Greatest Achievement in Engineering 8

[zdas04]

There was recently a thread in another forum from a student asking for opinions on "What is the Greatest Achievement in Engineering" of all time. The thread in that forum violated several of eng-tips rules and was inappropriate. But it got me thinking what really was the greatest engineering achievement of all time? Was it one of the early efforts of developing the wheel or the lever? Was it the U.S. space program that spun off so many wonderful new technologies? Was it the computer? Was it the aqueduct's of Rome?

What is your perspective on the greatest achievement in engineering of all time? All answers must be justified and defended there is no "right" answer, but I hope there will be many "wrong" answers.

David

 

[JAE]

Steel

 

[GregLocock]

Hey I'm not 100% convinced by the 'it is only engineering if it is analysed' argument myself.

The Great Wall was just an organisational exercise, I don't think it is essentially any different from building a garden wall in technology. The Pyramids were different (by the way you got their main function wrong, they are markers for the approach to the landing strip for UFOs) because of the difficulty of handling such large blocks of stone.

How about:

Transistors

Feedback circuits

Semiconductors

The Otto engine

Watt's steam engine



Cheers

Greg Locock

 

[EnglishMuffin]

GregLocock: Well, yes, it is difficult to handle large blocks of stone, but that "enabling technology" (whatever it was) seems already to have been in place before they started building pyramids, since the (reputedly) much earlier "valley temple" near the sphinx has even larger (200 ton) blocks than any in the pyramids. It's a bit like crediting the moon program with all the rocket technology which had actually already been developed. One of the things I find interesting about the pyramids is that they got better and better, peeking with the great pyramid, and then gradually deteriorated in technology - the final ones were just mud brick. That is so reminiscent of many other products we make today.

 

[zdas04]

OK, we get back to Newton's "One is only great when he stands on the shoulders of Giants". I think we need to find a revolutionary (as opposed to evolutionary) step. James Burke's "Connections" PBS series was really big on showing how everything we see today had logical connections back to the stone axe or some such. Is there anything anyone can think of that represents an "AHA!" in engineering like Galleleo had in clestial mechanics?

David

 

[ScottyUK]

Radio, perhaps? It was a quite amazing achievement to discover and demonstrate that a funny-shaped wire could transmit a signal to another funny-shaped wire some distance away without any direct connection.

Does this discussion extend to include physicists as well as engineers? For example, the work of Newton, Einstein, and Maxwell to name just a few. Not strictly 'engineering' achievements, but they laid the foundations for engineers to build upon.






-----------------------------------

"Never look down any at anybody, unless you are helping them up."

Jesse jackson.

 

[patprimmer]

Getting back to Newton.

His development of calculus gave engineers the basic mathematical tool to do complex calculations.

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pat pprimmer@acay.com.au
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[EnglishMuffin]

Regarding Newton, I think the revisionists are now of the opinion that Liebnitz was as much, if not more, responsible for giving us calculus in the form we know it today. If one were to go back in a time machine and kill both of them at birth, I suspect that calculus books today would look pretty much the same if you killed Newton, but not if you killed Liebnitz.
But this is mathematics, which some have defined as "the science of patterns". If one defines engineering, as most do, to be applied science, not science itself, how can you define any mathematical development to be an "engineering achievement"? As with most things, one has to agree on definitions first, before they can really be discussed logically.

 

[EnglishMuffin]

How about "The Atomic Bomb"? Most people would regard this as a "scientific" achievement, but I contend that it was largely engineering, and there has always been a deep connection between weapons of war and engineering in any case. The late Richard Feynman once said that almost everything they did at Los Alamos was in fact engineering, not science. Of course, the engineering was being carried out mostly by eminent scientists, not engineers. But most of what the majority of scientists spend their time doing is actually engineering anyway.

 

[desertfox]

Hi zdas04

I think the construction of Stonenge in Wiltshire is a fantastic engineering feat, try this link:-

http://www.crystalinks.com/stonehenge.html

regards desertfox

 

[25362]

Whether Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (e goes before i) or Newton were the fathers of calculus is, to my grasping, immaterial; both made major contributions, and the bitter dispute of so long on who preceded whom shouldn't worry us.

I think EnglishMuffin is right on the subject of definitions, engineering is a science, and science involves the application of mathematical reasoning and data analysis to natural phenomena. Science is "per se" applied although it doesn't always seem so.

On the other hand, mathematics, the study of shape, quantity and dependence, can be applied or pure. The former arises from the study of physical phenomena, the latter from the intrinsic study of mathematical structures.

Am I right ?

 

[jmw]

We might also reflect that mathematics is not absolute and has a rather more philosophical view of itself.

One of the earliest Greek philosophers refused to countenance any real world use of his philosophies (the educated among you will remind me who). Engineers who so thoroughly use mathematics are using math as a tool and are free from the philosophical considerations.

We might also consider Pythagoras Theorem, even though it is actual a proof for which he is famous. The "theorem" existed long before that, and was a vital engineering tool.

This tells us that while mathematicians are obsessed with proofs that define the limits or extent to which a theorem is true, engineers are concerned with the usefulness in everyday circumstances.

We can reflect that mathematicians are not without the human touch. Fermat’s last Theorem has now been converted into a proof; but no-one seems to comment on Fermat’s claim to have had a proof, perhaps in deference to the esteem in which he is held: the proof has required extensive use of "new" mathematics unavailable to Fermat.

