It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible. – Aristotle
My father (a professor of engineering himself) always had this quote on his desk. This is, in a way, the main “sutra” (key / core value) of all engineering!
Engineering isn’t an exact science. Very often there are no precise formulae that you can just apply and get results. Half the time one has to use empirically arrived at values / graphs, made by other people, to get an answer that might work. The other half of the time, one has to try it out oneself and use your knowledge and judgment to figure it out via the good old trial and error method.
Yes, there are simulations these days. But simulations and CAE are less expensive (and less dangerous) ways to do the empirical-trial-and-error parts. At the end of the day, the only truth is what happens in the testing phase. CAE tools, reduce the amount of testing time required.
It doesn’t make the entire process any more precise though.
So how does an engineer decide when the solution that she is proposing, is sufficient? There are of course standards to be followed and lots of excellent theoretical concepts to be learnt and applied.
But at the end of the day, what really makes a big difference, is experience!
With experience, one acquires an “engineering intuition” that tell you when something doesn’t look right.
There are countless stories of how big disasters were prevented because someone “sensed” that something was wrong. This “sense” comes from experience.
It doesn’t have to be a big disaster though. It could be a simple thumb rule, that saves you hours and hours of looking for answers. Or it could be a clever approximation, that is good enough for the job at hand. Or it could be knowing how fine or coarse the mesh / modelling should be, that saves days in computation time and resources!
Experience brings the polish: the confidence and understanding that comes from being in that field for decades.
If you have someone on the team, who has done it before, you are going to be that much faster, more efficient, and less likely to be wrong!
If you can talk to someone, who has worked on similar problems for a few decades, you are going to breeze through.
This is because, the experienced person, can tell you what steps to follow, whose help you should seek, what to do when things go wrong etc. And most importantly, they can tell you when to stop!
Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash
