Best 421 quotes in «engineering quotes» category

With the advent of genetic engineering the time required for the evolution of new species may literally collapse.

With the subsequent strong support from cybernetics , the concepts of systems thinking and systems theory became integral parts of the established scientific language, and led to numerous new methodologies and applications -- systems engineering, systems analysis, systems dynamics, and so on.

You can be creative in anything - in math, science, engineering, philosophy - as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.

You had to make a camera look like it's traveling at 300 mph, but you couldn't make it actually travel at 300 mph so you had to slow everything down and build devices to do that. So you were constantly engineering.

You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.

You have to do every detail on every bloody piece of the building. You have to know how the engineering works. You have to know how the fittings go together. You have to master the mechanical, electrical, acoustical - everything.

Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

As we look around the world, especially in Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, the west coast of Italy, Peru, and Bolivia, there are stone structures and the remains of others which don't easily fit into the standard picture of history. The pyramids of Giza in Egypt, Puma Punku in Bolivia, and the great megalithic wall of Sachsayhuaman in Peru are but three examples of astonishingly well-made stone works which modern engineers, stone masons, and other experts puzzle over. Conventional academics in general date these structures well within the standard timeline of so-called civilization. The generally prescribed creation date of the three pyramids of Giza is about 2500 BC, Puma Punku is alleged to have been constructed around 600 AD, and Sachsayhuaman approximately 1200 to 1400 AD. However, what intrigues engineers, architects, stone masons, and other professionals is the extreme precision of the work, often in very hard stone, which many archaeologists insist was usually achieved using bronze and or copper chisels, wooden measuring devices, and stone hammers.

You have the insanity that is geo-engineering which is a case in which you say the planet is heating up. Let's spray some aerosol and cool it down.

As electrical energy can create mechanical vibrations (perceived as sound by the human ear), so in turn can mechanical vibrations create electrical energy, such as the previously mentioned ball lightning. It could be theorized, therefore, that with the Earth being a source for mechanical vibration, or sound, and the vibrations being of a usable amplitude and frequency, then the Earth's vibrations could be a source of energy that we could tap into. Moreover, if we were to discover that a structure with a certain shape, such as a pyramid, was able to effectively act as a resonator for the vibrations coming from within the Earth, then we would have a reliable and inexpensive source of energy.

Ask Gandhi, and eye for an eye makes us both blind.....ask an engineer, and the numbers don't lie - the first to strike wins.

A societal revolution is politically organic in nature. It can't be engineered. It has to be evolved.

Bad design with good materials may give you the designed fatigue life, but a good design with bad materials will never give you the designed fatigue life.

Current theories regarding the function and construction of the pyramid fall short. A credible theory would have to explain the following conditions found inside the Great Pyramid: -The selection of granite as the building material for the King's Chamber. It is evident that in choosing granite, the builders took upon themselves an extremely difficult task. -The presence of four superfluous chambers above the King's Chamber. -The characteristics of the giant granite monoliths that were used to separate these so-called "construction chambers." -The presence of exuviae, or the cast-off shells of insects, that coated the chamber above the King's Chamber, turning those who entered black. -The violent disturbance in the King's Chamber that expanded its walls and cracked the beams in its ceiling but left the rest of the Great Pyramid seemingly undisturbed. -The fact that the guardians were able to detect the disturbance inside the King's Chamber, when there was little or no exterior evidence of it. -The reason the guardians thought it necessary to smear the cracks in the ceiling of the King's Chamber with cement. -The fact that two shafts connect the King's Chamber to the outside. -The design logic for these two shafts—their function, dimensions, features, and so forth.

Birds fly more efficiently than aeroplanes. Nature is the superior engineer.

A pessimist says the glass is half empty, an optimist says the glass is half full, and an engineer says the glass is too big.

Conjugation of the irregular verb “to design”: I create, You interfere, He gets in the way. We cooperate, You obstruct, They conspire.

