WIE_F2015_02

That's my tokenism to structural materials. Now this is a quote from Daniel [Kahneman], and actually next week I will probably give everyone a copy of this book. Has he would have ever heard of this book, Thinking Fast and Slow? Daniel [Kahneman] won the Nobel Prize in economics back in 2002 or 2001 or something. He's a psychic, psychologist, and he's also a statistician. Someone recommended this book to me, actually an MIT grad recommended it to me, and it's one of the few books I've read that I put a lot of highlights in. One of the highlights is, I've yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, okay.

Materials and new materials, or whatever you read in the MIT news and see on the screens at MIT, most of this is oversold okay. Ninety-eight percent of it is a sales job okay, and it's not really quite that great. In fact there's a quote that I like, and you'll, if you take some of the other modules you'll probably, right. There was a guy at General Electric in Cincinnati where they make aircraft engines, and he was head of materials, name was Robert Sprague. And Robert Sprague had a quote: whenever you first hear about a new material, write it down, because those are the best properties that material will ever have, okay. And then there's Jim Williams' corollary. Jim Williams was a titanium metallurgist who became department head at Carnegie Mellon and Dean at Ohio State, and then he replaced Bob Sprague at General Electric. And Jim Williams says his corollary to Bob Sprague's quote is, whenever you first hear about the cost of a new material, write it down, because that's the lowest price the material will ever have, okay.

So when you hear about, I mean, this is not only am I unconventional my teaching, I'm a little bit unconventional in my approach to is material science as wonderful as everywhere it says? Actually it is pretty wonderful in many ways, but most people are exaggerating how wonderful it is. Has anybody in here not signed up on the class list? Okay let me just give this back, you can sign up, make sure I get a package. I just like to figure out sometime in the next week how many students I have.

Okay so today we're supposed to be starting What Is Engineering. It's sort of a catch-all, in part because students have asked me to talk about different things at different times, and I finally decided okay, I'll put some of these things together, and I could do it in terms of what is engineering. This is the syllabus, it's on the, should be on Stellar. We're going to start today with definitions of engineering. I'll pass these around, everybody take one, is your first quiz. There's questions on it anyway, and then we'll talk about externalities. Do you know what an externality is? It's an economics word, and it's all the things that don't have to do with what you think the main technical subject is, like politics. Student: Economics, okay, or cost, what, public perception, environmental, you know, all these. Yes. Yeah, and we'll talk about that, externalities, and in fact externalities are often the biggest hurdle to introducing a new technology. Has nothing to do with technology is great, but there are other factors.

We're going to talk about the history of engineering just because I think you'll be surprised at where engineering came from and where its various diversions. We're going to talk about the scientific method, and I'm going to talk about Kahneman, that's why I bought you a copy. What I found out, that Amazon sells these in paperback for nine dollars nineteen cents. I figure you're all worth nine dollars nineteen cents. If it'd been more than ten, maybe not, but anyway, in any case they should be in tomorrow or Monday or whatever, and I'll bring them to class. Kahneman talks about, it's called Thinking Fast and Slow, and thinking fast is your intuitive judgment, and thinking slow is your analytical judgment, okay. And anyway we'll talk about that when we get to it.

Gets into what's an expert. Okay if you're going to be an engineer you're going to be engineering experts, and what does it mean to be an expert. We're going to talk about design. To a certain extent engineering is design, and how design has evolved. We're going to talk about forensics and how do you get to the root cause of a problem. We're going to talk about errors and logic and learning to be honest with yourself and forcing other people to be honest with themselves, which is not always a way to win friends and influence people. And we're going to talk about language translation and communications, which I said are important. And then we got some miscellaneous topics, but, and if you want some other topic let me know, I'm happy to try to incorporate it.

But right now I want you to take a couple minutes to try to answer some of these questions. You got the paper, you're going to keep it, I'm not going to read it. Write down what I want you to tell me what you think engineering, and go down as far as you can in the next three minutes and try to give me your idea.

