Industrial Engineers

"A clue to the future must lie in the past... every scientist, and everyone with intellectual curiosity, can learn something useful from a brief study of the history of atomism."

"No scientist has yet provided an acceptable definition of "mind" or "mental" that reveals the character of "unconscious mental processes," and no physicist a lucid definition of "elementary particles" that shows how they can appear or disappear, and why there are so many."

"Did ever the history of the intellect so little conceal so much?"

"The material particle or the conscious mind—has been discovered not to be sufficiently unchanging to be treated as a thing in isolation... but more often to be the opposite: a changing system in a changing environment."

"Nothing is more surprising than the surprises of history, and nothing more untrustworthy than the uncritical extrapolation of the tendencies of the recent past."

"There are good reasons to expect... a return to a concreteness of basic ideas, to simpler fundamentals easily understood, to principles that will bring exact science closer to the human perspective."

"The most productive novelties often spring, in thought as in biological evolution, from more primitive and simpler forms, rather than from differentiated ones which, through their elaboration, have become too specialized to be adaptable to new tasks."

"Systematic errors of theory can seldom be discovered by direct attack; it is easier to uncover them by studying how and why physical theory took the path it did. That is why a clue to the future can sometimes be found in the past, and this is my reason for studying the history of atomism."

"Every scientific generation, measured by its most vocal members, exaggerates the historical importance of its own members. ...there is a perpetual temptation to study the latest and to neglect the past."

"There is no doubt of the need for an up-to-date, balanced, and comprehensive work on the history of atomism, drawing ideas, mathematics, and experiment together into a single story. When available, it should become required reading for all students of the exact sciences."

"No one is so brilliant that he can afford to neglect what history can teach him."

"Discontinuity of its linguistic and logical terms is for the conscious analytical intellect psychologically and logically prior to notions of continuity. ...This functional priority... may not have been reflected in the history of the development of reason in all human communities. ...But it is relevant for the West that the Pythagoreans, with their discrete integers and point patterns, came before Euclid, with his continuous metrical geometry, and that physical atomism as a speculative philosophy preceded by some two thousand years the conception of a continuous physical medium with properties of its own."

"Atomism originally stood for iconoclasm, impiety, and atheism, because the Greek atomists conceived a universe under the reign of chance."

"Two extreme interpretations of atomism have persisted through centuries: the näive assumption of objectively real indivisible pieces of matter, and the sophisticated view that "atom" is merely a name given to abstractions which it is convenient to assume in simplifying complex phenomena. The second perhaps stems from Ockham, who wrote in 1330 of "the fiction of abstract nouns"; from John Troland, who in 1704 interpreted material particles as mental fictions; and from countless others down to Ernst Mach, who after starting as a physical atomist came to regard atoms as "mental artifices" or "economical ways of symbolizing experience." Both views have advantages..."

"Theory confronts experiment, and both sides are a mixture of obscurity and clarity."

"Dogmatism in science is usually mistaken, because the conviction of certainty expresses a psychological compulsion, never any truly compelling reasons or facts. When a view attains wide popularity and seems obviously beyond question, its decline has usually begun or will begin very soon."

"The idea of the unconscious mental processes was, in many of its aspects, conceivable around 1700, topical around 1800, and became effective around 1900, thanks to the imaginative efforts of a large number of individuals of varied interests in many lands."

"I consider that Curie's Principle has two major consequences:- First: It shows that the class of processes which can be isolated for causal representation, not requiring the inference of external causes, is wider than the class of energetically closed systems. One-way processes in which the system loses energy can be isolable, in the sense that they can be given complete representation without taking their environment into account. Second: It suggests the possibility of a geometrical physics treating 3D spatial relations , i.e., angles or lengths, as primary. Just as statistical mechanics, the theory of crystal symmetry, and Group theory in quantum mechanics, are useful without assumptions about forces, so Curie's principle, with an appropriate model, can determine the path of a one-way process without such assumptions..."

"We are sick today for lack of simple ideas which can help us be what we want to be."

"The basic challenge to mankind is not population, poverty, war, technology, pollution, religious or racial intolerance, or blind nationalism, but an underlying nihilism promoting violence and frustrating sane policies on these issues. ...the only hope lies in the emergence of a potentially worldwide consensus of heart, mind, and will, appealing to all sane men and women everywhere ...The time has come for the west to speak to the world in universal terms. ...the consensus, if it comes, is likely to surprise by its suddenness, timeliness, and universality."

"This essay touches bottom for twentieth century man. ...it is one many signals marking the end of "Antiman," with his hopeless relativism, and announcing "Unitary Man," ...able to be more harmonious because he has become aware of the ordering processes at all levels in nature, without and within. ...here at last subject and object are potentially fused in a single insight."

