Engineering

"Engineering is the art of directing the great sources of power in nature for the use and convenience of man."

"Comparatively few engineers are good mathematicians; and... it is fortunate that such is the case; for nature rarely combines high mathematical talent, with that practical tact, and observation of outward things, so essential to a successful engineer. There have been... brilliant exceptions; but they are very rare. But few even of those who have been tolerable mathematicians when young, can, as they advance in years, and become engaged in business, spare the time necessary for retaining such accomplishments."

"Any job I do—if it doesn’t work, somebody pays. Possibly hundreds or thousands of somebodies. That’s the price of good engineering; nobody notices you did your job right."

"Engineering: The art of organizing and directing men, and of controlling the forces and materials of nature for the benefit of the human race."

"Engineers simply refuse to eliminate a thing they call “safety factor.” They will deliberately over-design and over-build by a factor ranging from two to ten, depending upon the magnitude and seriousness of the consequences if something goes wrong. This does not mean that they have no confidence in their work. It is their statement of reality because they know good and well that sooner or later (a) somebody is going to goof, forget instructions, panic, or try to stretch the design, and/or (b) something in the system is going to malfunction."

"A man should build a house with his own hands before he calls himself an engineer."

"A key characteristic of the engineering culture is that the individual engineer’s commitment is to technical challenge rather than to a given company. There is no intrinsic loyalty to an employer as such. An employer is good only for providing the sandbox in which to play. If there is no challenge or if resources fail to be provided, the engineer will seek employment elsewhere. In the engineering culture, people, organization, and bureaucracy are constraints to be overcome. In the ideal organization everything is automated so that people cannot screw it up. There is a joke that says it all. A plant is being managed by one man and one dog. It is the job of the man to feed the dog, and it is the job of the dog to keep the man from touching the equipment. Or, as two Boeing engineers were overheard to say during a landing at Seattle, “What a waste it is to have those people in the cockpit when the plane could land itself perfectly well.” Just as there is no loyalty to an employer, there is no loyalty to the customer. As we will see later, if trade-offs had to be made between building the next generation of “fun” computers and meeting the needs of “dumb” customers who wanted turnkey products, the engineers at DEC always opted for technological advancement and paid attention only to those customers who provided a technical challenge."

"The transition to renewable energy can be greatly accelerated if the world’s governments finally bring the engineers to the fore... I was recently on a panel with three economists and a senior business-sector engineer. After the economists spoke... the engineer spoke succinctly and wisely. “I don’t really understand what you economists were just speaking about, but I do have a suggestion... Tell us engineers the desired ‘specs’ and the timeline, and we’ll get the job done.” This is not bravado.... The next big act belongs to the engineers. Energy transformation for climate safety is our twenty-first-century moonshot."

"As a guide to engineering ethics, I should like to commend to you a liberal adaptation of the injunction contained in the oath of Hippocrates that the professional man do nothing that will harm his client. Since engineering is a profession which affects the material basis of everyone’s life, there is almost always an unconsulted third party involved in any contact between the engineer and those who employ him — and that is the country, the people as a whole. These, too, are the engineer’s clients, albeit involuntarily. Engineering ethics ought therefore to safeguard their interests most carefully. Knowing more about the public effects his work will have, the engineer ought to consider himself an “officer of the court” and keep the general interest always in mind."

"Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money."

"A good engineer is always a wee bit conservative, at least on paper."

"Engineering is too important to wait for science."

"The world needs more engineers willing to solve problems and fewer rich philosophers who have run out of ways to spend money."

"It is a fight to the death between Big Oil and everybody else. Everybody else will benefit from HSR (high speed rail). It cleans up the air. It opens up all kind of new possibilities where you can live a more affordable life and get jobs further away...Everyone is going to benefit, except the oil industry, and that’s where the problem is.... There are some major changes needed to our transportation sector, which means that we need to electrify it. That will mean a whole lot of work for engineers...This is a huge project that the engineering profession needs to step up and be the leaders on. It’s not just an opportunity that means lots of jobs. It means the engineering profession gets to be front and center when solving this humongous problem that everyone looks at as almost unsolvable. It’s not unsolvable. It’s very solvable."

"The metalworker encourages the goldsmith, and the one who smooths with the hammer spurs on the one who strikes the anvil. One says of the welding, “It is good.” The other nails down the idol so it will not topple."

"Engineering is the conscious application of science to the problem of economic production."

"There are two laws discrete, Not reconciled,— Law for man, and law for thing; The last builds town and fleet, But it runs wild, And doth the man unking."

"I was originally supposed to become an engineer but the thought of having to expend my creative energy on things that make practical everyday life even more refined, with a loathsome capital gain as the goal, was unbearable to me."

"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering."

"Engineers should press forward with development to meet the diversified needs of people"

"The civil engineer is the real 19th century architect."

"Engineers do not particularly like PR men."

"As an engineer, he knew that a bucket-load of philosophical principles wasn’t worth a grain of good hard fact."

