Flying Buttresses, Entropy, and 0-Rings
Haegel, Nancy M.
WHERE IT GETS SQUISHY FLYING BUTTRESSES, ENTROPY, AND 0-RINGS The World of an Engineer James L. Adams Harvard University Press, $24.95, 256 pp. Nancy M. Haegel housands of visitors each year...
...An airplane that could not crash is simply impossible to conceive," the author Commonweal24 April 1992: 29...
...This is reflected in Adams's efforts to define engineering, to describe how engineers establish and solve problems, to explain what design, development, and manufacturing really mean...
...James Adams, a mechanical engineer and professor at Stanford, attempts to bridge that chasm in Flying Buttresses, Entropy, and 0-Rings...
...28: 24 April 1992Commonweal The attitude of Greek civilization toward engineering and technology continues to shape the modern profession...
...Adams tells a revealing story of designing a safety system for industrial milling machines...
...Although users of skilled technology, the Greek upper classes preferred "nonmaterial" pursuits, leaving engineering for the lower classes, slaves, and foreigners...
...nations, says Aristotle, are sleight of hand: actualization (seeing) is slipped into the material possibilities which then produce the effect by magic...
...The resultant sense of being unappreciated and misunderstood often means that engineers either don't bother to explain what they do, or else they try too hard...
...In addition, human conflict was another important, and still dominant, force in the development of technology...
...When an injury occurred soon after the new system was installed, he discovered that the workers were using other objects to depress one button, allowing them to operate the machine more easily, more rapidly and, of course, more dangerously...
...The word engineer comes from the Latin ingeniator, or "one who is ingenious at devising...
...Few educated people today would boast of their lack of competence or interest in history or literature, yet in many circles, ignorance of engineering and technology, physics and math is displayed with pride...
...The desire of rulers to build monuments to their god or to themselves provided early motivation for technological marvels...
...If actualizations are already fully explained in the materials, one produces a metaphysics that makes change illusory, freedom impossible, and philosophy depart from common sense...
...Taking a plant tour is one thing...
...Working with slave labor readily sacrificed in pursuit of the cause, these engineers moved twoanda-half-ton blocks over large distances...
...Adams designed a system requiring two separate buttons to be depressed before the mill would run...
...Nancy M. Haegel housands of visitors each year touring Detroit's automotive assembly factories are impressed, disconcerted, or simply amazed by the sheer speed, complexity, and automation they see...
...Ignorance and stereotyping go together, and engineers and their profession have been the subject of both...
...is to observe the efforts of early civil engineers...
...The British Institute of Civil Engineers organized in 1818, but their professional colleagues were at work millennia before...
...Adams surveys the history and future of engineering and describes the key aspects invention and design, development and testing, manufacturing and assembly, science and research, money and business—of the engineering profession...
...The most engaging discussion concerns the role of development and testing, risk and failure in modern engineering...
...His task was to make foolproof a machine that had high-speed cutting parts and represented a serious safety risk...
...Human consciousness, if it is to be "explained" at all, must exist in a world of change, freedom, and common sense...
...To stand before the Egyptian pyramids (3000-2500 B.c...
...Modern technology and engineering are on display as a car moves from an unrecognizable skeleton to a shiny product on the showroom floor...
...And, he suggests, we should want to know more, since "a society as technologically based as ours cannot remain functionally democratic, in the sense of making informed choices about our future, without an electorate and leaders who understand technology and the engineering process that is its core...
...The chicken is just the egg in another guise or, as Dennett suggests in a revelatory joke: a scholar is just a library's way of making another library...
...From David's slingshot in the valley of the Terebinth to modern infrared technology in the deserts of Iraq, engineering and warfare have walked hand in hand...
...Being an engineer is another...
...Admitting that "engineering and technology are not well understood by most people," Adams seeks to inform those who, because of profession, partner, or just general interest, want to know more about engineering...
...How does one ensure that workers' hands are never in harm's way...
...It's a worthwhile attempt—this is, after all, the world of the engineer—but it is not particularly interesting...
...Even Ralph Nader would be hard pressed to avoid an expression of wonder as finished automobiles emerge from the production line...
Vol. 119 • April 1992 • No. 8