Okay you keep writing. In fact what I'd like you to do is keep this, if you want to bring it to class every day. But maybe once a week you can pull it out and write down any other thoughts you might have, fill in the blanks. At the end of the term I might give you an assignment to tell me what you finally, how your opinion has formed or not formed, or changed or whatever.

There's a couple other things with this exercise. I just pulled a teaching technique on you that you should always be aware of. Anybody know what it is? It's called pre-assessment, to find out where your students are okay. You're all at different levels of understanding of what is engineering, and whenever you're teaching someone, the first thing you should do, no matter what the topic is, you know if you're teaching a cooking class you might want to know if you've got one of the world's top chefs as one of the students. I mean I remember when, yeah well I don't know, I don't know that particular example.

But Professor Sadoway and I were asked back in the late 1970s to teach a course to 40 IBM students one summer, and we were supposed to teach them introductory material science. And fortunately we did ask them what some of the background was. A couple of students had PhDs in materials, and we were supposed to be teaching them introductory material science, okay. We also had people, never had, they were, you know, electrical engineers, didn't know what a material was okay. So in fact we came back, we said well how are we going to teach this when we got all the way from people who know nothing to people who have a doctoral degree in the area. But we found out the old MIT technique, sort of works, you go back to the basics okay. If you go back to the basics, people usually can find some insight, if you go back to the basics, which are actually simple, okay.

So pre-assessment is one thing. The other thing is, I sort of sandbagged you, there is no good definition of engineering. Did, he might come up with it now that I've said that, and I've now poisoned you, or as huh, [Kahneman] will say, I've essentially pre-programmed you to that, you know, I don't believe there's a good definition of engineering. Actually I think there is a good definition, but what happened to me was about 25 years ago, during a Columbus Day holiday, about 24 people from the School of Engineering, department heads and a few others, I think each department head was allowed to pick one younger faculty member, and I was the one that Professor Flemings chose to go down to this retreat on the Cape, where we wanted to figure out what the strategy we should be for the next 25 years for the School of Engineering. And we spent a lot of time trying to define what is engineering. You would think that 24 engineers from the School of Engineering at MIT could define what engineering is. We spent about a day in little breakout groups, we finally came up with a, what was, I still think is a very good definition, and I'll give it to you later. But you know what, about 10 years ago I asked the assistant dean, Donna Savicki, for a copy of it because I didn't have that little report. She barely even remembered it, okay.

So we had this little meeting. This is another lesson. I had this meeting, everybody spends all this time, I mean, the meeting had to have cost twenty-five thousand dollars for, you know, 24 people to go spend a weekend, a three-day weekend at the Cape, right, in a hotel and everything, probably cost more than that. And we had some output which actually I thought was valuable, and it gets filed away in a file cabinet, and it gets thrown out in the trash someday, okay. So I don't really have the exact definition but I remember enough of it okay.

So anybody have a something they'd like to submit, or I'll start telling you what some other people said? Yes. Student: I'm hearing is the application of logic to generate products, services, or actions that meet some giving need. Did you write that down or did you look that up? Student: No. Okay fine, ok nice, that's very good okay. I just, whether you could, you could Google, and I'll show you some Google things, they're not all that different than that, but that's very good. Logic, and personal needs, our people's needs, just need. That's good okay. That in fact, that's one of the definitions that we're going to go through, that other people come up with. I actually gave all of you something a little while, a few minutes before that, I said engineering is design, okay. Yep, good. Student: Making new things or making things in any way. Definitely originally I just wrote, make anything. Well it is, if there's a creative process to engineering that is not involved the same way in science okay.

So those are all actually pretty good okay. So I pre-assessed it, you know more about it than I do. So maybe we're ahead of the game and we can skip time. But it turns out here's a quote: if it stinks it's biology, if it stinks chemistry, doesn't work it's physics, if it works but no one knows why it's engineering. So that's the cynical view, which has, you know, cynical is funny. In fact one of the reasons humor is often funny, particularly things like Dilbert, it's because it's true okay. There's, or there's a certain truth to it.

