Something to Think About - Comments?

[BigH]

Ran across the following today - thought I'd post it and see what responses we will get . . .

“For the engineer, … , there are many possible answers, all of which are compromises of truth and time, for the engineer must have an answer now; his answer must be sufficient for a given purpose, even if not true. For this reason an engineer must make assumptions he knows to be not strictly correct – but which will enable him to arrive at an answer which is sufficiently true for the immediate purpose.” H. Q. Golder (1948)

 

[AussieGeoEng]

Yes. I think I read/skimmed over that paper not long ago. I guess it is a somewhat reasonable statement. Along the same lines and a little more recently:
“Classical soil mechanics has evolved around a few simplified models which do not fit the properties of most real soils sufficiently for useful and safe predictions to be made… Since we cannot change the soil to fit the soil mechanics, perhaps we should change the soil mechanics to fit the soil. The theory which fails to fit their behaviour is problematic, not the soil.” (Vaughan, 1999)

 

[ishvaaag]

That's the traditional difference on what technical and science. Science is what most accurate we can afford, even if still just an approach to the attempted knowledge; science requires a higher level of specialization so scientist usually focus more on specialized problems; technical people, maybe with the exception of those dedicated to research, can relax somewhat the accuracy standard in order to provide efficiently solutions to what demanded from them.

Even our best guesses are but platonic shadows seen from the cave. Maybe the gnostic Job was on the point when bemusing

"Where is the knowledge?"
"Between those living you can't find it"

 

[Ron]

A great rationalization of insufficient data....but also more true than we are willing to admit much of the time.