its alternative is known as open-loop control, which is a strange name
when you think about it. The distinction is shown graphically in Figure 1.3. Open-
loop designs use feedforward, where an input is “fed forward” to the system, and the
control acts independently of the system state.10 Although feedforward might seem just
a limited version of feedback, its reliance on anticipated events can speed response
relative to feedback, which reacts to perturbations after the fact. Feedforward also
will not destabilize a system, a pitfall of feedback. We will see in Chapter 3 that the
best control designs often incorporate elements of both feedforward and feedback.
The distinction between open- and closed-loop control makes sense – and indeed
resulted from, human-engineered systems, where subsystems and wiring connections
are often known. It is less clearly useful when applied to the feedbacks of natural
systems such as the climate example given above.
Types of control. (a) open loop; (b) closed loop. Fig. 1.3
10 Some people reserve the term “feedforward” for the special case where measurements of incoming distur-
bances allow a controller to act before the disturbance arrives. We will refer to that case as disturbance
feedforward (Section 3.4.3) and here use “feedforward” more broadly.
Negative and Positive Feedback

Another basic distinction in control theory is between negative and positive feedback.
To develop our intuition, consider a system with a static, open-loop response, where
the output y is a static function of the input u. Since the response of a physical system
is limited in range, let
y = satg (u) . (1.2)
where the saturation function is defined at left: the output y goes from 0 to 1 as the
input u goes from 0 to g−1 . The constant g is the linear gain of the response function.
Using the open-loop response as a reference (b), we can explore the impact of neg-
ative (a) and positive (c) feedbacks in Figure 1.4. In (a), we show a block diagram
illustrating the signal flow for negative feedback, with k < 0. The output y is fed back
and subtracted from the input, using a feedback gain, k. There is now a closed-loop
response
y = satg (u − |k|y) ≡ satg (u) , (1.3)
where the new saturation function has gain

g
g = . (1.4)
1 + |k|g
The linear-response range of the input has increased from g−1 to g−1 + |k|, as illustrated
by the dotted lines in the response curve at lower left in Figure 1.4a. Notice that
for large gain (|k| g−1 ), the linear range is approximately independent of the linear
range of the original system. If the goal is to regulate the output y, we see that we
can keep y in a given range over a wider range of inputs, which might come from a
noisy environment. Thus, negative feedback can make the output less sensitive (more
robust) to variations of the input.
t
Fig. 1.4 Feedback aﬀects response. (a) Negative feedback increases the linear range. (b) Open-loop response. (c) Positive
feedback decreases the linear range, until it produces a switch (left) or memory (right). Adapted from Sepulchre et al.
(2019).
Figure 1.4c and the sketch at right show the effects of positive feedback, k > 0. For
k < g−1 the response is steepened, obeying
g
g = , (1.5)
1 − kg
until at k = g−1 , the gain diverges and the response becomes a step (part c, lower left
sketch, and vertical line at left). Such a response can be viewed as a switch or threshold
detector. It implies extreme sensitivity: a finite response due to an infinitesimal input
variation. For larger gains k > g−1 , the response has a backwards slope, and it is
easy to show that there is hysteresis and a binary output. The output is y = 0 until it
suddenly jumps to y = 1 when u is increased from negative values through 0. But if
the output is y = 1 for positive u, it stays at that value until u = g−1 − k < 0, when it
transitions back to y = 0. See the lower right sketch in Figure 1.4c. We have created a
memory, which can exist in two states over some range of input values.
The system described here is very simple, as it is just a static response. Yet already,
we see that negative feedback can regulate an output, making it less sensitive to vari-
ations in its input and that positive feedback can create a switch or memory. In
Chapter 3, we shall explore how dynamics generalizes this picture, leading to gains
that can be negative at some time scales (frequencies) but positive at others. And in
Chapter 11, we will understand better how the positive-feedback response is shaped
by nonlinearities in the dynamics. Here, the nonlinearity corresponds to the saturation
of the output at 0 and 1.
Autonomous and Nonautonomous

To understand the various types of feedback systems, physicists interested in control
have classified systems into autonomous and nonautonomous cases. The terminology
comes from the analogous classification of ordinary differential equations:11
ẋ = f (x) , ẋ = f (x, t) , (1.6)

autonomous nonautonomous
where the distinction is that the dynamics of nonautonomous systems have explicit
time dependence, whereas autonomous systems do not. Thus, Watt’s combination of
steam engine and governor would be an autonomous feedback system, as the ultimate
power sources are simply two heat reservoirs at different temperatures. All the time
dependence of motion and its regulation is generated through the internal dynamics.
By contrast, digital control systems with their explicit measurements and decisions
taken internally in a computer program would be the archetype of nonautonomous
control.
One subtlety is that the distinction between autonomous and nonautonomous
depends on the level of description. This is true for the theory of ordinary dif-
ferential equations, where one can always rewrite an n-dimensional system with
11 We define and review such equations in more detail in Chapter 2.
nonautonomous dynamics as the projection of a system that lives in an n + 1-

dimensional state space. That is,
⎧
⎪
⎪
⎨ ẋ = f (x, xt )
ẋ = f (x, t) → ⎪
⎪ (1.7)
⎩ ẋt = 1, y(0) = 0 .
In Eq. (1.7), the x subsystem behaves nonautonomously in both cases. Because the
second system has xt = t, we would not be able to distinguish the variable xt from time
t.
Physically, the dynamics describing one system may be nonautonomous, but they
can be part of a larger autonomous system. For example, a digital control loop (Fig-
ure 1.2d) implies that the system under control will seem nonautonomous, because the
digital controller can drive the system in a time-dependent way. But the entire system –
with computer, amplifiers, system, and the like – is autonomous because it is powered
by fixed power supplies delivering a constant power level.
Simple and Complex Controllers