Let me give you the best definition, succinct definition that I've ever heard, and it's from Theodore von Kármán. Who was Theodore von Kármán? Student: Partly legendary aerodynamicist and [founded a] Laboratory in Pasadena California. Did he find Jet Propulsion? Student: Jet Propulsion Lab, he found it. He's founder over in 1940s. That was, you were going to say? Okay you guys are pretty good okay. Von Kármán said, the scientist explains that which exists, the engineer creates that which never was, okay. He was both a scientist and an engineer. And there's more depth to that definition than you might think. Joel Moses, who used to be Dean of Engineering here, he was head of the electrical engineering and then became Dean of Engineering, became Provost, he used to say, and the Media Lab creates that which never will be, okay. So, but, scientist explains that which exists.

And there are a lot of wannabe scientists that at MIT, most of them in the School of Engineering, okay. I often say eighty percent of the faculty in School of Engineering are wannabe scientists. There's only about twenty percent engineers on the faculty in the School of Engineering, in terms of people who can actually go out and solve a real problem. A scientist will take, if you present a problem to a scientist, he will throw out all the hard part so he can solve it in closed form with a fourth-order differential equation or whatever sophisticated technique. And in fact that's what you've learned in many of your classes to do, right.

So whereas an engineer, Thomas Edison was an engineer okay. Thomas Edison sort of was intuitive, and he just kind of did things, and he made them work, and he created things that never were, right. And he didn't understand why, oh, why they worked. And he said it was ninety-nine percent perspiration, one percent inspiration, whereas a scientist would much rather be on the ninety-nine percent inspiration and one percent perspiration. That's why they do calculations, right. That's not a lot of heavy lifting to do, some, but takes deep intellect in a very narrow field.

Morrison, Fishbach, Herman Fishbach was head of physics 20 years ago, and Phil Morse was his mentor, was a faculty member here. They wrote a book called Theoretical Modern Physics or something. It's basically a bunch of mathematical techniques to solve very complex equations okay. But it's a very famous book. But most physicists will throw out the important terms, are not the important terms, difficult terms, so they can solve it explicitly. And then they pound their chests, "I solved this problem." Well they solved a mathematical problem, they didn't necessarily solve a real problem.

In fact, does anybody know the story of Brian Josephson, Josephson Act? Does anybody know what the Josephson effect is? Okay, Brian Josephson was a graduate student about 1962, at, I think Cambridge, might have been Oxford, somewhere in England. And he went to see his thesis advisor, he was, I think a thesis in physics, and his, he wanted to know well, what should I do my thesis on. And his professor was busy, so he said, well, go solve this problem, and it had to do with electrons and things like that. So Brian Josephson goes out and he writes down the differential equation. And most people who had solved this problem in the past, it was sort of a standard problem in physics, that the professor giving them knew that you threw out this one term because it was inconsequential. Brian Josephson, being young, not knowing much about the world, kept the term in, and went through the harder problem of solving it with that term, and he found that, he discovered the Josephson effect. The Josephson effect is basically tunning, a tunneling of electrons through insulating layers. And so at age 24 or so, he won the Nobel Prize.

I met him when he was about 30, and because my thesis advisor by 1965, with Margaret MacVicar. Ever heard of Margaret MacVicar? Margaret MacVicar, the MacVicar Faculty Fellows at MIT. Margaret was a physics student who couldn't get into the physics department at MIT, because they won't admit their own. That's why Feynman went to Princeton, because MIT wouldn't admit him into the physics department. Margaret came to the material science department, wanted to do a doctoral thesis, went to Bob Rose and said what should I do my thesis on. He says go up and see Pfeffer, who was the technician up in the lab. Pfeffer trained me in the lab, and Pfeffer was a genius, should have gotten an MIT PhD, but he grew up in the depression, his family couldn't afford to send him to school. But so Pfeffer showed her how to grow single crystals of niobium, lay down an insulating layer on it, put some electrodes on it, second liquid helium, and do tunneling experiments, and show you the Josephson effect okay.

