OT: Food for thought.

I'm reading "A History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times" 
by Donald Hill (1984). Keeping in mind that there was very little 
electrical engineering in the periods covered, I was nevertheless struck 
by the aptness of this paragraph in the introduction:

"The modern idea that the engineer is essentially an applied scientist 
just doesn't hold water. It is true that in the last two centuries the 
engineer has had at his disposal a growing array of quantified data upon 
which to base his designs, and that no engineer worthy of the name can 
ignore these data. Nevertheless, the execution of a construction project 
poses a number of problems that are unconnected with pure scientific 
reasoning. Some of these problems are not even of a directly technical 
nature: for example, the financial side of contracting and 
subcontracting with the accompanying measurement and valuation 
procedures. There are many other problems that are technical, but not 
directly related to science. An engineer needs to know the capabilities 
and limitations of men, machines, and materials, and the restraints 
imposed by weather and soil conditions. Engineering science can assist 
in the resolution of some of these problems, but in the end we should 
expect our engineers to get their hands dirty -- in the workshop or on 
the construction site. We should not be complacent, and assume that we 
have the got the mixture of theory and practice exactly right. There 
have been enough failures of modern engineering to teach us a little 
humility. One might object, with some justice, that we approach the 
structural limits of materials much more closely than did the early 
engineers. So we should -- with almost 4,000 years of their experience 
and almost two centuries of scientific analysis behind us!"

That's a long paragraph, but there's a lot in it. Most of it is relevant 
to a profession that most of us practice.

Jerry
-- 
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
�����������������������������������������������������������������������

"Jerry Avins" <jya@ieee.org> wrote in message
news:WpOdnZE6WK0VF-ffRVn-tw@rcn.net...
>
> That's a long paragraph, but there's a lot in it. Most of it is relevant
> to a profession that most of us practice.
>
As we're off topic, I just learnt that in the US 'practice' is both a verb
and a noun. Where I come from we practise what we preach, because practice
makes perfect. I advise you to take this advice next time you're in the UK.
Sorry, I'll go now...
Cheers, Syms.

http://www.world-english.org/practise_practice.htm

"Jerry Avins" schrieb
> I'm reading "A History of Engineering in Classical and
>  Medieval Times" by Donald Hill (1984). Keeping in mind 
> that there was very little electrical engineering in the 
> periods covered, I was nevertheless struck 
> by the aptness of this paragraph in the introduction:
> 
> "The modern idea that the engineer is essentially an 
> applied scientist just doesn't hold water. 
> ..."
>

I think that paragraph can be neatly summed up in that
fine sig of yours:

> Engineering is the art of making what you want 
> from things you can get.

Regards
Martin

PS: I have another interesting history book of engineering,
"A short history of technology from the earliest times to 
A.D. 1900" by T.K.Derry and Trevor I. Williams 
from Dover, quite fascinating and also puts it a bit in
perspective with the political and social developments at 
the time.

Anybody else any good books about engineering history?

Martin Blume wrote:
> Anybody else any good books about engineering history?

These are not as much about engineering as they are
about mathemathics, but you might find some of them
interesting:

Boyer: A history of mathemathics
Boyer: The history of calculus and its
       conceptual development
Eves:  Foundations and fundamental concepts
       of mathematics
Struik: A concise history of mathematics

all published by Dover. I find these books interesting
since they describe such minuscule details we take
for granted. Did you know that the concept of the
number "0" dates from the 9th century? That the ancient
Greeks and Romans were not able to develo a decent
arithmetic because of the number system they used?
Did you know that the notation we find so familiar
today, "+", "-", "=", "e" etc was established as
late as a mere 200 years ago, by Euler and Leibnitz?

Eves' book uses one of Euclid's postulates as backdrop
for the evolution of maths as a scientific discipline.
People tried to establish a link between the various
postulates of Euclid, and could not fit one particular
postulate into the otherwise consistent pattern. By
attempting (and failing!) to do so, the rest of maths
was "accidentially" discovered, culminating in the
discovery of "non-Euclidian geometry" some 200 years
ago.

Some of the anecdotes are all out hillareous, like
the Italians who disputed who were the first to discover
the solution of the 3rd order (or was it 4th order?)
equations, around the 16th century. Another one is
Boyer's anecdote of a mathematician explaining his work,
in "A history of mathematics". I am sure some of the
guys working in academia would recognize it (and I
would be very interested in hearing RBJ's opinions
about that particular anecdote...).

Oh well. Perhaps it just takes a too twisted mind to
see the charm of such books...

Rune

Rune Allnor wrote:
> Oh well. Perhaps it just takes a too twisted mind to
> see the charm of such books...
>
> Rune

Perhaps, but you're not alone.

Another great one is 'An imaginary tale, The story of sqrt(-1)'
(it actually uses the radical sign in the title)
by Paul J. Nahin.