"We know nothing about the Christian transcendental God except His total indifference both to individual suffering and to the collapse of the pseudo Christian civilization which the Church supported. The pretension to a transcendental authority... was a hypnotic given to children and remaining with them as adults. During one period in history it served a purpose... its early rational opponents... were strangely naive, for they imagined that a half-developed faculty called "reason" should, and could, lead the species. But reason... is not a prime mover."

"Faced by the dire nihilism of our time, we need a greater honesty... The Western search for unifying truth did not come to an end with Christianity, any more than with the physical theories of forty years ago."

"The Christian fog of self deception still does its damage: we either deceive ourselves by pretending to believe or overreact into a contempt of all religion. So, away with the fog!"

"God doesn't give a damn."

"The "divine" in man: creative bliss, the experience of perfection, the surprising joys of love all human, not divine. ...It is time that God was put in his place, that is, in man, and no nonsense about it. But, to prevent misunderstanding, instead of speaking of the "divine" in man I will call it the human sense of perfection or unity. ...Need I add that we may retain the Sermon on the Mount, Saint Paul's poem to charity, and much else, though we discard the Christian God?"

"The author... has known for that for several centuries freethinkers have led mankind. Only recently... new to him though perhaps long understood by others, possibly Kant and certainly Nietzsche, there emerged into his mind a clarity that will remain... the conception of transcendental divinity is damaging to man."

"Belief in a transcendental divinity arose from a misinterpretation of intimations from the less conscious levels of the mind. ...God is in the unconscious, is the unconscious, perhaps."

"A naturalistic reinterpretation renders all that is authentic about the Christian doctrine greater not less, for it makes it a part of a new and stronger man, not of some fancied "superman," but simply man as he is but less distorted by a dissociating tradition."

"To rob man of his noblest faculty, the experience of and aspiration to perfection and unity in himself , we can now see to have been a truly hellish surgery."

"L.L. Whyte, in his marvellous account of the way in which the duality of the human nervous system became the conflicting dualism of reason against instinct, writes: "Intellectual man had no choice but to follow the path which facilitated the development of his faculty of thought, and thought could only clarify itself by separating out static concepts which, in becoming static, ceased to conform to their organic matrix or to the forms of nature.""

"L. L. Whyte, in a short but prophetic essay, Archimedes or the Future of Physics, pointed out that in each of the two great new physical theories of this century the fundamental role was played by a particular constant of nature: in Relativity by c, the velocity of light in vacuo, and in Quantum Theory by h, Plank's constant. He suggested that the next great advance in our understanding of nature would be associated with a new fundamental constant, and he prophesied that this would be concerned with the flow of time."

"Whyte showed how at the core of Newtonian physics lies the assumption that the elementary processes of nature are reversible, or would be if they could be isolated, and hence in the system of Natural Philosophy time would not appear as an explicit factor. ...In the cosmological theories of Einstein, de Sitter and Lamaître new ideas were introduced concerning the character of universal space, but no corresponding advance was made in connection with the idea of time, except in so far as the idea of expansion pointed to a finite rather than an infinite past."

"Although the anti-causal inclinations of an Eddington (or a Jeans) are most pertinent... they were not characteristic for their milieu. Far more typical for British natural-philosophical thought in this period is that interpretation of the conceptual situation in physics advanced by Lancelot Law Whyte in 1927 in Archimedes, or the Future of Physics, namely that "in order to straighten out its atomic problems physics will have to take a hint from biology." This notion, casually stated in the language of the work-a-day world, had come to Whyte two years before as a most powerful experience, a veritable revelation. "...That just as the Solution of Relativity demanded a fundamental reconsideration of the so-called limits of Science & their absorption into Science & reconstruction & a new understanding of them, So the solution of the Relativity-Quantum problem might involve the problem of life in such a way as to throw real light on the relation of Religion, Art & Science." ...while Whyte anticipates a revolution in science, indeterminism receives no explicit attention...Whyte is simply unconcerned with that aspect of Weyl's and Eddington's views. And this seems characteristic... [of] how very far the British were from focusing on causality."

"The idea that time may be an active factor in causation has the mathematical significance that ' t ' (for the system in question) must appear explicitly in the formulation of the law. ...Such law may claim to express the fact of historic, irreversible duration."

"The question of the reversibility of natural processes provides the key to a great intellectual struggle which is now behind the complexities of philosophic and scientific thought. The issue can be formulated thus: Is there a real temporal process in nature? Is the passage of irreversible time a necessary element in any view of the structure of nature? Or, alternatively, is the subjective experience of time a mere illusion of the mind which cannot be given objective expression? These are not metaphysical questions that can still be neglected with impunity. For just as Einstein made his advance by analysing conceptions such as simultaneity, which had been thought to be adequately understood for the purposes of experimental science, so the next development of physical theory will probably be made by carrying on the analysis of time from the point at which Einstein left it."