So Brian Josephson did the calculation saying, oh, electrons can go through insulating layers, and Bob Rose and Margaret did the experiment. Margaret graduated like two and a half years, went off as a Kennedy Fellow but or something in England, came back here as an assistant professor of physics, and rose to the Dean of Undergraduate Education, but died of brain cancer at about age 41 or 42. But in any case, a scientist explains that which exists, and Brian Josephson made the mistake of solving the harder problem and not throwing out the insignificant term, which would turn out not to be insignificant. On the other hand, engineers create things that never were, and they don't always know why they work. Edison, when, how do you find the, how do you find tungsten in the light bulb, or actually he didn't, that was, in his first filament, his first useful filament for a light bulb was what? Yeah. Student: Carbonized horsehair. Okay so he just burned up horsehair and turned it into a carbon filament, had life like 11 hours or so if you're lucky okay.

Student: Yeah, Margaret and Tucker, get any kind of warrants for actually showing that, though, it's true thirty? Well Margaret got a lot of honors when she came back here. Bob Rose gave her a hundred-thousand-dollar DARPA contract that he had gotten, to help her get started, and she had a budget. She created the UROP program, that's what got her tenure. We could talk about Margaret, another story. Margaret was, she actually turned out to be a fantastic administrator as Dean of Undergraduate Education, but the physics department would not tenure her, because she could not teach freshman physics. She was incompetent as a teacher. But the MIT teaching award is named after her, because Paul Gray thought she was great. She was on the Board of Exxon when she was 37 years old, because Paul Gray was president of MIT, and he thought she was great. And she got tenure at large, not in the physics department, because Paul Gray was president, okay. And Margaret turned out to be a fantastic administrator. The reason we have a biology requirement now at MIT is because Margaret blasted through all the naysayers. And anyway, but anyway so Margaret was an interesting individual, but that's not the subject of this course okay.

Here's a picture of good old Theodore, if you want to see what he looked like. You can google him, but there's Theodore von Kármán. He was Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer, and physicist, who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics, okay. So now you can go to Webster's Dictionary, which is always the sterile way to do it. But an engineer, noun, is the builder of military engines. That's the number one definition. Why? We're going to find in the history of engineering, this is, I posed by Encyclopedia Britannica, so it might be about 1985.

But it turns out the first engineering school in the United States was West Point, 17— I got the date in here later. Until 1823 or 1824, when they were building the Erie Canal in New York State, in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, started the first of the second engineering school in the country. And they had one curriculum, it was called civil engineering, to distinguish it from the only type of engineering that was known before that, which was military engineering. So now you know where we get the term civil engineering, okay.

But in any case, the word goes back to the 14th century in the French, which means a person who designs and invents or contrives. It actually comes from the French word meaning contrived, a designer, a builder of engines, okay. These could be catapult engines or breastworks and dams and things like that. But an engineer would build military facilities. And in fact, the commandant of West Point until 1845 was required to come from the Army Corps of Engineers. They changed that, but that was part of the history, okay.

Engineer, verb, means to act as an engineer in laying out construction or management of something like some great dams or something. Does not design or produced by the methods of engineering. To guide the course of, manage or supervise during production and development. What's the interesting word in here that you don't usually associate with engineering? Management. And I'm going to tell you the history of Harvard's first engineering school. They tried to purchase MIT three times, 1873 to 1917, were unsuccessful because the Supreme Court of Massachusetts turned it down. So they built on the land that Andrew Carnegie had bought for him in Allston, their engineering school, and today it's known as the Harvard Business School. I'll tell you that story. Huh? Allston is also, it's across the river, is also Allston, Massachusetts. Student: Yes of course. It's not in Cambridge. Okay across the river okay.

Engineering, the science by which the properties of matters and the sources of energy in nature are made useful to man, in structures, machines, and products. You had useful, this to man or something, benefit or something, you had something like that. And you had something similar, to properties of matter, I don't remember. But your definition, both of your definitions, had some of these types of things. So that's a common definition.

What I'm going to do, I think, as I've never taught this course before, is, I have a handy-dandy little book here called The Builders: Marvels of Engineering. And this book was, it's gonna, okay, was written by none other than National Geographic, okay, National Geographic Society. And here's the, have the table of contents right here, I guess, here's the table of contents. And of course National Geographic's budget is a picture book right, not too many words, mostly pictures. Is it? Oh no, I've been reading National Geographic since I was eight years old okay. I used to have a couple of tons of National Geographics holding down the floor in my basement, but anyway, finally got rid of them.

