"Engineer a desire of our
youth"
ENGINEERING in our societyis the desire of most of the student.majority of
student wanted to take admission in engineering university but actually they
don't know that literally what is engineering and is this their area of in trust
because different people have their different abilities unlike engineering bus
due to parents pressure or due to any other reason they took this faculty.but in
my article i want to tell a basic fact about the engineering on the behalf of
Henry Petroski's artical .
In political discourse, public policy debates, and the mass media, engineering
is often a synonym for science. This confusion might seem an innocuous shorthand
for headline writers, but it can leave politicians, policymakers, and the
general public unable to make informed decisions about the technical challenges
facing the world today.
Science is about understanding the origins, nature, and behavior of the universe
and all it contains; engineering is about solving problems by rearranging the
stuff of the world to make new things. Conflating these separate objectives
leads to uninformed opinions, which in turn can delay or misdirect management,
effort, and resources.
Take this year's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. No one, to the best of my
knowledge, blamed it on science. Poor engineering decisions allowed gas to
escape from a well in deep water, which in turn caused a fatal explosion.
Subsequently, the engineered blowout preventer failed, and for months oil
escaped into the environment. Poor engineering got us into the mess; surely only
good engineering could get us out of it. Yet repeatedly, government and other
research scientists were allowed to veto the engineering tactics needed to
stanch the flow. In the end, of course, it was engineering that finally capped
the well.
While not all of the technological challenges facing the world today require the
same immediate attention as a gushing oil well—some are as mundane as developing
renewable energy sources, providing clean water, and disposing of our mountains
of garbage—they still present the same duality.
Scientists might argue that the government needs to invest in basic scientific
research that will lead to unspecified discoveries about energy, water, and
waste. Although a good deal is already known about those things, it certainly
would not hurt to know more, but what would really move things forward would be
investments in engineering.
Throughout history, a full scientific understanding has been neither necessary
nor sufficient for great technological advances: The era of the steam engine,
notably, was well into its second century before a fully formed science of
thermodynamics had been developed. Indeed, sometimes science has impeded
progress. Had Marconi believed his physicist contemporaries, he would have
"known" that wireless telegraphy signals could not be sent across the ocean,
around Earth's curvature.
Engineers welcome any and all available scientific knowledge, but they needn't
wait for scientists to give them the go-ahead to invent, design, or develop the
machinery to advance technology or to check it when it runs out of control.
Without understanding this, we will continue to underfund the engineering needed
to solve our greatest problems.