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Quotes tagged as 'engineering' Showing 1-30 of 168
“When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.” ―
“But remember this, Japanese boy... airplanes are not tools for war. They are not for making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality.” ―
“When Henry Ford decided to produce his famous V-8 motor, he chose to build an engine with the entire eight cylinders cast in one block, and instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. The design was placed on paper, but the engineers agreed, to a man, that it was simply impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine-block in one piece. Ford replied,'Produce it anyway.” ―
“Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems.” ―
“Anything which is physically possible can always be made financially possible; money is a bugaboo of small minds.” ―
“One man’s “magic” is another man’s engineering. “Supernatural” is a null word.” ―
“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. ” ―
“We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.” ―
tags: engineering, exploration, role-models, science, scientists, space
“The fewer moving parts, the better.' 'Exactly. No truer words were ever spoken in the context of engineering.” ―
“To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants—a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense.” ―
“Kevyn, Ennesby tells me you are building a time machine. Actually I'm finished. In one afternoon? Wow... Does it work? After a fashion. ... I put a whole lot of energy into it, and the next thing I knew it was time for dinner. -Captain Tagon & Commander Andreyasn” ―
“Stephenson had large wrought-iron boiler plates available and he also had the courage of his calculations... The idea found its best-known expression in the Menai railway bridge opened in 1850. Stephenson's beams, which weighed 1,500 tons each, were built beside the Straits and were floated into position between the towers on rafts across a swirling tide. They were raised rather over a hundred feet up the towers by successive lifts with primitive hydraulic jacks. All this was not done without both apprehension and adventure; they were giants on the earth in those days.” ―
“Manufacturing is more than just putting parts together. It's coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering, as well as final assembly.” ―
“Incurable diseases will eventually force mankind to justify disruptive nanotech and genetic engineering.” ―
“It is hardly surprising that the malodorous field of garbology has not attained the popularity of rocket science, oil exploration, or brain surgery.” ―
“Automation is cost cutting by tightening the corners and not cutting them.” ―
“Modern architects and engineers are still trying to understand how the ancient Greeks were able to build the Parthenon in ten years when the restoration of the monument has continued for more than three decades and is still not complete. What they have learned and shared along this arduous path of rediscovery is that the Greeks were highly skilled at building visual compensations into their structures. Columns were crafted and positioned to compensate for how the eye interprets what it sees at a distance. Subtle variances in the surface of platforms, columns, and colonnades provide the appearance of geometric proportion, whereas if they had worked from the perspective of a flat datum surface, the brain would interpret the results as being slightly skewed.” ―
“In engineering, the joints are the most crucial. They have to be both firm and flexible, exactly like the joints in our body.” ―
“John West is very good at reaching the heart of an issue using simple analogies. In summarizing the evidence of precision at Giza, he said, 'It's like finding a Porsche where only a wheelbarrow should be.” ―
“As in real life, complex engineering designs demand a pragmatic approach.” ―
“When we study the past seeking evidence of a highly advanced culture, we should not expect to find objects that we associate with our own culture. Different cultures develop along different paths. This process occurs even over relatively short periods of time, especially when one society is isolated from others. For example, when the Allies went into Germany after Hitler's defeat, they found that after only twelve years of isolation German technology was being developed along lines vastly different from our own. Pauwels and Bergier wrote: 'When the War in Europe ended on May 8th, 1945, missions of investigation were immediately sent out to visit Germany after her defeat. Their reports have been published; the catalogue alone has 300 pages. Germany had only been separated from the world since 1933. In twelve years the technical evolution of the Reich developed along strangely divergent lines. Although the Germans were behindhand as regards the atomic bomb, they had perfected giant rockets unmatched by any in America or Russia. They may not have had radar, but they had perfected a system of infra-red ray detectors which were quite as effective. Though they did not invent silicones, they had developed an entirely new organic chemistry, based on the eight-ring carbon chain. [...] They had rejected the theory of relativity and tended to neglect the quantum theory. [...] They believed in the existence of eternal ice and that the planets and the stars were blocks of ice floating in space. If it has been possible for such wide divergencies to develop in the space of twelve years in our modern world, in spite of the exchange of ideas and mass communications, what view must one take of the civilizations of the past? To what extent are our archaeologists qualified to judge the state of the sciences, techniques, philosophy and knowledge that distinguished, say, the Maya or Khmer civilizations?” ―
“The knowledge needed to evaluate certain of these ancient artifacts was not available until very recently. Even today there may be numerous articles that we will not understand until we further develop our own technology. We cannot fathom technology that is unknown to us, and we seldom consider things that seem impossible to us. Petrie, though knowledgeable in engineering and surveying, could not be expected to know anything about ultrasonic machining; hence his amazement at the machining abilities of the ancient Egyptians. Even if he had been aware of this technology, the intellectual climate of his time may have precluded his considering the possibility that these methods were known to the ancient Egyptians. Quite simply, the greatest barrier to our understanding may not necessarily be knowledge. It may be attitude.” ―
