• Question: What is your all-time favourite engineering discovery?

    Asked by Maya Gyosheva to Vinita, Rachel, Pam, Christopher, Brian, Andrew on 11 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Pam Anderson

      Pam Anderson answered on 11 Mar 2019:

      I think it would have to be the airplane. I love travelling for holidays and work and without airplanes that would be pretty difficult. Even although I studies Aero-Mechanical Engineering I am always still amazed that such large structures can stay in the air.

    • Photo: Rachel Hudson

      Rachel Hudson answered on 13 Mar 2019:

      I think the best invention is the bike because it means that people can travel around and get places faster without having to use up fuel and create pollution!

    • Photo: Brian Weaver

      Brian Weaver answered on 15 Mar 2019:

      Electronic computers. Although I’m not a computer scientist, I understand that the problems I solve everyday would be impossible without a computer. The number of operations needed to solve some equations is so large that a human would never be able to do it (without errors or in their lifetime).
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      If you’ve ever solved a “simultaneous” equation (example: two equations with two unknowns variables) then you will understand what I mean. Imagine solving thousands of equations with thousands of unknown variables, at each second, for ten years worth of data. You will definitely need a computer!
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      Organizations actually do solve these problems in real life using supercomputers. In 2011, the United States’ National Geodetic Survey (NGS) processed almost two decades of satellite positioning data to find the motion of the North American tectonic plate. The computer took ONE YEAR to finish processing the data! And that’s after advanced math was used to simplify the problem!!
      https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/web/news/Did_the_Earth_Move_Twelve_Million_NOAA_Data_Files_Will_Tell.shtml

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