Engineering-driven companies falsely assume that because they build it, the industry will magically become aware and be willing to buy it.

Designing Structures is an art and this needs to be transparent, as designs come and go but creativity stays there

Each type of knowledge has value; however, from an engineering point of view, practical knowledge seems to be more valuable than theoretical knowledge.

Engineering is defining and following datasheets.If it doesn't work then use common sense.

Engineering is not only study of 45 subjects but it is moral studies of intellectual life.

Engineering is the art and science of nuts and bolts.

Engineers are all too often unsung heroes; if we are ever, in truth, to travel between stars, it will be thanks to their aspirations and imagination... for they are the bridge builders.

Engineering is maths & management

E per tutto il giorno mi riempivano la testa di stronzate che volevano farmi tenere a mente, come ad esempio le equazioni per calcolare la distanza fra il posto dove ci trovavamo e quelle in cui volevano farci andare loro, e naturalmente quelle per tornare indietro; cazzate come le coordinate coassiali, il calcolo dei coseni, la trigonometria sferoide, l'algebra di Boolean, gli antilogaritmi, l'analisi di Fourier, quadrati e matrici. Mi dissero che io avrei dovuto fare da riserva al computer di riserva.

Evolution optimizes strongly for energy efficiency because of limited food supply, not for ease of construction or understanding by human engineers.

Here is the product of an ancient civilization empowered with the knowledge that as long as the moon continued to orbit the Earth, the special relationship that existed between the two assured the Egyptians of vast amounts of energy. The source of the energy is the Earth itself, in the form of seismic energy. The ancient Egyptians saw tremendous value in this form of energy and expended a considerable amount of effort to tap into it. The benefits they received may have been twofold: energy to fuel their civilization, and the ability to stabilize the Earth's crust by drawing off seismic energy over a period of time rather than allowing it to build up to destructive levels.

Expertise in a subfield was the key to a successful career as an engineer, and expertise was becoming a necessity for the mathematicians and computers as well.

Failure analysis is as easy as Monday-morning quarterbacking' design is more akin to coaching. However, the design engineer must do better than any coach, for he is expected to win every game he plays. That is a tough assignment when one mistake can often mean a loss. And when defeat occurs, all one can hope is to analyze the game films and learn from the mistakes so that they are less likely to be repeated the next time out.

For Commander Ripley Jones, it was becoming more and more troublesome. It had been said that nothing is infallible, Antares apparently being the proof. After hastily recalling all crew and leaving Spacedock 7 thirty hours ago, there had been nothing but problems. Breakdowns in the sensors and telemetry, system failures of a wide variety and finally – the Last Straw: a coupling seal in the stardrive engine failed. Fortunately the cut-out worked, or the whole of engineering would’ve disappeared in a flaming ball of anti-matter. Five crewmen were seriously injured as it was. Commander Smith, the Chief Entech, had the offending unit stripped down and under repair. They were currently on conversion drive - which could only propel them at sub-light speeds – and Ripley was currently in an elevator with a very pissed Captain Falconer.

How in the fucking hell did you do that?" Calyph shrugged. "I'm an Engineer," he said simply, as if it would explain everything.

I didn't have a drill, so I had to make my own. First I heated a long nail in the fire, then drove it through a half a maize cob, creating a handle. I placed the nail back on the coals until it became red hot, then used it to bore holes into both sets of plastic blades.