“Steiger presented another analysis by a professional engineer, who saw the wall carvings at Dendera as an accurate illustration of an electrical device—one which would not be out of place in a modern electrical blueprint file. 'In regards to the ancient Egyptian electron tubes, electromagnetic engineer Professor S.R. Harris identified a box-and braided cable in the picture as 'virtually an exact copy of engineering illustration used today for representing a bundle of conducting wires.' The cable runs from the box the full length of the floor and terminates at both the ends and at the bases of two peculiar objects resting on two pillars. Professor Harris is said to have identified these representations as high voltage insulators.” ―
“Because of the tendency of engineers to focus more on engineering matters rather than on archaeology, history, or anthropology, they are often accused of stripping artifacts of their cultural context and cherrypicking the evidence. Yet as an engineer, I strongly argue that the engineering context is, in fact, a cultural context in and of itself--one that is less susceptible to ambiguity than the cultural context of mummies and potsherds, which can be added decades or even centuries after a building has been completed.” ―
“The evidence presented in this book, for the most part, was recorded many years ago by men of integrity who worked in the fields of archaeology and Egyptology. That much of this evidence was misunderstood only reveals the pressing need for an interdisciplinary approach to fields that have until recently been closed to nonacademics and others outside the fold of formal archaeology and Egyptology. Much of our ignorance of ancient cultures can be placed at the feet of closed-minded theorists who ignore evidence that does not fit their theories or fall within the province of their expertise. Sometimes it takes a machinist to recognize machined parts or machines! As a result, much of the evidence that supports a purpose for the Great Pyramid as anything other than a tomb has been ignored, discounted without serious consideration, or simply explained away as purely coincidental. Is it coincidence that the Great Pyramid is so huge and so precise? That the King's Chamber contains so many indications that tremendous forces disturbed it or were created within it at one time? Are the exuviae, the chocolate-colored granite, the resonating chambers with their giant granite monoliths placed above, and the unique properties of the quartz crystal present in vast quantities in the granite complex all coincidental? Can the design and physical tests of the movement of sound inside the Grand Gallery be just a happy accident?” ―
“In the one hundred thirty years since Petrie published his seminal studies of the pyramids and temples of Egypt, the hand tools and building and sculpting tools used by men and women have improved exponentially in capability and efficiency and hard drives are better known as integral devices in a computer. Yet we are taught that during the three thousand years that the ancient Egyptians flourished on this planet, the tools used by men and women did not change. How could this be? The finely crafted and precise boxes inside the pyramids at Giza were supposedly created in the fourth dinasty, 2500 BCE, or forty-five hundred years ago. The finely crafted and precise boxes inside the rock tunnels of the Serapeum were supposedly created in the eighteenth dynasty, 1550-1200 BCE, or thirty-five hundred years ago. We are asked to believe that in a one-thousand-year span, the ancient Egyptians did not make any significant improvement in their tools and methods for cutting hard igneous rock. We, however, have examined the results of their labor, and it is clear that the Egyptians were not stupid people. In fact, they were geniuses in their accomplishments, yet we are to accept that while they tapped into the awesome power of the human spirit and creativity, they did not ask, over the course of a full millennium, how they could do their job better--how they could demand less pain and strain from their workforce, how they could do more with less effort, how they could reduce injuries and provide workers with more time off. If there is any mystery to ancient Egypt, it is why a paradigm that was established one hundred thirty years ago still holds force among many Egyptologists and archaeologists.” ―
“What we have been taught is that the ancient Egyptians were in posession of only simple hand tools, and that the only metals available to the Egyptians of the fourth dynasty, when the Giza Pyramids were built, were copper, gold, and silver. What is inferred, therefore, is that absent the tools made from these materials, the simple abrasive experiments actually demonstrate the stone-working methods of ancient Egypt. We are told that the ancient Egyptians had not yet developed the knowledge to extract the raw materials necessary to produce iron and steel. It has been suggested that they may have used meteoric iron, because they found it lying on the ground, but they did not mine the ore and smelt it in a foundry. Support for this view is the lack of evidence that they used tools made of any material other than copper, stone, and wood. Yet absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Although sophisticated tools made of iron or steel may not yet have been discovered in the archaeological record, what has been found is not adequate enough to explain how the artifacts were created.” ―
“I need to discuss science vs. engineering. Put glibly: In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it.” ―
“گفت فولاد بتن را روزی که تو این قدر چرا مرموزی؟ در کشش مثل لبو می مانی در خمش هم که خودت می دانی گفتی از علم تخطی نکنی پس چرا کرنش خطی نکنی؟ تا مسلح نشوی از فولاد تویی و این همه عیب و ایراد غالبا کیفیتت پایین است اصلا انگار که made in چین است کنترل کرده کسی جان تو را؟ نسبت آب به سیمان تو را؟ آخر این قدر تخلخل از چیست؟ غالبا ویبره ات کافی نیست چند هفته همه سرگردانند تا عمل آوری ات گردانند ناظر و کارگر و کارآموز آب باید بدهندت هر روز حرف من را بشنو باور کن برو ورزش بکن و لاغر کن شده ابعاد تو بسیار زیاد مثلا تیرِ نود در هفتاد سازه های بتنی سنگین است سرعت ساختشان پایین است در جوابش بتن آمد به سخن گفت آخر تو چه دانی از من؟ گرچه از آبم و سیمانم و سنگ هرگز اما نزنم مثل تو زنگ بیخودی مثل تو کرنش نکنم زیر هر بار کمانش نکنم نیست فولاد خفن تر از من من نمی ترسم از آتش اصلا اتصالات درونت ناجور هیکلت پر شده از جوش غرور سخنی بین من و بین تو نیست هر چه باشد پی ات آخر بتنی است” ―