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"The
Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our
Global Problems" by
Henry Petroski
;
Alfred A. Knopf
(288 pages,
$26.95
)
———
Henry Petroski
, who has written several wonderful books about small
things (toothpicks, pencils) and large things (bridges,
technology, the importance of failure) has got something
stuck in his craw. He is irritated by the way we
romanticize scientists and disrespect the critical role
of engineers: "Our Western Platonic bias has it
that ideas are superior and prerequisite to
things." Science does not, contrary to popular
opinion, he writes, "precede engineering in the
creative process." There would be no science
(certainly not the tools to conduct critical
experiments), he even goes so far to say, without
engineers.
Petroski
came of age in the era of Sputnik, when American
children with an aptitude for numbers and good
standardized test scores were encouraged to study
engineering in college. We knew, he writes of his early
colleagues, that "as engineers, we were going to be
in a position to change the world — not just study
it." He would like to clarify the different,
intersecting roles that scientists and engineers can
play in the effort to find solutions for the world's
most pressing problems.
New
technologies, such as steamships, compact fluorescent
light bulbs and even speed bumps to slow traffic all
come with problems that become evident with use. It
falls most often to the engineer to solve these
problems. (With speed bumps, the shape of the mound is
critical, not just for the shocks but also for the rate
at which a car will accelerate after going over the
bump, releasing exhaust and making noise.)
"Although engineers want always to make everything
better, they cannot make anything perfect,"
Petroski writes. "This basic characteristic flaw of
the products of the profession's practitioners is what
drives change and makes achievement a process rather
than simply a goal."
Petroski
takes us back into the research and development
departments of companies such as Corning,
AT&T
and
Kodak
in the early 1900s to show how scientists (research) and
engineers (development) have traditionally worked
together. Research in these labs was driven by economic
growth. Today, the failure to create inexpensive solar
cells, electric vehicles, fuel cells and other solutions
to energy problems is due to society's lack of adequate
investment in development over research, Petroski
writes. When budgets are "front-loaded with dollars
for undirected basic research," he writes,
"all that may be produced is knowledge that is
irrelevant and inefficacious as far as solving the
problem at hand." Petroski cites a few juicy
examples of scientists finding inane solutions: the
physicist who suggested using millions of carbon filters
to vacuum the atmosphere — a
$5.6-trillion
solution — or proposals to create artificial volcanoes
to blast sulfur particles into the atmosphere and block
sunlight, lessening the Earth's warmth.
Petroski
indulges in a certain snarkiness: In a chapter on
prizes, he writes that
Alfred Nobel
designated two engineers to be the executors of his
estate. The engineers engaged a lawyer, who "in
turn sought counsel from scientists of his social
acquaintance. The rest," he writes with just a hint
of bitterness, "is, of course, history."
Nonetheless,
he makes a convincing argument for shattering the halo
we have clamped so firmly on the heads of scientists,
who are expected to solve problems they are ill-equipped
to take on. Science tends to get bogged down in politics
— Petroski uses examples from the early debates on
global warming and from the health industry. He calls
this back-and-forth the "windshield wiper effect
... frequently seen in the health sector, with one study
finding that a substance is good for us and another that
it is bad." The result is a loss of credibility, an
increase in the gap that British scientist and novelist
C.P. Snow
spoke about in the famous lecture on two cultures —
physical scientists and literary intellectuals — he
delivered half a century ago.
Contrary
to both the humanities and the sciences, engineering
involves making and designing and building.
"Science may be the theatre," Petroski writes,
in which these heated discussions take place, but
"engineering is the action on the stage." He
wonders: "If the two cultures of a half century ago
were the sciences and the humanities, are the two
cultures of today the sciences and engineering?"
Only by working together more closely, Petroski argues,
can they solve the world's problems.
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