He discusses the debacle of cubic equations that you mentioned,
together with some very curious 'work-arounds' by societies who
regarded the concept of a negative number as heresy. On a more
practical note in the context of engineering, he also discusses
an application of complex numbers to the design of the phase shift
oscillator which got a couple of guys named Hewlett and Packard started
off in their careers.

David.

"Martin Blume" <mblume@socha.net> writes:
> [...]
> Anybody else any good books about engineering history?

It's just on the inside front cover, but Spiegel's third edition of
"Applied Differential Equations" (a beloved book which I will not part
with til my death) lists mathematicians (and physicists), their
nationality, year of birth and death, and a short description of their
contributions which I find fascinating. For example,

  RICCATI, Jacopo Francesco (Italian, 1676-1754). Mathematical analysis; Riccati's equa-
  tion was solved in 1723 by Daniel Bernoulli and other younger members of his
  family. 

Others include Gauss, Fourier, Hermite, Dirichlet, Chebyshev, Cauchy, Leibniz, Newton, 
Schwarz, ... etc.
-- 
Randy Yates
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications
Research Triangle Park, NC, USA
randy.yates@sonyericsson.com, 919-472-1124

Rune Allnor wrote:
> Some of the anecdotes are all out hillareous, like
> the Italians who disputed who were the first to discover
> the solution of the 3rd order (or was it 4th order?)
> equations, around the 16th century. Another one is
> Boyer's anecdote of a mathematician explaining his work,
> in "A history of mathematics". I am sure some of the
> guys working in academia would recognize it

I attributed the anecdote of "The Ideal Mathematician"
to the wrong book. It is not in Boyer's works, but in

Hersh & Davis: "The mathematical experience"
  Mariner Books

starting around page 37, to be exact.

>(and I
> would be very interested in hearing RBJ's opinions
> about that particular anecdote...).

Rune

Rune wrote:
> and I  would be very interested in hearing RBJ's opinions
> about that particular anecdote...

Come on Rune, what's the anecdote?

Are you refering to "A Mathematician's Apology" by Hardy?

Dave Coffey wrote:
> Another great one is 'An imaginary tale, The story of sqrt(-1)'
> (it actually uses the radical sign in the title)
> by Paul J. Nahin.
> 

My favorite of this genre is "A History if pi" by Petr Beckman, followed 
by "e, The Story of a Number" by Eli Maor, "The Nothing That Is, A 
Natural History of Zero" by Robert Kaplan, and "Zero, The Biography of a 
Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife.

Both those are math, not engineering.  The best engineering book I've 
read in the past year was "Longitude, The True Story of a Lone Genius 
Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time" by Dava Sobel. 
The genius was John Harrison.

-- 
Jim Thomas            Principal Applications Engineer  Bittware, Inc
jthomas@bittware.com  http://www.bittware.com    (603) 226-0404 x536
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like
having a peeing section in a swimming pool.

Hello Martin and others,

A related to engineering book is entitled "Hydrogen". It details the
experimments that led to all of the refinements of quantum mechanics
(atomic). The neat thing is the simplest of atoms led to such a wealth
of knowledge[1]. The chapters on the experiments of I. I. Rabi detail
the incredible genius he used to measure the finest of details in
atomic structure. Modern atomic clocks are based upon methods he used
to measure various atomic transistions such as the famous 21cm line
observed in space.

I find studying how these men solved the various problems they were
faced with to be truly thought provoking. How would I approach such
problems. Given their current technological limitations, they had to
really resort to some very clever tricks.

Certainly the early days of DSP caused some of this similar kind of
effort as the processors weren't very fast, and the memory was limited.
With today's DSPs, the standard tasks have become just that, standard.
Now the effort is put into much bigger problems. Instead of just a
filter or an oscillator or a mixer, we use DSPs to do almost the whole
product. DSP based radios now have the DSP do some of the protocol as
well.

In telephony, I remember when it was good to have a single DSP do DTMF
or MF decoding[2]. Back in 1992, I had a single DSP (56002) doing all
of the DTMF,MF-R1, MFC-R2 decoding as well as supervisory tone
generation for a complete T1/E1 circuit. When the processors got more
powerful, the expectation similarly increased.

And certainly I'd say it helps when an engineer knows a lot of basic
science. Because most worthwhile projects have a certain amount of
unknown stuff when they are started, and personally I find I use
science quite often in getting to my solutions.

Clay

[1] examples include:

Bohr model of atoms
Balmer formula for hydrogenic spectra
Rydburg's constant - The ground state binding energy of hydrogen.
Center of mass effect - isotope shifting of spectral lines
(Protium,Deuterium, and Tritium)
Stark effect - caused by external electric field
Zeeman effect - caused by external magnetic field
Fine Structure constant  - i.e., interaction between photons and
electrons
Hyperfine Structure constant - caused by spin flipping
Quadrapole moment of proton
Quadrapole moment of neutron

[2] In 1987, an MF decoder module was several hundred dollars, and I
recall when TI put out the TMS320-10 in a plastic package, I was able
to program up a single channel DTMF/MF decoder in what was currently
$20 dollars worth of parts.