Let us define complex controllers as ones that are (equivalent to) universal Turing
machines. In particular, they are capable of implementing any algorithm. Sim-
ple ones are all the others. This distinction will allow us to distinguish controllers
depicted in Figure 1.2c from d. The analog controller in (c) can be very simple.
We will see in Chapter 3 how to make a basic controller from an electrical circuit
with just a small number of components. The controller in (d) is a digital com-
puter, and we know that such machines can be programmed to give almost any
output.
The distinction has the advantage of allowing us to include in the set of complex
control systems cybernetical cases, where a human being is part of the control loop.
(If you drive a car or ride a bike, you are the human in the control loop.)
As with the other distinctions, this definition is meant to be more instructive than
rigorous. In particular, we can imagine a family of machines progressing in complex-
ity from the simple circuits of basic analog controllers to the universal computers in
digital controllers. Just where to draw the line between simple and complex may not
be immediately obvious.
Other ambiguous cases would arise for natural systems such as the climate-change
example shown in Figure 1.2b. Consider, too, a biophysical example, the various
functions of a cell. Some actions – sensing the environment, deciding which gene-
expression pathway to activate, translating the appropriate proteins – might end up
be classified as simple. And the brain, as we have already noted, is complex in our
terminology. But what about the metabolic control system, which is fiendishly com-
plex? And immune response? Where to draw the line? Conceptually, the requirement
to be a Turing machine seems reasonable, but understanding whether a given system
is complex may not be an easy task.
1.3 Control and Information
We already mentioned briefly the recent interest in links between control theory and
information theory. Historically, the two subjects grew up together. Wiener’s book
on cybernetics and Shannon’s major papers on information theory both appeared in
1948, and the two authors knew each other well. Yet, until recently, there were very
few explicit connections between the two topics. We will develop some of these connec-
tions in Chapter 15, but it is useful to summarize even now the heuristic perspective
that comes with this view. In the information-theoretic version of control, the quality
of control is limited by the information available about the system of interest. Control
then consists of gathering information, making a decision about what to do, and then
acting. How to act? A basic principle is
Exploit what you know; learn what you can.
These eight words summarize most of the field. If this book is long, it is because
what you know or can learn and what is worth doing with that knowledge differ greatly
from situation to situation. This book is a kind of catalog of situational responses
incorporating these guiding ideas.12
In the next chapter, we begin with a discussion of continuous-time dynamical sys-
tems, which will be the focus of much of our discussion. In part a review, it introduces
some differences in the way engineers, as opposed to physicists, view such systems.
Read it even if you know the general topic. Then, in Chapters 3 and 4, we present
core elements of classical and modern control theory. These chapters form the core
of a brief course on control. Later chapters will develop more sophisticated and more
specialized points.
1.4 Notes and References
The first historical book on control was published by Otto Mayr in German in 1969
and in English translation a year later (Mayr, 1970). At the time, feedback was viewed
as largely a twentieth-century. development, with a few antecedents such as Watt’s
governor; Mayr showed that it had ancient historical roots. Mayr’s work was sum-
marized by Bennett (2002), who “[took] up the story where Mayr left off” and wrote
a two-volume history of control covering 1800–1930 (Bennett, 1979) and 1930–1955
(Bennett, 1993). The water-clock description comes from Mayr, but the sketch is based
on Lepschy (1992), who also gives a quantitative analysis of the clock dynamics and a
description of medieval mechanical clocks, too.
12 You might argue that it is better to learn before exploiting. But learning has a cost: Typically, we start
with prior knowledge and see how far we get. Only when simple, generic solutions fail do we need to
learn more.
Unfortunately, the three books by Mayr and Bennett are all out of print and
relatively hard to find. Two useful and brief historical summaries are by Bennett
(1996) and Bissell (2009). The presentation I give here also draws from a review by
two influential control theorists (Åström and Kumar, 2014) that includes more mod-
ern developments. (The term “hidden technology” is due to Åström.) The review on
quantum feedback by Zhang et al. (2017) has many good insights in its brief sections
on history and on classical control.
The classification into periods given is a mixed scheme taken from Bennett (first
four periods) and Åström and Kumar for the “contemporary” period, although the
name is my own coinage. I also increased the overlap in dates and reclassified some
material. For example, the work of Wiener and Kolmogorov on stochastic systems
occurred prior to and during World War II but did not have an impact until well
after.
The description of homeostasis and the view of life as a hierarchy of regulated
systems and death as a failure cascade is taken from a beautiful, poignant essay by
Siddhartha Mukherjee (2018) on the death of his father. Although the term “home-
ostasis” was coined by Walter Cannon in the 1920s, the notion itself was discussed in
the 1860s by Claude Bernard, in work that had no influence until the early twentieth
century (Gross, 1998).
The Harold Black epiphany that led to the negative-feedback amplifier is recounted
in Black (1977), but David Mindell notes how, like most “origin myths,” it gives short
shrift to its precursors and the many contributions required to abstract the problem of
“signals” well enough to formulate such ideas (Mindell, 2002). Mindell also presents a
useful “prehistory” to Cybernetics (Wiener, 1961, originally published in 1948), draw-
ing attention to the “human in the loop” in instrumentation developed in American
industry (Ford Instrument Company, Sperry Gyroscope, Bell Telephone Laboratory)
and how these control systems fed into US military efforts prior to and during World
War II (Mindell, 2002).
For a review of control applications in the automotive industry, see Cook et al.
(2007). The discussion of climate change is from Hansen et al. (2017). A key paper
in the development of systems biology and control is Hartwell et al. (1999). Ingalls
(2013) discusses how to model control of the metabolic system. And Germain (2001)
reviews how similar ideas connect to the immune system. McNamee and Wolpert
(2019) review, from the perspective of control, the hypothesis that animals (especially
humans) use internal models of the world to make rational inferences about sensory
data and plans for action. Tang and Bassett (2018) discuss efforts to control dynamics
in brain networks.
The note at the end of Section 1.1.4 on the “negligible” impact of academic con-
trol methods prior to the development of robust control is from Morari and Zafirioiu
(1989). For more discussion, see Chapter 9 and also Åström and Kumar (2014). The
discussion of goals is adapted (and then slightly altered) from a discussion by Fradkov
(2007), Chapter 2. The notion of feedback without loops has been emphasized (from
a slightly different point of view) by Jacobs (2014). Finally, the discussion of negative
and positive feedback is from Sepulchre et al. (2019).
O’Keeffe et al. (2017) contrast the notions of synchronization (temporal correlation)
with swarming (spatial correlation) and go on to introduce dynamical systems with
spatiotemporal correlations, which they dub swarmalators.
2 Dynamical Systems
And now, reader . . . Bestir thyself . . . for, though we will always lend thee
proper assistance in difficult places, as we do not, like some others, expect
thee to use the arts of divination to discover our meaning, yet we shall not
indulge thy laziness where nothing but thy own attention is required; for thou
art highly mistaken if thou dost imagine that we intended, when we began this
great work, to leave thy sagacity nothing to do; or that, without sometimes
exercising this talent, thou wilt be able to travel through our pages with any
pleasure or profit to thyself –
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
Control-theory techniques allow us to modify a dynamical system. Perhaps we want to

regulate a physical variable such as temperature or pressure, linearize the response of a
sensor, speed up a sluggish system or slow down a jumpy one, or stabilize an unstable
system or destabilize a stable one (to create an oscillator or a switch). Whatever the
reason, we alter a given dynamical system in hopes of creating a “better” one.
Before “improving” the dynamics of a system, one should understand it. In this
chapter, we review ideas and tools about dynamics that mostly should be familiar
from introductory and intermediate physics courses. We present just enough material
to get started and will return to and extend the ideas introduced here later. The value
of outlining this material in advance is to clearly separate the tools that are common
to the analysis of all dynamical systems, whatever the application, from the tools that
are important for controlling systems.
We start on familiar ground, showing how to write equations of motion in a com-
pact form. We diverge, however, from traditional physics presentations by specifying
carefully how inputs affect the dynamics and how outputs, or measurements, are made
on the system. Such care about inputs and outputs will turn out to be crucial for
successful control.
Dynamical systems are characterized by an internal state vector x(t), which can
represent a position, a velocity, a concentration, or any other variable relevant to the
system being considered. In this chapter and the next two, we will assume that both
the state x and time t are continuous variables. In Chapter 5, we will focus on the case
of discrete time and (approximately) continuous x, which is relevant for computer-
based controllers. Chapter 12 introduces discrete-state dynamics, with discrete (or
continuous) observations.
Most dynamical systems obey nonlinear equations. While there are tools for under-
standing certain aspects of nonlinear systems, most must be studied case by case. In
contrast, linear systems can be analyzed completely. We will review appropriate tools,
24
such as the Laplace transform, a cousin of the more familiar Fourier transform. In tra-
ditional presentations of control theory, linear systems have pride of place. The cynic
would say that such systems are favored because they are the only ones we understand
in general. Although there is some truth to this notion,1 the motivation is more subtle.
We can often model the behavior of a nonlinear system near a point of interest using
a linear approximation. If our model and our control algorithms are good, the differ-
ence between the real dynamics will stay small enough that a linear approximation is
valid. For nonlinear systems, we focus on a few key concepts: the multiplicity of pos-
sible solutions, the stability of base solutions, and bifurcations (or switching) between
different solutions.
Advice to students: If you are familiar with the analysis of dynamical systems, this
chapter will remind you of ideas and will introduce notation. Since some of the lan-
guage and applications are likely to be unfamiliar, you should at least skim these
pages.
If you are less familiar with this material, you may not want to go through the
chapter all at once but rather cover the material as needed. For example, Chapter 3
covers frequency-domain methods and depends largely on Section 2.3, which itself
refers to the Appendix online, Section A.4. But other sections from this chapter are
not needed.
2.1 Introduction: The Pendulum as a Dynamical System
Before we consider a general formulation, let us start with a familiar dynamical system,
the pendulum, illustrated at right. From Newton’s laws (or using a Lagrangian), one
can write the equation for torque dynamics,
m2 θ̈ + mg sin θ = 0 , (2.1)
where m is the mass of the pendulum bob, its length, and g the acceleration of grav-
ity, and where we neglect any dissipation. We will use various notations to denote
derivatives, θ̇(t) = dt θ = dθ/dt , and partial derivatives, U x (x, t) = ∂ x U = ∂U/∂x, at
fixed t.
Although Eq. (2.1) seems to depend on three parameters (m, , and g), they can all
be eliminated by a careful rescaling of variables. Divide by m2 and define ω20 = g/,
giving
θ̈ + ω20 sin θ = 0 . (2.2)
Next, define a dimensionless time t ≡ ω0 t and transform the angular acceleration as

