What evidence do you have that engineers are "filled with prejudices and excesses and .. known to lack humility and skepticism" any more than members of any other profession? This is an absolutely rediculous assertion. Engineers are no more or less filled with prejudices and excess than anyone else.
There was never any question that humans lacked an understanding of the forces involved in insect flight as well as simply not having the capabilities to adequately model the fluid dynamics. Only very recent CFD programs have made understanding this possible. When engineers rightly claimed that the models they used for heavier than air flight were totally inadequate to explain insects they demonstrated this fact by showing how theories for aircraft lift failed to provide sufficient lift for dragonflies. Is this not a prime example of the humility you claim is lacking? People understood, in a simplistic way, how insects flew but no one was able to model it mathmatically. That is not quite the same thing as claiming "Nobody understood how bumblebees and other heavy-bodied insects could generate enough lift to fly."
The question went unanswered not because as you claim, there was too little reward, but for lack of computational ability. Certainly not because of any inherent hubris within the engineering field. The same is true any other areas of study as well. I am currently working with a few engineers (the smug bastards) on SI IC valve design. The information from the CFD program I am using is giving data that was not only unknown but unknowable only 20 years ago. It wasn't lack of reward that kept that information from being known.
Did an engineer slap your mother once or something? Why the irrational rant against engineering (of all kinds I guess)?
John Thornton
at 2006 at 10:56, boddi satva wrote:
> Engineering is the dumber, more promiscuous cousin of science.
> Engineering takes scientific principles or results and seeks to apply
> them to every situation it can. It is the act of advocacy and
> application of what comes out of that lab. Engineering is, by it's
> nature, prone to excess and a lack of self-reflection. It is the place
> where questions are cut off and methods are brought to bear.
>
> Engineering - where the scientific rubber meets the human road - is
> filled with prejudices and excesses and is known to lack humility and
> skepticism. Engineering is okay when it applies the actual rules of
> science to itself, but it rarely does.
>
> Consider the fact that at the same time we sent a person to the moon,
> there was not a single scientist in the world who could tell you with
> any precision how it was that a bumblebee could keep itself aloft.
> That is actually true. Nobody understood how bumblebees and other
> heavy-bodied insects could generate enough lift to fly. All the
> equations they had predicted that, from an engineering standpoint, a
> bumblebee could not fly. Why these equations were inadequate was
> simply too difficult a question with too little reward and so it went
> unanswered for decades (the answer is that the bumblebee creates
> vortices in the air with one stroke of its wings that it pushes
> against with the next stroke. It actually turns out to be a useful
> question to answer. It has helped people design far more efficient
> propellors and even come up with concepts for other propulsion systems
> - mainly nautical.)
>
> Boddi