if we were to build a Great Pyramid today, we would need a lot of patience. In preparation for his book "5/5/2000 Ice: The Ultimate Disaster", Richard Noone asked Merle Booker, technical director of the Indiana Limestone Institute of America, to prepare a time study of what it would take to quarry, fabricate, and ship enough limestone to duplicate the Great Pyramid. Using the most modern quarrying equipment available for cutting, lifting, and transporting the stone, Booker estimated that the present-day Indiana limestone industry would need to triple its output, and it would take the entire industry, which as I have said includes thirty-three quarries, twenty-seven years to fill the order for 131,467,940 cubic feet of stone. These estimates were based on the assumption that production would proceed without problems. Then we would be faced with the task of putting the limestone blocks in place. The level of accuracy in the base of the Great Pyramid is astounding, and is not demanded, or even expected, by building codes today. Civil engineer Roland Dove, of Roland P. Dove & Associates, explained that .02 inch per foot variance was acceptable in modern building foundations. When I informed him of the minute variation in the foundation of the Great Pyramid, he expressed disbelief and agreed with me that in this particular phase of construction, the builders of the pyramid exhibited a state of the art that would be considered advanced by modern standards.

I have been branded with folly and madness for attempting what the world calls impossibilities, and even from the great engineer, the late James Watt, who said ... that I deserved hanging for bringing into use the high-pressure engine. This has so far been my reward from the public; but should this be all, I shall be satisfied by the great secret pleasure and laudable pride that I feel in my own breast from having been the instrument of bringing forward new principles and new arrangements of boundless value to my country, and however much I may be straitened in pecuniary circumstances, the great honour of being a useful subject can never be taken from me, which far exceeds riches.

I have learned over the years that many formally educated corrosion professionals are either engineers or chemists by training. While those two groups represent the largest two categories of backgrounds in the oilfield corrosion control industry, they are in the minority.

I have seen ideas that work on paper not work in the field. But I have never seen an idea that does not work on paper work in the field.

I looked more closely at what I considered to be the most significant information regarding the Great Pyramid, which was the accuracy with which it was built. It soon became obvious to me that the researchers on both sides of the issue were sympathetic to the craftspeople involved in building the pyramids. But the researchers were not craftspeople themselves, and they did not have the perspective gained through years of experience working with their hands and with machinery. Having that experience myself, I have some very strong opinions regarding the level of manufacturing expertise practiced by the ancient Egyptians. They were not primitive by any means, and their craftsmanship and precision would be an extreme challenge to duplicate today.

Character is like 'Structural Integrity' in the field of engineering. A construction is believed to have structural integrity when it can withstand 'impact' from anywhere and anything, functioning adequately for its desired purposes and service life, until a physical collapse proves otherwise. 'Integrity' springs from the original Latin root 'integrum', which means "Intact". A man has INTEGRITY when he remains INTACT, despite the IMPACT of forces that seek to sidetrack him. He will never confuse "what is" with "what ought to be", EVEN WHEN "what is" will work in his favour. A man who will choose, not what the world forces his hands to choose, but what aligns with his destiny and will propel him to become what he is meant to become. Such men are few, such men should be me and you.

If automating everything makes people lazier and lazier, and laziness leads to stupidity, which it does for most people, judging by the current content circulating the social networks everywhere, except North Korea, where they don’t have any internet to speak of - at some point the Japanese robots, for which a market niche is currently being developed, with no concerns on how they should be designed to act in society or outside it - will have no choice, but to take everything over, to preserve us from ourselves…

If I were king, I would redress an abuse which cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, especially those of the mind.

In 1983 Donald Rahn of Rahn Granite Surface Plate Co. told me that diamond drills, rotating at nine hundred revolutions per minute, penetrate granite at the rate of one inch in five minutes. In 1996, Eric Leither of Tru-Stone Corp. told me that these parameters have not changed since then. The feedrate of modern drills, therefore, calculates to be .0002 inch per revolution, indicating that the ancient Egyptians drilled into granite with a feedrate that was five hundred times greater or deeper per revolution of the drill than modern drills! The other characteristics of the artifacts also pose a problem for modern drills. Somehow the Egyptians made a tapered hole with a spiral groove that was cut deeper through the harder constituent of the granite. If conventional machining methods cannot answer just one of these questions, how do we answer all three?

If you're going to go out, go out in a blaze of glory.

