arches

A thought, well a string of thoughts, in response to Adam Rutherford about the fact that science is just our best understanding at the moment.

Adam

You said the email was [email protected]. I guessed that was wrong and checked the web site.

Podcasts help me to sleep by occupying my mind with stuff other than work. It can take many nights for me to get to the content. 12th Jan isn't actually that far back. The bit I heard last night prompted me to turn on again when I woke.

I'm an engineer. I depend on science but what I do is largely not science. It was perhaps put best by Ted Happold. Structural Engineering is about achieving the confidence to build.

As a teacher (which I was for 23 years in my middle career) my job was to try to ensure that my graduates could develop confidence and try to avoid having false confidence. Having the confidence to teach is perhaps even more difficult than having the confidence to build. When I think about it, the teaching I received was largely unequivocal. "This is how it works". In my later thirties I worked for a committee at EPSRC. It included two chemists who worked in the construction world but who were scientists in a way that engineers are not. They taught me a lot about how to ask questions, how to test answers and the essence of what science really is. That every idea must be questioned, every concept is just the best we have at the moment.

Engineers are very uncomfortable with that.

In my day, there were two types of people went into engineering. Actually, in my day there were two types of man who went into engineering. There were relatively few like me, fired up by the desire to make things and many who had done science at A level and could get into engineering at Uni. DDD was the standard A Level offer in most departments.

So, the world you live in, the bridges roads, sewers, buildings; the cars, trains; the power stations and phones, were designed by people with 2ii or lower degrees That is with marks of between say 35 and 60% in their degrees. Look now and it seems that the input standards are very much better but I am not convinced.

However, now to my story.

In 1983, I put together some thinking published by Jacques Heyman from Cambridge and a brand new personal computer to build a tool to draw thrust lines for arch bridges. Thrust lines being a concept from the inimitable Robert Hooke. A year later, working engineers began to ask to buy the program and I became (part time) a business man. My customers asked about viaducts. Travelling in my SERC job I read something in New Scientist about Occam's Razor and it triggered a thought about how to do complex thrust lines, backed up by some thinking about it being more complicated than that. And engineers deal with complication by thinking about it and making a judgement about whether it makes them more or less confident and then adjusting their judgement.

In 2000 I left academe and started a third career (the first was building bridges) as a consultant. I looked at more and more masonry bridges and saw more and more damage that I couldn't explain. The standard "explanation" was either external unpredictables like foundations, or general weathering.

But some of the damage was obviously caused by loads and then I had to continue to provide solutions in which I had increasing doubt while trying to understand what was happening.

Today, I have a better answer. It probably isn't complete but it is definitely better. I now have to persuade the people who have been confidently using my software that it is no longer good enough because it isn't the best idea. Naturally they are resistant because it means accepting that the work they have been doing for perhaps 30 years has been wrong. But things have progressed, loads have increased. damage is reaching a scale where people might die.

So, I had better answer your question. To me, your presentation is just fine. You cannot say at the end of every sentence, or even at the end of every piece "actually it's more complicated than that". Just every now and then, as Brian Cox does on Monkey Cage, you need to say something like "its the best idea we have at the moment."

Keep it up.

Bill

A thought, well a string of thoughts, in response to Adam Rutherford about the fact that science is just our best understanding at the moment.

Adam

You said the email was [email protected]. I guessed that was wrong and checked the web site.

Podcasts help me to sleep by occupying my mind with stuff other than work. It can take many nights for me to get to the content. 12th Jan isn't actually that far back. The bit I heard last night prompted me to turn on again when I woke.

I'm an engineer. I depend on science but what I do is largely not science. It was perhaps put best by Ted Happold. Structural Engineering is about achieving the confidence to build.

As a teacher (which I was for 23 years in my middle career) my job was to try to ensure that my graduates could develop confidence and try to avoid having false confidence. Having the confidence to teach is perhaps even more difficult than having the confidence to build. When I think about it, the teaching I received was largely unequivocal. "This is how it works". In my later thirties I worked for a committee at EPSRC. It included two chemists who worked in the construction world but who were scientists in a way that engineers are not. They taught me a lot about how to ask questions, how to test answers and the essence of what science really is. That every idea must be questioned, every concept is just the best we have at the moment.

Engineers are very uncomfortable with that.

In my day, there were two types of people went into engineering. Actually, in my day there were two types of man who went into engineering. There were relatively few like me, fired up by the desire to make things and many who had done science at A level and could get into engineering at Uni. DDD was the standard A Level offer in most departments.

So, the world you live in, the bridges roads, sewers, buildings; the cars, trains; the power stations and phones, were designed by people with 2ii or lower degrees That is with marks of between say 35 and 60% in their degrees. Look now and it seems that the input standards are very much better but I am not convinced.

However, now to my story.

In 1983, I put together some thinking published by Jacques Heyman from Cambridge and a brand new personal computer to build a tool to draw thrust lines for arch bridges. Thrust lines being a concept from the inimitable Robert Hooke. A year later, working engineers began to ask to buy the program and I became (part time) a business man. My customers asked about viaducts. Travelling in my SERC job I read something in New Scientist about Occam's Razor and it triggered a thought about how to do complex thrust lines, backed up by some thinking about it being more complicated than that. And engineers deal with complication by thinking about it and making a judgement about whether it makes them more or less confident and then adjusting their judgement.

In 2000 I left academe and started a third career (the first was building bridges) as a consultant. I looked at more and more masonry bridges and saw more and more damage that I couldn't explain. The standard "explanation" was either external unpredictables like foundations, or general weathering.

But some of the damage was obviously caused by loads and then I had to continue to provide solutions in which I had increasing doubt while trying to understand what was happening.

Today, I have a better answer. It probably isn't complete but it is definitely better. I now have to persuade the people who have been confidently using my software that it is no longer good enough because it isn't the best idea. Naturally they are resistant because it means accepting that the work they have been doing for perhaps 30 years has been wrong. But things have progressed, loads have increased. damage is reaching a scale where people might die.

So, I had better answer your question. To me, your presentation is just fine. You cannot say at the end of every sentence, or even at the end of every piece "actually it's more complicated than that". Just every now and then, as Brian Cox does on Monkey Cage, you need to say something like "its the best idea we have at the moment."

Keep it up.

Bill