{"id":4651,"date":"2010-07-22T07:50:26","date_gmt":"2010-07-22T11:50:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=4651"},"modified":"2010-07-22T07:50:26","modified_gmt":"2010-07-22T11:50:26","slug":"the-empirical-side-of-engineering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/07\/22\/the-empirical-side-of-engineering\/","title":{"rendered":"The empirical side of engineering"},"content":{"rendered":"

As anyone who’s been paying attention knows, most engineering work is unexceptional and we depend on it working without fuss or bother. Engineers learn what is and isn’t possible with the materials and techniques available, but one of the most important teachers is failure<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The sinking of the Titanic<\/em>, the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor in 1986, the collapse of the World Trade Center — all forced engineers to address what came to be seen as deadly flaws.<\/p>\n

\u201cAny engineering failure has a lot of lessons,\u201d said Gary Halada, a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who teaches a course called \u201cLearning from Disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n

Design engineers say that, too frequently, the nature of their profession is to fly blind.<\/p>\n

Eric H. Brown, a British engineer who developed aircraft during World War II and afterward taught at Imperial College London, candidly described the predicament. In a 1967 book, he called structural engineering \u201cthe art of molding materials we do not really understand into shapes we cannot really analyze, so as to withstand forces we cannot really assess, in such a way that the public does not really suspect.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As anyone who’s been paying attention knows, most engineering work is unexceptional and we depend on it working without fuss or bother. Engineers learn what is and isn’t possible with the materials and techniques available, but one of the most important teachers is failure: The sinking of the Titanic, the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,15],"tags":[590,156],"class_list":["post-4651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-technology","tag-engineering","tag-fail"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1d1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4652,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4651\/revisions\/4652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}