We also should consider that mathematics has its own "king’s new suit of clothes". All proofs are based on previous proofs. “And so ad infinitum?” No, at the heart of mathematics are some axioms. A straight line is the shortest distance between two points etc. Sadly, when it was decided to look at these axioms and see if they too were not capable of being proved, it was found that they could not be. A bit like Schrödinger’s cat? Except that they did open the box and possibly wished they hadn't since they don't know, and now know they can't know, if the cat is alive or dead. This, it seems to me, reduces the whole of mathematics to a great big theoretical structure.

This definition of axioms is a hard one to swallow:

http://www.faragher.freeserve.co.uk/axioms2.htm

I think it was Russel (

http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Russell.html;

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell/)

who was involved in this work (still looking).

Euclids work (

http://plus.maths.org/issue7/features/proof1/)

suggests that modern math is founded on 2000year old “presumptions”.

So engineers use mathematics as a tool in the practical world. The results are tangible and viable. The mathematics behind them may not be quite so sound? I wonder if we are ever going to see a “Non-euclidian” branch of mathematics, much as we have Newtonian and Non Newtonian.

We already have Null A (non-Aristotelian) thought and this is probably more useful to us as engineers along with Edward De Bono's works on letaral thinking, as a means of "thinking outside of the box".

This, then, bears on the argument that a "greatest" invention or discovery would be something not evolved out of existing thought. That is going to be hard since many "discoveries" or "inventions" appear, with hindsite, almost inevitable once their time has come. Witness the counter claims about Leibnitz and Newton, about who invented TV or the electric light.

Is there an invention that goes beyond conventional mathematics, beyond the current development paths in the accepted diciplines?

Any ideas?


JMW

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[25362]

I'd venture that Chemistry has introduced over the ages some inventions that weren't the direct result of using mathematics. Do you agree ?

 

[EnglishMuffin]

25362 : Well, I may be right, but I am NOT saying that engineering is a science. The subject is highly controversial, since the whole issue of what constitutes engineering versus science, or even science itself, is partly a matter of lexicography and partly a philosophical issue. There have even been eminent scientists who had the audacity to claim that only physics was a science, and that subjects like biology were really just "reverse engineering'. In the face of what appears in some cases to be intellectual snobbery, it is doubtful that any consensus can be achieved on the subject.

The following includes an interesting discussion of the origin of the term "engineering". Be patient - it takes a long time to come up.

http://www.analitica.com/va/sociedad/articulos/1262677.asp

 

[IRstuff]

This whole question is rather nebulous and will never come to a reasonable conclusion, ala Animal Farm.

Consider the human body and the person. Is the heart more important or more monumental than the brain? The whole point of standing on the shoulders of giants is that the sum is greater than the parts.

The greatest achievement is that we got to this point without, yet, catastrophically damaging ourselves or our world.

TTFN

 

[GregLocock]

"We can reflect that mathematicians are not without the human touch. Fermat’s last Theorem has now been converted into a proof; but no-one seems to comment on Fermat’s claim to have had a proof, perhaps in deference to the esteem in which he is held: the proof has required extensive use of "new" mathematics unavailable to Fermat."


"no-one"?

Not true. The proof that has been offered is rather ugly and involved. There has been a lot of discussion about whether Fermat had a better approach, or if he had made a mistake.

Now that they know it is true there is a fair amount of effort going into reverse-engineering Fermat's possible solution.

Cheers

Greg Locock

 

[EnglishMuffin]

Quite agree. Even if his proof was not rigorous, he must have had some brilliant insight in order to propose such an "off the wall" conjecture, which probably nobody would have even thought of trying to prove had he not proposed it. Just knowing what that insight was would be fascinating. Even we non-mathematicians might be able to understand it, although Sir Andrew Wiles probably disapproves (I think I heard him say once that Fermat could not possibly have proved it in his time). But I don't see how any of this can be a "great achievement in engineering", since at best it qualifies as science. I personally think science and mathematics have to be off limits for this particular accolade.
The problem is, even science textbooks are full of inventions which in their day were unquestionably the work of engineers. Does one categorize lasers, say, or transistors, as engineering or science ? Certainly lasers could have been created by engineers using the known physics principles of the time, even if the inventors were actually both physicists. For most people, that fact puts it squarely in the field of physics. But as far as I am aware, lasers don't exist in the natural world (although I expect someone will correct me with an obscure example), so that ought to qualify their invention as an engineering achievement. The triode vacuum tube on the other hand was invented by an engineer, and seems to be generally thought of as an engineering creation. One might note that Lee de Forest was sneered at a little by physicists because they said it was a lucky accident and he really didn't understand it properly. So it's all a very controversial and ego-laden subject indeed.

 

[JAE]

I would say that a good definition of engineering, is the USE of math, science, chemistry, statistics, etc. to create something real, tangible, and beneficial to the world. Sort of using the "general" sciences for something specific that I can touch or see.

NSPE some years ago had a slogan for E-week:

"Engineers - Turning Ideas into Reality".

 

[25362]

To JAE, there are exceptions to all rules; sometimes creation of something real and tangible such as an atomic bomb is indeed an engineering feat but no so beneficial to the world or to civilization.

 

[Maui]

Mother nature provided the world with the ultimate engineering accomplishment when the first living cells were created billions of years ago. And the rest, as they say, is history.


Maui

 

[EnglishMuffin]

25362: The contention that the atomic bomb has not been beneficial, at least in the short term, is controversial. If you draw a graph of the number of people killed in combat versus time, it rises exponentially, but with a precipitous drop after 1946. In my view, the jury is still out on whether familiarity, nuclear proliferation and terrorism will eventually prove that phenomenon to be an ephemeral anomaly.