Sometimes you do things when you’re not sure and you just have a hunch. Sometimes you don’t know the logic or the reasoning behind your decisions – you just know it makes sense.
SWIVL recommends a wonderful book, The Essential Engineer by Henry Petroski for your September – October reading that provides an excellent summary of science and engineering, their differences and similarities. This is a well written book, easy to understand, and quick to the point on how and why we make decisions; decisions based on experiences, common sense, and just plain human ingenuity. For example, Petroski tells the story of the Wright brothers and their invention of flight. These brothers knew what to do but not why. Here's a little bit of their story:
"The airplane is another classic example of a thing being designed, built, and operated before there was a complete scientific explanation of its working principles. The Wright brothers were neither scientists nor engineers in any formal sense, but that is not to say that they did not apply scientific and engineering methods to develop a machine capable of powered flight. They read what they could find on the problems, experience, and phenomena associated with flight, and they experimented with different designs and profiles for wings and propellers, which they thought of as rather complicated rotating wings, to find the best shape for their purposes. . . . When a Wright propeller broke in flight, it revealed a weakness that was fixed by a redesign. What the brothers could not appeal to in their quest was a fully predictive engineering science of aerodynamics. The development of that would follow the existence of airplanes whose powered flight begged for analysis. Indeed, airplanes would be flying for decades before there was a full physical and mathematical explanation of why wings worked."
Petroski has taken a subject that at first glace might seem to be rather esoteric and limited to a scientific audience, and shaped it into an important story about how science and engineering have singularly and together created the wonders of our world today. Equally important is that Mr. Petroski has provided numerous metaphors and analogies to help us understand how invention takes place not just in the physical and material world but also how we can reinvent ourselves to be more productive and successful in society. Click here to purchase a copy of the book. As you read this book please feel free to add your own comments below.
