What is engineering?
Problems are an engineer’s inspiration. And maths and science are the creative tools they use to solve them. Problems like making your alarm go off at the right time. Or making sure your toothpaste has just the right balance of chemicals to give you that perfect smile. Or even making a game so addictive it’s almost impossible to put down if that really is a problem!
The face of the moon was in shadow
Now let’s head over to the airport and jump on an airplane. Airplanes are so easy to take for granted. Before airplanes, flying was quite a bit more challenging. Every bit of your plane has been touched by engineers. A mechanical engineer designed the engine. A mechatronics engineer devised the controls. The fuel? Extracted by mining engineers and refined by chemical engineers. The navigation systems? Electrical and software engineers created those. A whole team of engineers. Now we’ve landed in Dubai home of the Burj Khalifa. It’s the world’s tallest building at 829.8 meters high. It’s also in one of the world’s hottest environments reaching up to 50 degrees in summer. One of the difficulties building the Burj was trying to figure out how to set 45,000 cubic meters of reinforced concrete in such extreme weather. The solution: a clever method of pumping iced liquid concrete into the 55,000-ton steel frame during the night. The result: a building that’s vertically 800 meters high rather than horizontally all over the ground.
What is engineering?
Now let’s jump into our time machine and go back to Saturday. Saturday, March 1932, the Sydney Harbour Bridge is about to open. The bridge is a marvel of civil engineering and a pretty cool place to set off some fireworks. Since 1815 people had been talking about building a bridge to connect the two sides of the harbor. The problem was that the harbor was so incredibly wide. How could a bridge span such width and support its own weight? The solution? The Romans. Well actually, it was an idea they came up with. The arched bridge works by transferring the weight into horizontal forces and bracing them at the end of the arch. But what about the future? What problems will engineers solve next? Will we finally have affordable solar power? Or robots that can perform life-saving surgery? Or a building that’s so tall your view is of outer space? How about finally engineering a working hoverboard? Seriously, we’ve waited long enough! So what is engineering? It’s solving problems; it’s taking crazy, out-there ideas and seeing if they’re actually possible, and when they are the idea is shared with the world to make all our lives better. So, what problems do you want to solve?