dtt θ → (ω20 ) dt t θ. Finally, divide by ω20 in Eq. (2.2) and write
θ̈ + sin θ = 0 . (2.3)
1 It is a bit like looking for your lost keys under a streetlight, because that is where you can see.
26 Dynamical Systems
In Eq. (2.3), we let the same variable denote the dimensional and dimensionless
quantities (i.e., we drop the overbar and let t → t). This reduces notation clutter.
Equation (2.3) is a second-order, nonlinear ordinary differential equation (ODE). We
can rewrite it as a pair of coupled first-order equations by defining x1 (t) ≡ θ(t) and
x2 (t) ≡ θ̇. The two new variables, x1 and x2 , can then be grouped into an internal
state vector x(t) (“state vector” for short), and we can write Eq. (2.3) as a nonlinear,
first-order vector ODE:
d x1 x2 f (x)
= ≡ 1 =⇒ ẋ = f (x) , (2.4)
dt x2 − sin x1 f2 (x)
where f is a vector field (with two components here) that depends on the state vector x.
In short, we have gone from Eq. (2.1) to ẋ = f (x). We can always put the models and
equations of motion for dynamical systems that we consider into this general form.
Motion in Phase Space

Although it is possible to solve Eq. (2.3) analytically in terms of an elliptic integral,
most nonlinear ODEs cannot be solved exactly.2 One way to make further progress
was pioneered by Poincaré and others at the beginning of the twentieth century. In
their geometric approach, we analyze the trajectories of the state vector x(t) in a phase-
space plot.3 For a two-dimensional state vector, the result is a two-dimensional phase
plot, which is shown for the pendulum in Figure 2.1. We can characterize the trajecto-
ries by their energy, because the latter is a conserved constant during motion. (Proof:
integrate Eq. (2.3) to find 12 θ̇2 − cos θ + 1 = E, where E is the total energy and satisfies
Ė = 0. The constant is chosen so that E = 0 when the pendulum is at rest and hanging
down.)
For energies less than Ec = 2, the trajectory is a circle about the origin, corre-
sponding to an oscillation of the bob about the downward position. For E > Ec ,
the pendulum swings end over end in a “running trajectory.” For E = Ec , the pendu-
lum starts upside down and makes one swing and, after an infinite amount of time,
t
Fig. 2.1 State-space trajectories of a nonlinear simple pendulum without friction. (a) Oscillator angle versus time, showing
end-over-end motion, an approximation to a heteroclinic connection, and oscillations. (b) Phase-space plot of angular
velocity versus angle. Because angles are periodic in 2π radians, we should view the repeating plot as being wrapped
around a cylinder.
2 Even a solution in terms of an elliptic integral is not always interesting. Although knowing an analytic
form can lead to useful asymptotic expressions, general evaluations must still be done numerically.
3 The physics term phase space is just a particular example of a state space, where the internal state vector
components are positions and momenta. More generally, the internal state x can be any dynamical
quantity.
returns to the upright position, a trajectory known as a heteroclinic connection. The

three classes of trajectory are illustrated (for energies E = 2.001, 2.000, and 1.999) in
Figure 2.1a. Note that because of errors in the integration routine, the heteroclinic
connection begins another swing after a finite time.
In phase space, trajectories cannot cross by the uniqueness of solutions to ODEs.4
In two dimensions, the closed orbits corresponding to oscillatory motion divide the
state space into two disjoint sets (inside and outside). As a consequence, a trajectory
confined to a region for all time has at least one fixed point or limit cycle in that region
(Poincaré-Bendixson theorem). Otherwise, it is impossible that trajectories not cross
each other after an infinite amount of time. Of course, the phase space often has
more than two dimensions. In higher dimensions, lines are generically skew: although
they may seem to cross when projected down to a two-dimensional subspace, they do
not cross in the full space. The motion can then have more exotic structure (strange
attractors, chaos); see Chapter 11.
There are two general features of phase-space plots. One is that they shift
the focus from understanding single solutions to understanding the properties of
groups of solutions (that is, those originating from a region of phase space). Also,
they suggest the use of geometrical and topological methods to analyze motion
(Section 2.6).
Linearization
Another way to make progress is to consider motion that does not deviate much from
an equilibrium solution. For example, Eq. (2.3) has two equilibrium solutions, θ0 = 0
and π, corresponding to a pendulum that hangs straight down or balances upside
down, respectively. Small deviations about one of the equilibria, say θ0 = 0, can be
studied by linearizing: sin θ ≈ θ, leading to a linear ODE,
d x1 0 1 x1
θ̈ + θ = 0 =⇒ = =⇒ ẋ = Ax (2.5)
dt x2 −1 0 x2
where the dynamics is encoded into a 2 × 2 matrix, A. Solving Eq. (2.5) gives
θ(t) = θ(0) cos t + θ̇0 (0) sin t