"Thought is born of failure. When action satisfies there is no residue to hold the attention; to think is to confess a lack of adjustment which we must stop to consider. Only when the human organism fails to achieve an adequate response to its situation is there material for the process of thought, and the greater the failure the more searching they become. (p. 1)"

"The unitary system of thought has three main characteristics which distinguish it from many other systems: it deals with the form of systems rather than with their component parts; it recognizes a process of development as prior to the apparently static aspects of nature; and it is unitary, emphasizing one general form beneath all apparent dualism. (p. 21-22)"

"A unitary method of thought is indispensable to the interpretation of European history. The pervasive dualisms which distort the thought of western man are an element in this general condition, which therefore must be diagnosed in a language which does not take these dualisms for granted. No interpretation of European man in traditional European terms can bring the truth to light, any more than the color-blind can know their deficiency. (p. 25)"

"The presence of an enterprise reference architecture aids an enterprise in its ability to understand its structure and processes. Similar to a computer architecture, the enterprise architecture is comprised of several views. The enterprise architecture should provide activity, organizational, business rule (information), resource, and process views of an organization."

"Reference disciplines are existing bodies of knowledge that help establish the new discipline, that are a foundation of support for future work, and that are logical linkages to previous works. Throughout history, new disciplines have emerged from the need to solve new problems that are not fully addressed by existing disciplines. Emerging disciplines build upon the knowledge, subject matter, methods, tools, and theories of existing reference disciplines."

"A discipline has six basic characteristics:"

"An enterprise must be viewed from several perspectives if it is to be fully described and understood (Barnett 1994; ESPIRIT Consortium AMICE 1991). Previous work in the development of architectures by the Automation & Robotics Research Institute (Presley et al. 1993) describes a five view approach. The Business Rule (or Information) View defines the entities managed by the enterprise and the rules governing their relationships and interactions. The Activity View defines the functions performed by the enterprise (what is done) while the Business Process View defines a time sequenced set of processes (how it is done). The resources and capabilities managed by the enterprise are defined in a Resource View. Finally, the Organization View is used to define how the enterprise organizes itself and the set of constraints and rules governing how it manages itself and its processes."

"There are several world view assumptions present in enterprise engineering. The first assumption is that the enterprise can be viewed as a complex system. This is necessary because systems in organizations are systems of organized complexity. Complexity is the result of the multiplicity and intricacy of man’s interaction with other components of the system. Secondly, the enterprise is to be viewed as a system of processes. These processes are engineered both individually and holistically. The final assumption is the use of engineering rigor in transforming the enterprise. The enterprise engineering paradigm views the enterprise as a complex system of processes that can be engineered to accomplish specific organizational objectives. In the Enterprise Engineering paradigm, the enterprise is viewed as a complex system of processes that can be engineered to accomplish specific organizational objectives."

"Enterprise Engineering is defined as that body of knowledge, principles, and practices having to do with the analysis, design, implementation and operation of an enterprise. In a continually changing and unpredictable competitive environment, the Enterprise Engineer addresses a fundamental question: “how to design and improve all elements associated with the total enterprise through the use of engineering and analysis methods and tools to more effectively achieve its goals and objectives”..."

"An enterprise architecture can be thought of as a "blueprint" or "picture" which assists in the design of an enterprise. The enterprise architecture must define three things. First, what are the activities that an enterprise performs? Second, how should these activities be performed? And finally, how should the enterprise be constructed? Consequently, the architecture being developed will identify the essential processes performed by a virtual company, how the virtual company and the agile enterprises involved in the virtual company will perform these processes, and include a methodology for the rapid reconfiguration of the virtual enterprise."

"This country has been so rich in human and material resources that it is only recently that the importance of waste elimination has come to be realized. The material element received the first consideration, and in the comparatively few years during which the subject has received attention, an enormous amount has been done to conserve natural resources, to economize in the use."

"No definite and permanent advance is made in any kind of work, whether with materials or men, until use is made of measurement."

"[A]dvancement of the human factor in industry... varies so much that unless we use measurement and abide by the results, there is no possibility of repeating the process accurately and efficiently at will, or of predicting and controlling the future conditions that assure that advancement."

"The first step in any great movement is to... arouse interest in the subject, to discuss the great problems involved, to outline the possible solutions, and to assign the various problems to those best fitted to undertake and handle them. The next step is to realize that all this discussion, valuable as it is, can grow into such action as it deserves, only if measurement is insisted upon from the very beginning of making the investigations outlined, if the records of measurement are in such form that they can be used by those who did not make them, that skill and experience may thus be transferred, and if the results of the measurements are incorporated into actual and universal practice as soon as they are properly synthesized into practical methods of least waste. The world has come to realize the truth of this as applied to material things. The day of standardization of materials and of machines is far advanced, and is daily progressing; but such has been rarely the case with measurement as applied to the human element."