But they have a bunch of different examples of major engineering marvels. And today, since I can't afford to give you this book, of it's out of print, but it's a nice book, and what I'm going to do, probably I might do every day, is spend a couple of minutes on each one of these things, like today is roads okay. To give you some examples of major engineering achievements over the centuries. And I'll have Jerry put that chapter on roads on Stellar, and the next time I'll do canals, and Jerry can put that on, and by the time the course is over we will probably have everything on Stellar. I will have violated the copyright laws, but Stellar won't know, because the fair use says I can take pieces at a time, right. If I just haven't taken a hundred percent of the pieces. Oh anyway.

So roads, let's look at, oops, that's the Golden Gate Bridge, right. Overcoming distance is the main chapter, roads, canals, bridges, railroads, pipelines. This is something you haven't seen before probably, this is the National Road, started in 1811 okay, in Pennsylvania, or, uh, Cumberland Maryland to Vandalia Illinois okay, 600 miles. It's, anyway, you'll be able to read about this. It's an interesting story about, this is one of the first major projects in 1811. The federal government paid for it, was the first interstate highway, if you will, okay.

If you go on you'll learn about, this is a Roman road in Syria okay, still in use. The Romans built fantastic series of roads all over the head, was 50,000 kilometers, I have 50,000-mile network okay, of roads. And this tells you how they built it okay. I'm not going to take the time to go through this. Here's the Incas, this is Incas, and this is Incas down here. And, well that's not very clear, it's llamas walking on, this is in Sichuan China, which is, you know, the. And how the Chinese had 200,000 people working on a road and took, completed it in a couple of days, okay. So the Incas did it without wheels. The Incas didn't have a wheel okay in their technology toolbox, but they built these huge roads.

It goes on, it talks about macadam. Anybody ever heard of macadam? That's the macadam on the pavement on the airport. Tells you about John McAdam, who he was. There's the first toll road, 1940, Pennsylvania. Here's a, the Glenwood Canyon. There's actually several pages on the Glenwood. Obviously the National Geographic had to run a big article on that. Anyway so it's some reading. The evaluations, some students said they wished I could give more reading so you could follow up on this, so I'll give you more reading okay. You can read about roads.

But going back, the Romans, their roads are still working after 2,000 years okay. If you read about how these different people came along and they improved on the Roman system by making it cheaper, faster to build, but doesn't have the same longevity as some of the Roman roads. And those are some of the trade-offs that you have in engineering, okay. You also learn, why did the Romans build these roads? Yeah, and what were they doing? They, it was for their military, to be able to get the supplies and the soldiers where they wanted.

Anyone ever heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs okay? What's Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Yep okay, all right, I'll, like you asked. Yeah, so this is a simplified Maslow, this is a more complex, this is just coming right off of Wikipedia or whatever. Basically the Romans built roads as part of their military security program. Why did we build the interstate highway system in the 1950s? Called the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. He liked the autobahn, but there was another military reason that the generals wanted. Something, yep. Student: Had missiles on trucks. The only way you could keep the Soviets from targeting our launch sites was to move the launch sites. And the Soviets did the same thing, they built mobile launch sites, and we built mobile launch sites. We just built a huge interstate highway system to be able to move the missiles around okay. It's harder in the Soviet Union to do that, it's a little larger okay.

But anyway, the first thing is physiological needs, food shelter clothing okay. The next one is safety, security, that's your military security. The Romans built roads for the second level on Maslow. We built the interstate highway system for the same reason. It was a military endeavor. How many you think the space shuttle was built for civilian purposes? It was built to hold the lasers they were going to put in space to shoot down the missiles coming at us okay. It was, the cargo bay just happened to be the exact size of the chemical laser weapon okay, amazing. But you couldn't have gotten it through Congress if you were just proposing it as a 20 billion dollar military project. But if you said we're going to, you know, we're going to make space travel cheaper so it only cost a thousand dollars a pound to get into space, rather than twenty thousand dollars a pound of payload. Now did they achieve it? The space shuttle over the 25 years or so, they increased the price to about fifty thousand dollars a pound in space. They didn't get it down to a thousand, they still talked about trying to get it down to a thousand dollars a pound.

