Quotes About Engineering

You cannot make an aircraft without forged components.

Everybody who knows Formula 1 knows McLaren and knows that it is the greatest team in Formula 1.

After becoming an engineer, I worked for a year in Faridabad. I was so bored. I used to live in a one-room apartment, and every night I would come back to a frog in my bathroom.

Form follows function.

Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.

When I work on sculpture, I don't have to worry about function. When I work on a piece of architecture, I must think about function all the time.

Instead of winding and skirting, Roman roads tend to go straight to the top. The chariots were light and the shortest distance between two points seemed to have governed their surveyors. I've read that some of their roadbeds go down twelve feet.

Behavioral engineering in all of its manifestations always degenerates into merciless manipulation. It reduces all (manipulators and manipulated alike) to a deadly mass effect. The central assumption, that manipulation of individual personalities can achieve uniform behavioral responses, has been exposed as a lie by many species but never with more telling effect than by the Gowachin on Dosadi. — The Dosadi Papers, BuSab reference

Philosophy couldn't emancipate the mind, but technology just might. Google has set out to succeed where Descartes failed, except that it has jettisoned all the philosophical questions that rattled around in his head. Where Descartes emphasized skepticism and doubt, Google is never plagued by second-guessing. It has turned the liberation of the brain into an engineering challenge—an exercise that often fails to ask basic questions about the human implications of the project.

The mathematicians and engineers may have disavowed the existence of God, but they placed themselves in a celestial role of giving life to a pile of inorganic material. And it changed them.

The I-495 bridge over the Christina River in Wilmington, Delaware, is tilting.

I don't drive by the seat of my pants and happen to win races. I work very hard to interpret the data and drive a certain way. My engineers have confidence in me, and more often than not, when I tell them what I need or what I am feeling with the car, it's right.

We know the cyclones will come because we are in the wind sector. It cannot be consistent high wind; sometimes, it can be low wind. We are designing our turbines assuming that one day even a cyclone will come.

It becomes a giant's task to compute the result when the effect of cross seas, wind at all angles and ever varying force, arched surfaces, head resistance, ratio of weight to area, and the intelligence of the guiding power crop up.

A man from a primitive culture who sees an automobile might guess that it was powered by the wind or by an antelope hidden under the car, but when he opens up the hood and sees the engine he immediately realizes that it was designed.

I make skeletons that are able to walk on the wind, so they don't have to eat... eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.

I've spent quite a bit of time working on wind turbines and exploring control systems and photovoltaic and integration system.

I was in Peru and visited a building near Lima built by the Incas. It was low in height, with no windows at all, but all the way in the back there was air movement. And I couldn't figure out how they'd done it; it was incredible.

The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it's Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.

The robotic fly that we actually make the most use of in our laboratory is actually not a small thing, it's a giant thing. It has about a meter wing span, and it flaps in three metric tons of mineral oil. And it is a so-called dynamically scaled fly.

Using KERS and the adjustable front wing is not particularly difficult. Once you've worked out where to use KERS to optimum effect at each track, and in which places you adjust the front wing, it happens pretty much automatically.

I have got a scheme to make a thing in the form of a horse with a steam engine in the inside so contrived as to move an immense pair of wings, fixed on the outside of the horse, in such a manner as to carry it up into the air while a person sits on its back.

The wings are moved several times by hand to charge the crank chamber with mixture, which flows on through the external pipe and inlet valve to the compression space and cylinder.

It still amazes me, when I go out and fly the T-38, and I'm looking at those little, short, skinny little wings, and that thing's flying. It's just amazing to me, even now.