=⇒ θ(t) = θ(0) cos ω0 t + θ̇0 (0)/ω0 sin ω0 t , (2.6)
with θ(0) = x1 (0) and θ̇0 = x2 (0) the initial angular position and velocity. Equa-
tion (2.6) is in dimensional units. We can thus interpret ω0 as the angular frequency
of the oscillations. Note how linearizing the equations allows us to solve for the evo-
lution of the state variable x(t) in terms of combinations of (complex) exponential
functions.
4 In Figure 2.1, trajectories seem to cross at the unstable fixed points. Remember that these fixed points
correspond to pointing up, with zero angular velocity. It takes an infinite amount of time for a trajectory
to go from one such fixed point to another with Δθ = 2π.
28 Dynamical Systems
So far, we have not specified how the outside world interacts with our pendulum.
Let us start with the input. One way to alter the motion of a pendulum is to exert an
external torque τ(t). Equation (2.1) then becomes
m2 θ̈ + mg sin θ = τ(t) → θ̈ + sin θ = u(t) , (2.7)
with u = τ/(m2 ω20 ). The variable u(t) is known as a control input. In state-vector
notation, we have, for the nonlinear and linear (about 0) cases
0 1 x1 0
ẋ = f (x, u) → + u → Ax + Bu . (2.8)
−1 0 x2 1
The vector B couples the input u(t) to the state-vector dynamics. That B1 = 0 and
B2 = 1 follows since u is a torque.
Next, we consider observations, or system outputs. A common situation is that
we measure the angular displacement. We might also measure the angular velocity
directly, for example by using an accelerometer located at the pendulum bob.5 Or we
might measure both quantities. For control, it matters a great deal what information
is available about the dynamical system. We introduce an explicit notation to spec-
ify what exactly is being measured, defining a (single) output variable y(t) as a linear
combination of state-vector elements:
x1
y = C1 C2 ≡ Cx . (2.9)
x2
If only the angular position is measured, C1 = 1 and C2 = 0; if only the angular
velocity is measured, then C1 = 0, C2 = 1. If both are measured independently, then y
is a two-component vector and C a 2 × 2 matrix – equal to the identity matrix in this
special case, so that y1 = x1 and y2 = x2 .
2.2 General Formulation
Motivated in part by the pendulum example, we will discuss dynamical systems more
generally. We start by assuming that the dynamics can be written as6
ẋ = f (x, u) y = h(x, u) , (2.10)
where there are n linearly independent elements of the state vector x, m independent
inputs (driving terms) u, and p independent outputs y. The state vector generalizes
the notion of phase space from classical mechanics: it contains all the information
5 The pendulum bob traces a circle, implying a radial acceleration of a = θ̇ 2 , in addition to gravity.
6 Even more general forms of dynamics can be envisioned (e.g., F( ẋ, x, u) = 0). Such a form can represent
differential-algebraic equations (DAE), differential equations supplemented by algebraic constraints.
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European revolutions and wars, surround the State department, and
infest unsuspecting politicians with illegible testimonials in unknown
tongues.
August 5th.—The roads from the station are crowded with troops,
coming from the North as fast as the railway can carry them. It is
evident, as the war fever spreads, that such politicians as Mr.
Crittenden, who resist the extreme violence of the Republican party,
will be stricken down. The Confiscation Bill, for the emancipation of
slaves and the absorption of property belonging to rebels, has,
indeed, been boldly resisted in the House of Representatives; but it
passed with some trifling amendments. The journals are still busy
with the affair of Bull Run, and each seems anxious to eclipse the
other in the absurdity of its statements. A Philadelphia journal, for
instance, states to-day that the real cause of the disaster was not a
desire to retreat, but a mania to advance. In its own words, “the only
drawback was the impetuous feeling to go a-head and fight.”
Because one officer is accused of drunkenness a great movement is
on foot to prevent the army getting any drink at all.
General M‘Clellan invited the newspaper correspondents in
Washington to meet him to-day, and with their assent drew up a
treaty of peace and amity, which is a curiosity in its way. In the first
place, the editors are to abstain from printing anything which can
give aid or comfort to the enemy, and their correspondents are to
observe equal caution; in return for which complaisance,
Government is to be asked to give the press opportunities for
obtaining and transmitting intelligence suitable for publication,
particularly touching engagements with the enemy. The Confederate
privateer Sumter has forced the blockade at New Orleans, and has
already been heard of destroying a number of Union vessels.
August 6th.—Prince Napoleon, anxious to visit the battle-field at
Bull Run, has, to Mr. Seward’s discomfiture, applied for passes, and
arrangements are being made to escort him as far as the
Confederate lines. This is a recognition of the Confederates, as a
belligerent power, which is by no means agreeable to the authorities.
I drove down to the Senate, where the proceedings were very
uninteresting, although Congress was on the eve of adjournment,
and returning visited Mr. Seward, Mr. Bates, Mr. Cameron, Mr. Blair,
and left cards for Mr. Brekinridge. The old woman who opened the
door at the house where the latter lodged said, “Massa Brekinridge
pack up all his boxes; I s’pose he not cum back here again.”
August 7th.—In the evening I went to Mr. Seward’s, who gave a
reception in honour of Prince Napoleon. The Minister’s rooms were
crowded and intensely hot. Lord Lyons and most of the diplomatic
circle were present. The Prince wore his Order of the Bath, and bore
the onslaughts of politicians, male and female, with much good
humour. The contrast between the uniforms of the officers of the
United States army and navy and those of the French in the Prince’s
suit, by no means redounded to the credit of the military tailoring of
the Americans. The Prince, to whom I was presented by Mr. Seward,
asked me particularly about the roads from Alexandria to Fairfax
Court-house, and from there to Centreville and Manassas. I told him
I had not got quite as far as the latter place, at which he laughed. He
inquired with much interest about General Beauregard, whether he
spoke good French, if he seemed a man of capacity, or was the
creation of an accident and of circumstances. He has been to Mount
Vernon, and is struck with the air of neglect around the place. Two of
his horses dropped dead from the heat on the journey, and the
Prince, who was perspiring profusely in the crowded room, asked me
whether the climate was not as bad as midsummer in India. His
manner was perfectly easy, but he gave no encouragement to bores,
nor did he court popularity by unusual affability, and he moved off
long before the guests were tired of looking at him. On returning to
my rooms a German gentleman named Bing—who went out with the
Federal army from Washington, was taken prisoner at Bull’s Run,
and carried to Richmond—came to visit me, but his account of what
he saw in the dark and mysterious South was not lucid or interesting.
August 8th.—I had arranged to go with Mr. Olmsted and Mr.
Ritchie to visit the hospitals, but the heat was so intolerable, we
abandoned the idea till the afternoon, when we drove across the
long bridge and proceeded to Alexandria. The town, which is now
fully occupied by military, and is abandoned by the respectable
inhabitants, has an air, owing to the absence of women and children,
which tells the tale of a hostile occupation. In a large building, which
had once been a school, the wounded of Bull Run were lying, not
uncomfortably packed, nor unskilfully cared for, and the
arrangements were, taken altogether, creditable to the skill and
humanity of the surgeons. Close at hand was the church in which
George Washington was wont in latter days to pray, when he drove
over from Mount Vernon—further on, Marshal House, where
Ellsworth was shot by the Virginian landlord, and was so speedily
avenged. A strange strain of thought was suggested, by the rapid
grouping of incongruous ideas, arising out of the proximity of these
scenes. As one of my friends said, “I wonder what Washington would
do if he were here now—and how he would act if he were
summoned from that church to Marshall House or to this hospital?”
The man who uttered these words was not either of my companions,
but wore the shoulder-straps of a Union officer. “Stranger still,” said I,
“would it be to speculate on the thoughts and actions of Napoleon in
this crisis, if he were to wake up and see a Prince of his blood
escorted by Federal soldiers to the spot where the troops of the
Southern States had inflicted on them a signal defeat, in a land
where the nephew who now sits on the throne of France has been
an exile.” It is not quite certain that many Americans understand who
Prince Napoleon is, for one of the troopers belonging to the escort
which took him out from Alexandria declared positively he had ridden
with the Emperor. The excursion is swallowed, but not well-digested.
In Washington the only news to-night is, that a small privateer from
Charleston, mistaking the St. Lawrence for a merchant vessel, fired
into her and was at once sent to Mr. Davy Jones by a rattling
broadside. Congress having adjourned, there is but little to render
Washington less uninteresting than it must be in its normal state.
The truculent and overbearing spirit which arises from the
uncontroverted action of democratic majorities develops itself in the
North, where they have taken to burning newspaper offices and
destroying all the property belonging to the proprietors and editors.
These actions are a strange commentary on Mr. Seward’s
declaration “that no volunteers are to be refused because they do
not speak English, inasmuch as the contest for the Union is a battle