It did occur to him that perhaps he’d gone to the wrong Academy – the guys in the Space Fleet always had more interesting stories to tell at the spaceport bars. You know, tales about the dude who got vaporized in a plasma accident in the engineering section, or the fella who got turned into a blob of weird space jelly by some alien virus – or the time someone flew a starship into an astor-field at warp four by mistake (they were still trying to find the black box on that one). The Imperial Space Fleet’s recruiting office sure didn’t go around advertising ‘Join up, see the universe, meet interesting aliens and die screaming’, but it was known there were risks involved. It was part of the job after all, and yet somehow, they still got recruits signing up in droves. Yes, indeedy – the stories were far more interesting than his – took a load of ore to Gorda, took a load of mining equipment back to Tordrazil. Took a load of Florpavian Flame-birds to a zoo on Deanna, took a load of machinery to Salus. Picked up and dropped off a few passengers on the way. Still, Florpavian Flame-birds were a risky cargo… and damned tricky to transport – which is probably the only reason he’d had any entertainment at all on the last trip.

It is contrary to the usual practice of professional men to give their opinions upon each other's work unless regularly called upon in the way of their profession.

I was hoping to be able to get into the Queen's Chamber while I was in Egypt in 1986 to get a sample of the salt for analysis. I had speculated that the salt on the walls of the chamber was an unwanted, though significant, residual substance caused by a chemical reaction where hot hydrogen reacted with the limestone. Unfortunately, I was unable to get into the chamber because a French team was already inside the Horizontal Passage, boring holes into what they hoped were additional chambers. (It was discovered, after I left Egypt, that the spaces contained only sand.) As it turned out, my research would have been redundant. Noone reported in his book that another individual had already had the same idea and done the work. In 1978, Dr. Patrick Flanagan asked the Arizona Bureau of Geology and Mineral Technology to analyze a sample of this salt. They found it to be a mixture of calcium carbonate (limestone), sodium chloride (halite or salt), and calcium sulfate (gypsum, also known as plaster of paris). These are precisely the minerals that would be produced by the reaction of hot, hydrogen-bearing gas with the limestone walls and ceiling of the Queen's Chamber. [...] The interior chambers of the Great Pyramid have the appearance of being subjected to extreme temperatures; and [...] the broken corner on the granite box shows signs of being melted, rather than simply being chipped away.

Math is my Passion. Engineering is my Profession.

Nothing is easier than yesterday's solutions.

Programmers are isolated. They sit in their cubicle; they don't think about the larger picture. To my mind, a programmer is not an engineer, because an engineer is somebody who starts with a social problem that an organization or a society has and says, "OK, here's this problem that we have- how can we solve it?" The engineer comes up with a clever, cost-effective solution to address that problem, builds it, tests it to make sure it solves the problem. That's engineering.

Rudolph Gantenbrink's important discovery [of a door with metallic handles found with a robot inside a shaft in the Great Pyramid] has forced many Egyptologists to finally accept that their theories are flawed. This is an interesting development. Academic mores normally dictate that when a theory contains flaws, or unsubstantiated data that supports critical elements on which the theory is built, the entire theory must either be thrown out or revised. Instead of the tomb theory being dismissed, however, Gantenbrink himself was dismissed from the project. He discovered the "door" on March 22, 1993. A week later, he was told to pack up his robot and leave Egypt. Gantenbrink has the technology to go beyond the so-called door but, presumably because of political reasons, has been refused permission to resume his research in Egypt. Gantenbrink, with an engineer's typical pragmatism, stated, 'I take an absolute neutral position. It is a scientific process, and there is no need whatsoever to answer questions with speculation when these questions could be answered much more easily by continuing the research. Yet because of a stupid feud between what I call believers and non-believers, I am condemned as someone who is speculating. But I am not. I am just stating the facts. We have a device [ultrasonic] that would discover if there is a cavity behind the slab. It is nonsensical to make theories when we have the tools to discover the facts.