• Question: what are the advantages of engineering

    Asked by Roxianna 101 to Peppe, Greg on 5 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Greg Chance

      Greg Chance answered on 5 Nov 2017:

      Engineering has done so much for humanity, created cars and aeroplanes, medical equipment, computers, mobiles phones and millions of other things that have helped people. As an engineer you will be one of the people who help to create these things or even invent one yourself?! Engineering is a vast subject area and you can do some much with the fundamental knowledge from building boats and bridges to creating new internet security software. In a nutshell, engineering is the exploitation of the physical world to make positive changes for people.

    • Photo: Giuseppe Cotugno

      Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      The whole point of engineering is “making things real”. If you won’t have engineers there will be a lot of people able to talk and invent very clever ideas but rarely they will be practical. Without engineering, a mobile that unlocks when your face is detected on camera might take so long or eat so much battery that it will be practically useless although theoretically great.

      Engineers are making approximations all the time, they need to identify what is really useful for the job and make it as efficient as required. They don’t pursue a “this thing can do everything” approach because such thing simply don’t exist in real life. Without this discipline things like solid houses, or safe bridges won’t necessarily exist because a general strategy to make sure that a house will always be solid (just think in which conditions an engineering work as the Colosseum reached us and in which state early medieval peasant houses reached our days)

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