of the free men of the world for the institutions of self-government.”
August 11th.—On the old Indian principle, I rode out this morning
very early, and was rewarded by a breath of cold, fresh air, and by
the sight, of some very disorderly regiments just turning out to
parade in the camps; but I was not particularly gratified by being
mistaken for Prince Napoleon by some Irish recruits, who shouted
out, “Bonaparte for ever,” and gradually subsided into requests for
“something to drink your Royal Highness’s health with.” As I returned
I saw on the steps of General Mansfield’s quarters, a tall, soldierly-
looking young man, whose breast was covered with Crimean ribbons
and medals, and I recognised him as one who had called upon me a
few days before, renewing our slight acquaintance before
Sebastopol, where his courage was conspicuous, to ask me for
information respecting the mode of obtaining a commission in the
Federal army.
Towards mid-day an ebony sheet of clouds swept over the city. I
went out, regardless of the threatening storm, to avail myself of the
coolness to make a few visits; but soon a violent wind arose bearing
clouds like those of an Indian dust-storm down the streets. The black
sheet overhead became agitated like the sea, and tossed about grey
clouds, which careered against each other and burst into lightning;
then suddenly, without other warning, down came the rain—a perfect
tornado; sheets of water flooding the streets in a moment, turning the
bed into water-courses and the channels into deep rivers. I waded
up the centre of Pennsylvania Avenue, past the President’s house, in
a current which would have made a respectable trout stream; and on
getting opposite my own door, made a rush for the porch, but
forgetting the deep channel at the side, stepped into a rivulet which
was literally above my hips, and I was carried off my legs, till I
succeeded in catching the kerbstone, and escaped into the hall as if
I had just swum across the Potomac.
On returning from my ride next morning, I took up the Baltimore
paper, and saw a paragraph announcing the death of an English
officer at the station; it was the poor fellow whom I saw sitting at
General Mansfield’s steps yesterday. The consul was absent on a
short tour rendered necessary by the failure of his health consequent
on the discharge of his duties. Finding the Legation were anxious to
see due care taken of the poor fellow’s remains, I left for Baltimore at
a quarter to three o’clock, and proceeded to inquire into the
circumstances connected with his death. He had been struck down
at the station by some cerebral attack, brought on by the heat and
excitement; had been carried to the police station and placed upon a
bench, from which he had fallen with his head downwards, and was
found in that position, with life quite extinct, by a casual visitor. My
astonishment may be conceived when I learned that not only had the
Coroner’s inquest sat and returned its verdict, but that the man had
absolutely been buried the same morning, and so my mission was
over, and I could only report what had occurred to Washington. Little
value indeed has human life in this new world, to which the old gives
vital power so lavishly, that it is regarded as almost worthless. I have
seen more “fuss” made over an old woman killed by a cab in London
than there is over half a dozen deaths with suspicion of murder
attached in New Orleans or New York.
I remained in Baltimore a few days, and had an opportunity of
knowing the feelings of some of the leading men in the place. It may
be described in one word—intense hatred of New England and black
republicans, which has been increased to mania by the stringent
measures of the military dictator of the American Warsaw, the
searches of private houses, domiciliary visits, arbitrary arrests, the
suppression of adverse journals, the overthrow of the corporate body
—all the acts, in fact, which constitute the machinery and the
grievances of a tyranny. When I spoke of the brutal indifference of
the police to the poor officer previously mentioned, the Baltimoreans
told me the constables appointed by the Federal general were
scoundrels who led the Plug Uglies in former days—the worst
characters in a city not sweet or savoury in repute—but that the old
police were men of very different description. The Maryland Club,
where I had spent some pleasant hours, was now like a secret
tribunal or the haunt of conspirators. The police entered it a few days
ago, searched every room, took up the flooring, and even turned up
the coals in the kitchen and the wine in the cellar. Such indignities
fired the blood of the members, who are, with one exception,
opposed to the attempt to coerce the South by the sword. Not one of
them but could tell of some outrage perpetrated on himself or on
some members of his family by the police and Federal authority.
Many a delator amici was suspected but not convicted. Men sat
moodily reading the papers with knitted brows, or whispering in
corners, taking each other apart, and glancing suspiciously at their
fellows.
There is a peculiar stamp about the Baltimore men which
distinguishes them from most Americans—a style of dress,
frankness of manner, and a general appearance assimilating them
closely to the upper classes of Englishmen. They are fond of sport
and travel, exclusive and high-spirited, and the iron rule of the
Yankee is the more intolerable because they dare not resent it, and
are unable to shake it off.
I returned to Washington on 15th August. Nothing changed;
skirmishes along the front; M‘Clellan reviewing. The loss of General
Lyon, who was killed in an action with the Confederates under Ben
McCullough, at Wilson’s Creek, Springfield, Missouri, in which the
Unionists were with difficulty extricated by General Sigel from a very
dangerous position, after the death of their leader, is severely felt. He
was one of the very few officers who combined military skill and
personal bravery with political sagacity and moral firmness. The
President has issued his proclamation for a day of fast and prayer,
which, say the Baltimoreans, is a sign that the Yankees are in a bad
way, as they would never think of praying or fasting if their cause
was prospering. The stories which have been so sedulously spread,
and which never will be quite discredited, of the barbarity and cruelty
of the Confederates to all the wounded, ought to be set at rest by the
printed statement of the eleven Union surgeons just released, who
have come back from Richmond, where they were sent after their
capture on the field of Bull Run, with the most distinct testimony that
the Confederates treated their prisoners with humanity. Who are the
miscreants who tried to make the evil feeling, quite strong enough as
it is, perfectly fiendish, by asserting the rebels burned the wounded
in hospitals, and bayoneted them as they lay helpless on the field?
The pecuniary difficulties of the Government have been alleviated
by the bankers of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, who have
agreed to lend them fifty millions of dollars, on condition that they
receive the Treasury notes which Mr. Chase is about to issue. As we
read the papers and hear the news, it is difficult to believe that the
foundations of society are not melting away in the heat of this
conflict. Thus, a Federal judge, named Garrison, who has issued his
writ of habeas corpus for certain prisoners in Fort Lafayette, being
quietly snuffed out by the commandant, Colonel Burke, desires to
lead an army against the fort and have a little civil war of his own in
New York. He applies to the commander of the county militia, who
informs Garrison he can’t get into the fort as there was no artillery
strong enough to breach the walls, and that it would require 10,000
men to invest it, whereas only 1400 militiamen were available. What
a farceur Judge Garrison must be! In addition to the gutting and
burning of newspaper offices, and the exercitation of the editors on
rails, the republican grand juries have taken to indicting the
democratic journals, and Fremont’s provost marshal in St. Louis has,
proprio motu, suppressed those which he considers disaffected. A
mutiny which broke out in the Scotch Regiment 79th N. Y. has been
followed by another in the 2nd Maine Regiment, and a display of
cannon and of cavalry was required to induce them to allow the
ringleaders to be arrested. The President was greatly alarmed, but
M‘Clellan acted with some vigour, and the refractory volunteers are
to be sent off to a pleasant station called the “Dry Tortugas” to work
on the fortifications.
Mr. Seward, with whom I dined and spent the evening on 16th
August, has been much reassured and comforted by the
demonstrations of readiness on the part of the people to continue the
contest, and of confidence in the cause among the moneyed men of
the great cities. “All we want is time to develop our strength. We
have been blamed for not making greater use of our navy and
extending it at once. It was our first duty to provide for the safety of
our capital. Besides, a man will generally pay little attention to
agencies he does not understand. None of us knew anything about a
navy. I doubt if the President ever saw anything more formidable
than a river steamboat, and I don’t think Mr. Welles, the Secretary of
the Navy, knew the stem from the stern of a ship. Of the whole
Cabinet, I am the only member who ever was fairly at sea or crossed
the Atlantic. Some of us never even saw it. No wonder we did not
understand the necessity for creating a navy at once. Soon,
however, our Government will be able to dispose of a respectable
marine, and when our army is ready to move, co-operating with the
fleet, the days of the rebellion are numbered.”
“When will that be, Mr. Secretary?”
“Soon; very soon, I hope. We can, however, bear delays. The
rebels will be ruined by it.”
CHAPTER XVII.
Return to Baltimore—Colonel Carroll—A Priest’s view of the Abolition of

