Quotes About Engineering

The computer systems that we have on our cars when we go test just blow my mind.

A battery by definition is a collection of cells. So the cell is a little can of chemicals. And the challenge is taking a very high-energy cell, and a large number of them, and combining them safely into a large battery.

I actually moved from engineering to acting. I think what's important is how talented and passionate you are.

You talk about German technocracy and you get automobiles.

My background is economics and maths. I think one of the reasons I studied humanities at all, or even went into journalism, is because, like, science and maths wasn't cool in England when I was growing up. No one ever talked to the engineering students at Oxford.

There can be little question that the tall building presents one of the most difficult challenges to the architect.

All we know about the new economic world tells us that nations which train engineers will prevail over those which train lawyers. No nation has ever sued its way to greatness.

All architecture is design but not all design is architecture. Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change. (Grady Booch)

Once you accept that failures will happen, you have the ability to design your system's reaction to specific failures. Just as auto engineers create crumple zones---areas designed to protect passengers by failing first---you can create safe failure modes that contain the damage and protect the rest of the system.

Pump seals therefore had to be devised that were both gastight and greaseless, a puzzle no one had ever solved before that required the development of new kinds of plastics. (The seal material that eventually served at Oak Ridge came into its own after the war under the brand name Teflon.)

Desegregation would attempt to reverse a century of social engineering on the part of federal, state, and local governments that enacted policies to keep African Americans separate and subordinate. Too few whites were terribly concerned with that kind of social engineering, and it's a bit unseemly to make that objection now.

The most beautiful things in the world," Ford said a quarter century later, "are those from which all excess weight has been eliminated." The car he was working on would weigh five hundred pounds.

Many of today's students who are training to be traditional professionals will, in due course, be engaged as knowledge engineers. These new professionals will specialize in designing certain kinds of online service—we call this the 'knowledge engineering' model (section 5.7).

custom engineering" unit, which basically keeps capabilities on the shelf but which can reinvigorate them when they seem relevant once more to a customer's problem or retire them when the customer no longer needs support.

Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.

noise is always a byproduct of inefficiency. A correctly designed engine is as silent as the grave.

But how, from the viewpoint of a Martian, did man differ from other animals? Would a race that could levitate and god knows what else be impressed by engineering? If so would the Aswan Dam or a thousand miles of coral reef win first prize? Man's self awareness, sheer conceit. There was no way to prove that sperm whales and sequoias were not philosophers and poets exceeding any human merit?

I'm electron pusher by trade;

Your computers must be three-phase A.C.

And Spaceship Earth, that glorious and bloody circus, continued its four-billion-year-long spiral orbit about the Sun; the engineering, I must admit, was so exquisite that none of the passengers felt any motion at all. Those on the dark side of the ship mostly slept and voyaged into worlds of freedom and fantasy; those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers, or idled waiting for the next order from above.

The Mass. Ave. Bridge is open... Some MIT students once measured it by repeatedly placing an undergraduate named Smoot on the ground and marking off his length. Every six feet or so there is still the indication of one smoot, two smoots, painted on the pavement. I could never remember how many smoots long the bridge was.

gadgets on the sides and a big silver whatchamacallit on the end. I sit in the center of this whoozis, like I say, and out there in the other room they are turning switches and pressing buttons and pulling levers and twirling dials and then they press a lot of do-funnys. The whole apparatus is sort of like one of those you-knows. Only with a lot more mechanisms. See?

social engineering"—the casual or calculated manipulation of people to influence them to do things they would not ordinarily do. And convincing them without raising the least hint of suspicion.

Henry Ford was afraid that the amount of dirt that was being removed to make room for the foundation of the Empire State Building was so great that it would have a disastrous effect on the rotation of the Earth. Not a genius.