Student: Which means the space shuttle is safer? Yeah, well, have you ever heard this story of how Feynman analyzed the space shuttle? I'm, either NASA had been done this big safety analysis okay, and they proved by all this probabilistic, see, I probably paid some professor some, well-known Eastern University to help him with this, there was one chance in 10,000 of the space shuttle failing on launch okay. And then when it failed on launch, Feynman was part of the blue-ribbon panel that was supposed to figure out what's going on, and they learned it was the o-rings, you know, in the cold weather, and his whole books written on this stuff. But Feynman basically pointed out that since Wernher von Braun, it, we stole him from Germany, right, we took all the great scientists out of Germany before World War Two. The center of science in the world was Germany, it was, in the United States, I can show you the, in 1900 you were required at MIT to take several semesters of German so you could read the scientific literature, okay. And all the great scientists, think of the quantum mechanics folks, start naming them off okay, mostly Germans right. And people would, Americans would go over to Germany to learn the science and bring it back. After the war, after World War Two, the United States became sort of the center of science. Why? Because we picked and choose, we brought them back. There was starvation going on in Europe after the war, and so we brought the people back that we wanted to bring back, and we essentially made the United States great in science by bringing all these other people. Wernher von Braun, and they set him up in Huntsville Alabama, they brought him back.

And what was, Feynman showed that four percent of the missiles that they had shot since 1947 or whatever had failed on launch. And he also pointed out, this was the 25th shuttle flight, four percent. Now that's kind of coin, since we all know that statistics in small numbers, and there's no, it just should have been within the first 25, it shouldn't have been just the 25th. But the media didn't, doesn't understand those types of statistics. So in any case, the shuttle has not been safer okay, it's been, saying it's a fact, that's a good example okay.

Student: Being prevention. Oh yeah but that's because we've improved safety of aerospace flight generally since 1947 right okay, that's the general trend. But there's not some big blip because of that program. Student: Yeah, no, I was just saying it got more expensive because after, you know, they start blowing up, you know, they're like, oh well we better check every part after every mission, oh, almost failure analysis, and we need to replace every part all the time right. Well right yeah. NASA actually learned what [Admiral] Rickover had found out earlier.

Kahneman makes actually makes the point in Thinking Fast and Slow that all the pundits that are predicting politics and, you know, elections and stuff, that he's a statistician, and he shows, he uses the term a blindfolded monkey with a dart could do better than what these people predict okay. There's interesting chapter where he and another guy kind of at odds, the other guy studied firefighters and basically said those guys are experts, they make intuitive snap judgments that are right. And Kahneman says, well most experts make intuitive judgments and you can do better with a blind monkey with a dartboard okay. And he proves it okay. So let's see, that's why he's a nonconformist is what I like. Anyway okay.

So any questions on this? Yep, if you just stretching okay, good enough, it's okay to stretch okay. So that sort of answers, is part of the second question, we talked about what is engineering. I'm going to talk some more, what's the difference between science and engineering. Well von Kármán sort of gave us that to a certain extent, but I'm hoping you might refine some of these things. In fact if one of you wanted to do your presentation on answering some of these questions or how it's evolved, I mean you could do that, but you probably have more interesting things to do.

How old is engineering as a profession? Anyone have an idea? That's right. And how many people say it's very new? It's actually both okay, and I'll go through that when we go through the history of engineering. What types of disciplines, we're going to go through that. What's a PE license and things like that. PE license, something totally ignored at MIT, and almost essential for civil engineers practicing. So this is just what Webster's gave us, sort of, I got it out of some dictionaries, not Webster's, but it says the same thing. The dictionaries all plagiarize each other, you ever know that, okay. Anyway maybe it's because the words have similar meanings.