Slavery—Slavery in Maryland—Harper’s Ferry—John Brown—Back by
train to Washington—Further accounts of Bull Run—American Vanity—
My own unpopularity for speaking the truth—Killing a “Nigger” no murder
—Navy Department.
On the 17th August I returned to Baltimore on my way to

Drohoregan Manor, the seat of Colonel Carroll, in Maryland, where I
had been invited to spend a few days by his son-in-law, an English
gentleman of my acquaintance. Leaving Baltimore at 5.40 p.m., in
company with Mr. Tucker Carroll, I proceeded by train to Ellicott’s
Mills, a station fourteen miles on the Ohio and Baltimore railroad,
from which our host’s residence is distant more than an hour’s drive.
The country through which the line passes is picturesque and
undulating, with hills and valleys and brawling streams, spreading in
woodland and glade, ravine, and high uplands on either side,
haunted by cotton factories, poisoning air and water; but it has been
a formidable district for the engineers to get through, and the line
abounds in those triumphs of engineering which are generally the
ruin of shareholders.
All these lines are now in the hands of the military. At the
Washington terminus there is a guard placed to see that no
unauthorised person or unwilling volunteer is going north; the line is
watched by patrols and sentries; troops are encamped along its
course. The factory chimneys are smokeless; half the pleasant villas
which cover the hills or dot the openings in the forest have a
deserted look and closed windows. And so these great works, the
Carrolton viaduct, the Thomas viaduct, and the high embankments
and great cuttings in the ravine by the river side, over which the line
passes, have almost a depressing effect, as if the people for whose
use they were intended had all become extinct. At Ellicott’s Mills,
which is a considerable manufacturing town, more soldiers and
Union flags. The people are Unionists, but the neighbouring gentry
and country people are Seceshers.
This is the case wherever there is a manufacturing population in
Maryland, because the workmen are generally foreigners, or have
come from the Northern States, and feel little sympathy with States
rights’ doctrines, and the tendencies of the landed gentry to a
Conservative action on the slave question. There was no good-will in
the eyes of the mechanicals as they stared at our vehicle; for the
political bias of Colonel Carroll was well known, as well as the
general sentiments of his family. It was dark when we reached the
manor, which is approached by an avenue of fine trees. The house is
old-fashioned, and has received additions from time to time. But for
the black faces of the domestics, one might easily fancy he was in
some old country house in Ireland. The family have adhered to their
ancient faith. The founder of the Carrolls in Maryland came over with
the Catholic colonists led by Lord Baltimore, or by his brother,
Leonard Calvert, and the colonel possesses some interesting deeds
of grant and conveyance of the vast estates, which have been
diminished by large sales year after year, but still spread over a
considerable part of several counties in the State.
Colonel Carroll is an immediate descendant of one of the leaders
in the revolution of 1776, and he pointed out to me the room in which
Carroll, of Carrolton, and George Washington, were wont to meet
when they were concocting their splendid treason. One of his
connections married the late Marquis Wellesley, and the colonel
takes pleasure in setting forth how the daughter of the Irish recusant,
who fled from his native country all but an outlaw, sat on the throne
of the Queen of Ireland, or, in other words, held court in Dublin
Castle as wife of the Viceroy. Drohoregan is supposed to mean “Hall
of the Kings,” and is called after an old place belonging, some time
or other, to the family, the early history of which, as set forth in the
Celtic authorities and Irish antiquarian works, possesses great
attractions for the kindly, genial old man—kindly and genial to all but
the Abolitionists and black republicans; nor is he indifferent to the
reputation of the State in the Revolutionary War, where the
“Maryland line” seems to have differed from many of the contingents
of the other States in not running away so often at critical moments
in the serious actions. Colonel Carroll has sound arguments to prove
the sovereign independence and right of every State in the Union,
derived from family teaching and the lessons of those who founded
the Constitution itself.
On the day after my arrival the rain fell in torrents. The weather is
as uncertain as that of our own isle. The torrid heats at Washington,
the other day, were succeeded by bitter cold days; now there is a
dense mist, chilly and cheerless, seeming as a sort of strainer for the
even down pour that falls through it continuously. The family after
breakfast slipped round to the little chapel which forms the extremity
of one wing of the house. The coloured people on the estate were
already trooping across the lawn and up the avenue from the slave
quarters, decently dressed for the most part, having due allowance
for the extraordinary choice of colours in their gowns, bonnets, and
ribbons, and for the unhappy imitations, on the part of the men, of
the attire of their masters. They walked demurely and quietly past
the house, and presently the priest, dressed like a French curé,
trotted up, and service began. The negro houses were of a much
better and more substantial character than those one sees in the
south, though not remarkable for cleanliness and good order. Truth
to say, they were palaces compared to the huts of Irish labourers,
such as might be found, perhaps, on the estates of the colonel’s
kinsmen at home. The negroes are far more independent than they
are in the south. They are less civil, less obliging, and, although they
do not come cringing to shake hands as the field hands on a
Louisianian plantation, less servile. They inhabit a small village of
brick and wood houses, across the road at the end of the avenue,
and in sight of the house. The usual swarms of little children, poultry,
pigs, enlivened by goats, embarrassed the steps of the visitor, and
the old people, or those who were not finely dressed enough for
mass, peered out at the strangers from the glassless windows.
When chapel was over, the boys and girls came up for catechism,
and passed in review before the ladies of the house, with whom they
were on very good terms. The priest joined us in the verandah when
his labours were over, and talked with intelligence of the terrible war
which has burst over the land. He has just returned from a tour in the
Northern States, and it is his belief the native Americans there will
not enlist, but that they will get foreigners to fight their battles. He
admitted that slavery was in itself an evil, nay, more, that it was not
profitable in Maryland. But what are the landed proprietors to do?
The slaves have been bequeathed to them as property by their
fathers, with certain obligations to be respected, and duties to be
fulfilled. It is impossible to free them, because, at the moment of
emancipation, nothing short of the confiscation of all the labour and
property of the whites would be required to maintain the negroes,
who would certainly refuse to work unless they had their masters’
land as their own. Where is white labour to be found? Its introduction
must be the work of years, and meantime many thousands of slaves,
who have a right to protection, would canker the land.
In Maryland they do not breed slaves for the purpose of selling
them as they do in Virginia, and yet Colonel Carroll and other
gentlemen who regarded the slaves they inherited almost as
members of their families, have been stigmatised by abolition orators
as slave-breeders and slave-dealers. It was these insults which
stung the gentlemen of Maryland and of the other Slave States to the
quick, and made them resolve never to yield to the domination of a
party which had never ceased to wage war against their institutions
and their reputation and honour.
A little knot of friends and relations joined Colonel Carroll at dinner.
There are few families in this part of Maryland which have not
representatives in the other army across the Potomac; and if
Beauregard could but make his appearance, the women alone would
give him welcome such as no conqueror ever received in liberated
city.
Next day the rain fell incessantly. The mail was brought in by a
little negro boy on horseback, and I was warned by my letters that an
immediate advance of M‘Clellan’s troops was probable. This is an
old story. “Battle expected to-morrow” has been a heading in the
papers for the last fortnight. In the afternoon I was driven over a part
of the estate in a close carriage, through the windows of which,
however, I caught glimpses of a beautiful country, wooded gloriously,
and soft, sylvan, and well-cultivated as the best parts of Hampshire
and Gloucestershire, the rolling lands of which latter county, indeed,
it much resembled in its large fields, heavy with crops of tobacco and
corn. The weather was too unfavourable to admit of a close
inspection of the fields; but I visited one or two tobacco houses,
where the fragrant Maryland was lying in masses on the ground, or
hanging from the rafters, or filled the heavy hogsheads with
compressed smoke.
Next day I took the train, at Ellicott’s Mills, and went to Harper’s
Ferry. There is no one spot, in the history of this extraordinary war,
which can be well more conspicuous. Had it nothing more to
recommend it than the scenery, it might well command a visit from
the tourist; but as the scene of old John Brown’s raid upon the
Federal arsenal, of that first passage of arms between the
abolitionists and the slave conservatives, which has developed this
great contest; above all, as the spot where important military
demonstrations have been made on both sides, and will necessarily
occur hereafter, this place, which probably derives its name from
some wretched old boatman, will be renowned for ever in the annals
of the civil war of 1861. The Patapsco, by the bank of which the rail
is carried for some miles, has all the character of a mountain torrent,
rushing through gorges or carving out its way at the base of granite
hills, or boldly cutting a path for itself through the softer slate.
Bridges, viaducts, remarkable archways, and great spans of timber
trestle work leaping from hill to hill, enable the rail to creep onwards
and upwards by the mountain side to the Potomac at Point of Rocks,
whence it winds its way over undulating ground, by stations with
eccentric names to the river’s bank once more. We were carried on
to the station next to Harper’s Ferry on a ledge of the precipitous
mountain range which almost overhangs the stream. But few
civilians were in the train. The greater number of passengers
consisted of soldiers and sutlers, proceeding to their encampments
along the river. A strict watch was kept over the passengers, whose
passes were examined by officers at the various stations. At one
place an officer who really looked like a soldier entered the train, and
on seeing my pass told me in broken English that he had served in
the Crimea, and was acquainted with me and many of my friends.
The gentleman who accompanied me observed, “I do not know
whether he was in the Crimea or not, but I do know that till very lately
your friend the Major was a dancing master in New York.” A person
of a very different type made his offers of service, Colonel Gordon of
the 2nd Massachusetts Regiment, who caused the train to run on as
far as Harper’s Ferry, in order to give me a sight of the place,
although in consequence of the evil habit of firing on the carriages in
which the Confederates across the river have been indulging, the
locomotive generally halts at some distance below the bend of the
river.
Harper’s Ferry lies in a gorge formed by a rush of the Potomac
through the mountain ridges, which it cuts at right angles to its
course at its junction with the river Shenandoah. So trenchant and
abrupt is the division that little land is on the divided ridge to build
upon. The precipitous hills on both sides are covered with forest,
which has been cleared in patches here and there on the Maryland
shore, to permit of the erection of batteries. On the Virginian side
there lies a mass of blackened and ruined buildings, from which a
street lined with good houses stretches up the hill. Just above the
junction of the Shenandoah with the Potomac, an elevated bridge or
viaduct 300 yards long leaps from hill side to hill side. The arches
had been broken—the rails which ran along the top torn up, and
there is now a deep gulf fixed between the shores of Maryland and
Virginia. The rail to Winchester from this point has been destroyed,
and the line along the Potomac has also been ruined.
But for the batteries which cover the shoal water at the junction of
the two rivers below the bridge, there would be no difficulty in
crossing to the Maryland shore, and from that side the whole of the
ground around Harper’s Ferry is completely commanded. The gorge
is almost as deep as the pass of Killiecranckie, which it resembles in
most respects except in breadth and the size of the river between,
and if ever a railroad finds its way to Blair Athol, the passengers will
find something to look at very like the scenery on the route to
Harper’s Ferry. The vigilance required to guard the pass of the river
above and below this point is incessant, but the Federals possess
