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Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand 12

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"Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead" both by Ayn Rand, should be required reading for all engineers.

My Economics Professor recommended both to me years ago - I am indebted forever. He also told me to read the "Tao Teh Ching" frequently, which I do.

These three literary works have help me improve myself which in turn helps me get ahead in my work.

Can anyone recommend other great reads to help achieve these ends?

Thanks.
 
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I have read "Atlas..." Rand is good in my opinion.

Two authors to try for good thought: Feyneman's "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out." or McPhee's "The Control Of Nature"

The truth will set you free. Best of luck. Geodude
 
Fight Club - the movie or the book. Don't let the title fool you, it's not just about guys beating each other up. Addresses the problem of being 'slaves in white collars.'

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, humorous look at the implications of a triumph of chemistry that basically destroyed the world.

Real Genius with Val Kilmer.

Vince
 
I didn't realize Fight Club was a book -- even better than the movie? I might have to pick that one up, a one-sentence review/comparison to the movie would be appreciated.
 
The Manhattan Project - now it can be told
by General Leslie Groves -- Challenging engineering enterprise under trying circumstances. The present text is heavily edited from the original I read many years ago. This is the definitive background story of the bomb.

V-2
by General Dornberger -- A remarkable story of engineering achievement under great pressures. Look for description of elements of rockets and jet engines still in use today.
(Be happy they didn't concentrate on the A bomb!)

Sons of Martha - available from ASCE
A good read for all engineers, especially CE's. There are selections from many books. This will surely lead to other books of interest. It runs the gamut of canals, railroads, tunnels, bridges, dams, military engineering, etc.
 
well on the fiction and conservative side of Engineering and books that should be read by lots of engineers Fountianhead and Atlas Shrugged are great!

However on the fiction and liberal side the Heinlen and other "Golden Age" sci-Fi i thought were required to be in this profession!

For my suggestions:

The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra

Excerpt: "There are two things in life: Having fun and learning something. If you're not having fun, Learn something!" (discussion on the quantum nature of life love and philosophy)

The Illuminatus (or how I found the goddess and what I did with her when I found her) by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

(the above is a great dose of completely excessive sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. When included with the sequal Schrodingers Cat enven some quantum mechanics to go with)

Chaos by James Glieck (last name spelt wrong)
Im sure most ar familar with the revolution caused by B. Mandelbrot and Mr. Julia and others.

Seconds for Art of War.

Hank Reardon was kinda cool thou........





Nick
I love materials science!
 
don't think i saw this one in there so I will add it for grins - angle of attack, about and possibly coauthored by Harrison stormy Storms - about the space race from the ENGINEERING side. Really really good book.
 
This thread is gettin' kinda long, but I thought I'd mention a good reference:

"The Official Rules"

I bought it some 20 years ago (1st edition paperback) and noticed a few years back a later version.

It has Murphy's Law (of course!), along with almost all the corollaries, then many other quotes along the same lines. One of my favorites was "Gabe Caplan's Law", which says, "Give a small boy a hammer, and soon he will find that everything he encounters needs a beating." Or something like that.

... Steve
 
ICman, I learned a slightly different version of that same saying. "When the only tool you have is a hammer, the rest of the world looks like a nail."


Maui
 
I am afraid my current favorite, or at least most accurate is "where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
 
For more summer beach reading, how about:
"The Goal" by Eliyahu M. Goldratt & Jeff Cox.
It's a novel about industrial engineering/operations management


"Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II" by Jennet Conant . it's about Alfred Loomis a financier/scientist inventor who was instrumental in radar & atomic physics.
 
NickE:

I have the Tao of Physics and found it fascinating. It is a very cool book.

That must be very exciting work. I was especially intrigued by the theory that they can 'create' matter by colliding particles at extremely high speeds. I say 'theory' but in the book it descibes in detail how they have done this and proven it. But it still doesn't make intuitive 'sense'.

Good Book.
 
Creating matter makes sense when you consider E=mc^2. This is the very foundation of the nuclear industry: that matter and energy are equivalent, matter can be converted to energy and energy to matter. If you solve for m, you get m=E/c^2. That's how you determine the amount of matter that can be created from an amount of energy.

[bat]Someday, someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it is empty.[bat]
 
Thanks, TheTick

But, I may be wrong, but I think this is a little different in that the total mass of the system was larger after the collision than before. There were more smaller particles that cumlatively had more mass. Assuming that energy and matter are equivalent, there would more matter and energy in the system total, not just converted from one to other.

??
 
Still makes sense. That's what nuclear fusion is all about. The mass of a nucleon (proton or neutron) is actually not constant. It is dependent on the size of the nucleus in which the nucleon resides.

As smaller nuclei fuse, the mass per nucleon is less than their original parts. The "missing" mass is released as energy. This phenomenon reverses when nuclei are about the size of an iron (Fe) atom nucleus. After that, net energy needs to be added to make nuclei fuse. So larger nuclei undergoing fusion would gain mass.

There would still be mass-energy parity with the relationship of dE=(dm)c^2 (imagine the "d's" are "deltas")
 
Another good book that I am currently reading is called

"Wild at Heart" Dont remember the author. Very good :)
 
There have been some interesting suggestions on this thread - I've made a list and will see what I can find at the library.
A couple of suggestions of my own :
Slide Rule by Neville Shute - this is his autobiography and is a fascinating insight into an engineer of the 30's through to the 50's. He worked on the Vickers R100 airship alongside Barnes Wallis (of WWII bouncing bomb fame).
Another good read and much more recent is Against All Odds by James Dyson - inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner. Again this is an autobiography. Whilst not an engineer, Dyson is a brilliant designer and the story of his dogged determination to bring his vacuum to market makes a great story.
 
EngineerDave-
Different Dyson, I believe--the Dyson at Princeton was a contemporary and good friend of Richard Feynman. He was a physicist/applied mathematician.
Brad
 
I love books and can't resist a post about them. I've never read Ayn Rand but I've never seen an author who could elicit such an emotional response as she, positive or negative. People seem to love her or hate her. Therefore I shall have to read some of her work.

Recommended reading for engineers:

Non Fiction:
George Gamow's books about Mr Tompkins (if you can snag them, you're in luck - they are all out of print but worth every penny)
Le Couteur & Burreson "Napoleon's Buttons"
Robert Hazan "The Diamond Makers" (try to ignore the typos)
Oliver Sacks "Uncle Tungsten"
Richard Rhodes "The Making of the Atomic Bomb"
Street & Alexander "Metals in the Service of Man"
Paul Strathern "Mendeleev's Dream"

Fiction:
George MacDonald Fraser's "Flashman" series (because even non-fiction readers need a good laugh now and then)
Yann Martel "Life of Pi" - an example of on-the-fly life-or-death problem solving at its finest.
Any decent historical fiction - because engineers seem to feel that they have to be learning something while they read a story.

...And please don't read any of the junk written by or about Jack Welch. He is no friend to the engineer. Dilbert would say that he is the pointiest of the pointy-haired bosses.



 
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