"[Engineering concerns] the creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation and safety to life and property.""

"When I looked at the science of engineering and saw that it had disappeared after its ancient heritage, that its masters have perished, and that their memories are now forgotten, I worked my wits and thoughts in secrecy about philosophical shapes and figures, which could move the mind, with effort, from nothingness to being and from idleness to motion. And I arranged these shapes one by one in drawings and explained them"

"Only among those who were engaged in a particular activity did their language remain unchanged; so, for in­stance, there was one for all the architects, one for all the carriers of stones, one for all the stone-breakers, and so on for all the different opera­tions. As many as were the types of work involved in the enterprise, so many were the languages by which the human race was fragmented; and the more skill required for the type of work, the more rudimentary and barbaric the language they now spoke. But the holy tongue remained to those who had neither joined in the project nor praised it, but instead, thoroughly disdaining it, had made fun of the builders' stupidity."

"Dynamic systems studies usually are not designed to predict what will happen. Rather, they're designed to explore what would happen, if a number of driving factors unfold in a range of different ways."

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."

"The successes of modern control theory in the design of highly accurate space navigation systems have stimulated its use in the theoretical analyses of economic and biological systems. Similarly, the effectiveness of computer simulation techniques in the macroscopic analyses of physical systems has brought into vogue the use of computer-based econometric models for purposes of forecasting, economic planning, and management."

"It is my hope that in such a way we may again, as Marx claimed, find scientific arguments in the competition between various systems, but up-to-date scientific arguments rather than obsolete ones. This more fundamental research in economics deserves relatively more attention and resources than the more superficial versions of economic research directed at forecasting or analysing very short-term fluctuations in market prices, on which quite some money is being spent to-day."

"The intellectually aggressive hedgehogs knew one big thing and sought, under the banner of parsimony, to expand the explanatory power of that big thing to “cover” new cases; the more eclectic foxes knew many little things and were content to improvise ad hoc solutions to keep pace with a rapidly changing world."

"This led me to the thought that it might be easy to pretend to be a Seer. After all, if one pretended to have visions of the far distant future, how would anyone know if they came true or not?"

"Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making."

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

"Without precise predictability, control is impotent and almost meaningless. In other words, the lesser the predictability, the harder the entity or system is to control, and vice versa. If our universe actually operated on linear causality, with no surprises, uncertainty, or abrupt changes, all future events would be absolutely predictable in a sort of waveless orderliness."

"I am profoundly skeptical about our abilities to predict the future in general, and human behavior in particular."

"A forecast can only be based on a diagnosis about current trends if it is to be based on something other than wishful thinking. This is why I was never a strong supporter of the distinction between forecasts and projections: our best forecasts are intelligent projections. Moreover, it turns out that learning about the diagnosis that underlies a forecast is often much more rewarding than learning about the forecast itself."

"I have always believed that people have misjudged the accuracy of economic forecasting... During the 1980s and 1990s, I researched and applied methods of high frequency economic forecasting, to be used by themselves, and for objective establishment of initial conditions for longer range forecasts from structural dynamic models that carry forward the pioneering contributions of Jan Tinbergen."

"Question 8. Is There a Measurable, Qualitatively Distinctive Prediction of String Theory? String theories can, in principle, make many "s" (such as the calculation of the mass ratios of s and s, Higgs masses and couplings, s, etc.). They can also make many new predictions (such as the masses of the supersymmetric partners of the observed particles, new gauge interactions, etc.). These would be sufficient to establish the validity of the theory, however in each case one can imagine (although with some difficulty) conventinal field theories coming up with similar pre or post dictions. It would be nice to predict a phenomenon, which would be accessible at observable energies and is uniquely characteristic of string theory."

"If you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous."

"Psychologist Philip Tetlock (following the lead of Isaiah Berlin), divided the world of political forecasters into hedgehogs and foxes."

"As with anything else, there are good and bad ways to forecast."

"[Engineering concerns] the creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation and safety to life and property.""

"Darius was clearly of the opinion That the air is also man's dominion And that with paddle or fin or pinion, We soon or late shall navigate The azure as now we sail the sea."

"Wal, I like flyin' well enough," He said, "but the' ain't sich a thundern' sight O' fun in't when ye come to light."

"He rode upon a cherub, and did fly: yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind."

"Let brisker youths their active nerves prepare Fit their light silken wings and skim the buxom air."

"For I dipt into the future far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales; Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue."

"According to the theory of aerodynamics, as may be readily demonstrated through wind tunnel experiments, the bumblebee is unable to fly. This is because the size, weight and shape of his body in relation to the total wingspread make flying impossible. But the bumblebee, being ignorant of these scientific truths, goes ahead and flies anyway—and makes a little honey every day."

"The birds can fly, an' why can't I? Must we give in," says he with a grin, "That the bluebird an' phœbe are smarter 'n we be?"