the advantage on their side of a deep canal parallel to the railway
and running above the level of the river, which would be a more
formidable obstacle than the Potomac to infantry or guns. There is
reason to believe that the Secessionists in Maryland cross
backwards and forwards whenever they please, and the Virginians
coming down at their leisure to the opposite shore, inflict serious
annoyance on the Federal troops by constant rifle practice.
Looking up and down the river the scenery is picturesque, though
it is by no means entitled to the extraordinary praises which
American tourists lavish upon it. Probably old John Brown cared little
for the wild magic of streamlet or rill, or for the blended charm of vale
and woodland. When he made his attack on the arsenal now in
ruins, he probably thought a valley was as high as a hill, and that
there was no necessity for water running downwards—assuredly he
saw as little of the actual heights and depths around him when he
ran across the Potomac to revolutionize Virginia. He has left behind
him millions either as clear-sighted or as blind as himself. In New
England parlours a statuette of John Brown may be found as a
pendant to the likeness of our Saviour. In Virginia his name is the
synonym of all that is base, bloody, and cruel.
Harper’s Ferry at present, for all practical purposes, may be
considered as Confederate property. The few Union inhabitants
remain in their houses, but many of the Government workmen and
most of the inhabitants have gone off South. For strategical
purposes its possession would be most important to a force desiring
to operate on Maryland from Virginia. The Blue Ridge range running
up to the Shenandoah divides the country so as to permit a force
debouching from Harper’s Ferry to advance down the valley of the
Shenandoah on the right, or to move to the left between the Blue
Ridge and the Katoctin mountains towards the Manassas railway at
its discretion. After a false alarm that some Secesh cavalry were
coming down to renew the skirmishing of the day before, I returned,
and travelling to Relay House just saved the train to Washington,
where I arrived after sunset. A large number of Federal troops are
employed along these lines, which they occupy as if they were in a
hostile country. An imperfectly formed regiment broken up into these
detachments and placed in isolated posts, under ignorant officers,
may be regarded as almost worthless for military operations. Hence
the constant night alarms—the mistakes—the skirmishes and
instances of misbehaviour which arise along these extended lines.
On the journey from Harper’s Ferry, the concentration of masses
of troops along the road, and the march of heavy artillery trains,
caused me to think a renewal of the offensive movement against
Richmond was immediate, but at Washington I heard that all
M‘Clellan wanted or hoped for at present, was to make Maryland
safe and to gain time for the formation of his army. The Confederates
appear to be moving towards their left, and M‘Clellan is very uneasy
lest they should make a vigorous attack before he is prepared to
receive them.
In the evening the New York papers came in with the extracts from
the London papers containing my account of the battle of Bull’s Run.
Utterly forgetting their own versions of the engagement, the New
York editors now find it convenient to divert attention from the bitter
truth that was in them, to the letter of the foreign newspaper
correspondent, who, because he is a British subject, will prove not
only useful as a conductor to carry off the popular wrath from the
American journalists themselves, but as a means by induction of
charging the vials afresh against the British people, inasmuch as
they have not condoled with the North on the defeat of armies which
they were assured would, if successful, be immediately led to effect
the disruption of the British empire. At the outset I had foreseen this
would be the case, and deliberately accepted the issue; but when I
found the Northern journals far exceeding in severity anything I could
have said, and indulging in general invective against whole classes
of American soldiery, officers, and statesmen, I was foolish enough
to expect a little justice, not to say a word of the smallest generosity.
August 21st.—The echoes of Bull Run are coming back with a
vengeance. This day a month ago the miserable fragments of a
beaten, washed out, demoralised army, were flooding in disorder
and dismay the streets of the capital from which they had issued
forth to repel the tide of invasion. This day month and all the editors
and journalists in the States, weeping, wailing, and gnashing their
teeth, infused extra gall into their ink, and poured out invective,
abuse, and obloquy on their defeated general and their broken
hosts. The President and his ministers, stunned by the tremendous
calamity, sat listening in fear and trembling for the sound of the
enemy’s cannon. The veteran soldier, on whom the boasted hopes
of the nation rested, heart-sick and beaten down, had neither
counsel to give nor action to offer. At any moment the Confederate
columns might be expected in Pennsylvania Avenue to receive the
welcome of their friends and the submission of their helpless and
disheartened enemies.
All this is forgotten—and much more, which need not now be
repeated. Saved from a great peril, even the bitterness of death, they
forget the danger that has passed, deny that they uttered cries of
distress and appeals for help, and swagger in all the insolence of
recovered strength. Not only that, but they turn and rend those
whose writing has been dug up after thirty days, and comes back as
a rebuke to their pride.
Conscious that they have insulted and irritated their own army, that
they have earned the bitter hostility of men in power, and have for
once inflicted a wound on the vanity to which they have given such
offensive dimensions, if not life itself, they now seek to run a drag
scent between the public nose and their own unpopularity, and to
create such an amount of indignation and to cast so much odium
upon one who has had greater facilities to know, and is more willing
to tell the truth, than any of their organs, that he will be unable
henceforth to perform his duties in a country where unpopularity
means simply a political and moral atrophy or death. In the
telegraphic summary some days ago a few phrases were picked out
of my letters, which were but very faint paraphrases of some of the
sentences which might be culled from Northern newspapers, but the
storm has been gathering ever since, and I am no doubt to
experience the truth of De Tocqueville’s remark, “that a stranger who
injures American vanity, no matter how justly, may make up his mind
to be a martyr.”
August 22nd.—
“The little dogs and all,
Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart,
See they bark at me.”
The North have recovered their wind, and their pipers are blowing
with might and main. The time given them to breathe after Bull Run
has certainly been accompanied with a greater development of lung
and power of blowing than could have been expected. The volunteer
army which dispersed and returned home to receive the Io Pæans of
the North, has been replaced by better and more numerous levies,
which have the strong finger and thumb of General M‘Clellan on their
windpipe, and find it is not quite so easy as it was to do as they
pleased. The North, besides, has received supplies of money, and is
using its great resources, by land and sea, to some purpose, and as
they wax fat they kick.
A general officer said to me, “Of course you will never remain,
when once all the press are down upon you. I would not take a
million dollars and be in your place.” “But is what I’ve written untrue?”
“God bless you! do you know in this country if you can get enough of
people to start a lie about any man, he would be ruined, if the
Evangelists came forward to swear the story was false. There are
thousands of people who this moment believe that M‘Dowell, who
never tasted anything stronger than a water melon in all his life, was
helplessly drunk at Bull’s Run. Mind what I say; they’ll run you into a
mud hole as sure as you live.” I was not much impressed with the
danger of my position further than that I knew there would be a
certain amount of risk from the rowdyism and vanity of what even the
Americans admit to be the lower orders, for which I had been
prepared from the moment I had despatched my letter; but I confess
I was not by any means disposed to think that the leaders of public
opinion would seek the small gratification of revenge, and the petty
popularity of pandering to the passions of the mob, by creating a
popular cry against me. I am not aware that any foreigner ever
visited the United States who was injudicious enough to write one
single word derogatory to their claims to be the first of created
beings, who was not assailed with the most viperous malignity and
rancour. The man who says he has detected a single spot on the
face of their sun should prepare his winding sheet.
The New York Times, I find, states “that the terrible epistle has
been read with quite as much avidity as an average President’s
message. We scarcely exaggerate the fact when we say, the first
and foremost thought on the minds of a very large portion of our
people after the repulse at Bull’s Run was, what will Russell say?”
and then they repeat some of the absurd sayings attributed to me,
who declared openly from the very first that I had not seen the battle
at all, to the effect “that I had never seen such fighting in all my life,
and that nothing at Alma or Inkerman was equal to it.” An analysis of
the letter follows, in which it is admitted that “with perfect candour I
purported to give an account of what I saw, and not of the action
which I did not see,” and the writer, who is, if I mistake not, the Hon.
Mr. Raymond, of the New York Times, like myself a witness of the
facts I describe, quotes a passage in which I say, “There was no
flight of troops, no retreat of an army, no reason for all this
precipitation,” and then declares “that my letter gives a very spirited
and perfectly just description of the panic which impelled and
accompanied the troops from Centreville to Washington. He does
not, for he cannot, in the least exaggerate its horrible disorder, or the
disgraceful behaviour of the incompetent officers by whom it was
aided, instead of being checked. He saw nothing whatever of the
fighting, and therefore says nothing whatever of its quality. He gives
a clear, fair, perfectly just and accurate, as it is a spirited and graphic
account of the extraordinary scenes which passed under his
observation. Discreditable as those scenes were to our army, we
have nothing in connection with them whereof to accuse the
reporter; he has done justice alike to himself, his subject, and the
country.”
Ne nobis blandiar, I may add, that at least I desired to do so, and I
can prove from Northern papers that if their accounts were true, I
certainly much “extenuated and nought set down in malice”—
nevertheless, Philip drunk is very different from Philip sober,
frightened, and running away, and the man who attempts to justify
his version to the inebriated polycephalous monarch is sure to meet
such treatment as inebriated despots generally award to their
censors.
August 23rd.—The torrent is swollen to-day by anonymous letters
threatening me with bowie knife and revolver, or simply abusive,
frantic with hate, and full of obscure warnings. Some bear the
Washington post-mark, others came from New York, the greater
number—for I have had nine—are from Philadelphia. Perhaps they
may come from the members of that “gallant” 4th Pennsylvania
Regiment.
August 24th.—My servant came in this morning, to announce a
trifling accident—he was exercising my horse, and at the corner of
one of those charming street crossings, the animal fell and broke its
leg. A “vet” was sent for. I was sure that such a portent had never
been born in those Daunian woods. A man about twenty-seven or
twenty-eight stone weight, middle-aged and active, with a fine
professional feeling for distressed horseflesh; and I was right in my
conjectures that he was a Briton, though the vet had become
Americanised, and was full of enthusiasm about “our war for the
Union,” which was yielding him a fine harvest. He complained there
were a good many bad characters about Washington. The matter is
proved beyond doubt by what we see, hear, and read. To-day there
is an account in the papers of a brute shooting a negro boy dead,
because he asked him for a chew of tobacco. Will he be hanged?
Not the smallest chance of it. The idea of hanging a white man for
killing a nigger! It is more preposterous here than it is in India, where
our authorities have actually executed whites for the murder of
natives.
Before dinner I walked down to the Washington navy yard. Captain
Dahlgren was sorely perplexed with an intoxicated Senator, whose
name it is not necessary to mention, and who seemed to think he
paid me a great compliment by expressing his repeated desire “to
have a good look at” me. “I guess you’re quite notorious now. You’ll
excuse me because I’ve dined, now—and so you are the Mr. &c.,
&c., &c.” The Senator informed me that he was “none of your d——d
blackfaced republicans. He didn’t care a d—— about niggers—his
business was to do good to his fellow white men, to hold our glorious
Union together, and let the niggers take care of themselves.”