To, contriver, playing out usually with more or less subtle skill or craft, which means it's sort of an art, it's not, and some people might say it's not a science. To guide the course of, managed or supervised during development, management is an important part of engineering and that's going to be one of my themes. Engineers from an old French word, engineer or war machine, all these words derive from the Latin meaning genus, genius, divine spirit presiding at birth, or a talent or natural gift. So we now have an etymology of engineer, a war machine or a divine spirit okay.

Hmm, and you can go to engineer, noun, from French to contrive, you have the builder of military engineer, inches, and military engineer, contriver, someone who designs, inventor, contrives, could be called a schemer okay. That's not exactly a polite term for engineer, but, someone engineering something okay. The Mafia engineers the internet or something. A person runs complex machinery, a railroad engineer. A person engaged in occupation requiring special skill, like a sanitary engineer, fix up garbage rings. A person who carries through an enterprise or brings about a result, especially by skillful or artful contrivance. And that's a quote from a number of dictionary definitions.

Now, something I've said before, and I said before to you in this course, is engineering is design. Anybody know what ABET is? That's what is ABET? Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology. You will all grad, if you get an engineering degree from MIT you will all be ABET-accredited. MIT participates in ABET, and ABET has a design requirement. When they come to evaluate us once every four or five years, we have to prove in each department, we have to prove that we have a certain number of units that involve a design component, because ABET feels engineering is essential to engineer, to a design is essential to engineering. Yeah, 3.042 is part of that. Actually this course could qualify but it's not required okay.

Anyway we're going to talk about design later, but engineering does design. And we talked about creative, or making something new or different or whatever. There's a creative aspect of engineering. Remember the quote, the stinky quote at the beginning, about if it works but no one knows why, it's engineering okay. Well you create it but you don't, this, Edison didn't know why, you know, horsehair worked so well. He later found out tungsten was better, but, and then the General Electric spent billions of dollars over the next hundred years perfecting tungsten light bulbs, only to have LEDs come along.

Anyway, engineering is problem solving. One of the two of you, I think you said problem solving in your definition, and that's something that I kind of came up with on my own when I was thinking about this 10 years ago. And engineering is the application of science and math to solve problems. I got that off the internet, by googling what is engineering, I can go through a bunch of sites, and one of them says engineering is the application of science and math to solve problems. And it is.

But now let me tell you what the School of Engineering came up with. I can't tell you what they came up with because they've lost it okay. But engineering involves complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty okay. And that's why it's not what a scientist likes. A scientist likes something, they don't mind something's complex as long as they can write down a mathematical formula for it okay, to describe it okay. But that's what chaos theory is right, you can write down the formula for chaos and you write it down mathematically. But ambiguity, I talked to you about, you know, your boss doesn't give you everything, just the right amount of information and no more, no less. Sometimes you don't have all the information so that's ambiguous, sometimes you have conflicting information so that's ambiguous okay. And uncertainty is, well if you have conflicting information you don't know what's right.

But it also should involve safety, and I thought of this earlier this week, I'm up with this last weekend okay, what are, what's Labor Day for. Being an engineer involves complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty, that's the School of Engineering. Safety is critical. If you read the engineering code of ethics it will say that safety is paramount. And as a professional engineer, and we'll talk about what that means later, you have a duty to hold the safety of the public paramount above your job, above anything else okay. So I put safety in there, and I thought about, actually I came up with CAU, and then I came up with safety, I came up with a cause, and I figured I could make it because right. So anyway, everything else.

Means I've always said, if your boss gives you a job to solve, and the solution is to the accounting problem, I don't care if you're a chemical engineer or materials engineer, you got to solve the accounting problem okay. Accounting is not always the problem, but I can tell you what ninety percent of the problem is, or ninety-five percent of the problem is, in most cases. Anybody know what the number one problem is? Hmmm? Yourself, exactly. People, managing people is the biggest problem in getting anything done. Anyone who's actually been in, doing something will tell you that, trying to get every other people to work together as a team is the hardest job okay.

So what is engineering? This is my summary: complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty, safety, and everything else. Engineering is everything that's good. I like that, all right, make an overhead of that okay. I'll probably be here tomorrow, Dr. Belmar will be lecturing, but I don't know who it'll be here, me or, on.