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Control Theory for Physicists 1st

Edition John Bechhoefer

Group Theory for Physicists 2nd Edition Zhong-Qi Ma

Linear Algebra and Group Theory for Physicists and

Mathematical Control Theory for Stochastic Partial

Group Theory in a Nutshell for Physicists Solutions

Education by Choice The Case for Family Control John E.

Electronics for Physicists An Introduction 2nd Edition

Ordinary Differential Equations Mathematical Tools for

Control Engineering Theory and Applications 1st Edition

Control theory, an interdisciplinary concept dealing with the behavior of dynamical

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Part I Core Material 1

4 Time-Domain Control 129

4.2 Control Based on the State 142

5 Discrete-Time Systems 161

6 System Identification 205

Part II Advanced Ideas 249

7 Optimal Control 251

8 Stochastic Systems 297

8.6 Stochastic Optimal Control 345

9 Robust Control 363

10 Adaptive Control 404

11 Nonlinear Control 454

Part III Special Topics 491

12 Discrete-State Systems 493

13 Quantum Control 516

13.2 Three Types of Quantum Control 520

14 Networks and Complex Systems 533

15 Limits to Control 561

If You Are an Experimental Physicist

If You Are a Theoretical Physicist

If You Are a Control Theorist or Engineer

Why This Book?

Figures and Style

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words,

If You Are an Experimental Physicist

If You Are a Theoretical Physicist

If You Are a Control Theorist or Engineer

Why This Book?

Figures and Style

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words,

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

1.1 Historical Overview

• Early control (before 1900)

1.1.1 Early Control (before 1900)

1.1.2 Preclassical Period (1900–1940)

1.1.3 Classical Period (1930–1960)

1.1.4 Modern Control (1945–2000)

1.1.5 Contemporary Control (after 2000)

an engineering perspective emphasizing control especially. The resulting field of sys-

1.2 Lessons from History

1.2.1 Goals of Control

1.2.2 What is a Feedback Loop?

1.2.3 Progression of Control Types

In Figure 1.2, we see a progression in abstraction of control systems, from “con-

1.2.4 Classifying Control and Controllers

Open and Closed Loops

Negative and Positive Feedback

y = satg (u) . (1.2)

y = satg (u − |k|y) ≡ satg (u) , (1.3)

where the new saturation function has gain

Autonomous and Nonautonomous

y = satg (u − |k|y) ≡ satg (u) , (1.3)