Arthur C Clarke said it best when he pointed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
So what about engineering ?
Well, isn’t it supposed to be like magic ? But wait, isn’t really science.It is fringe science at best raising a few eyebrows and getting that disdain pitiful look ,if you mention it to be so ,in an august assembly of qualified engineers and scientists.
But let us delve into it with a bit more profoundness ,shall we ,before we tag it prematurely with an ignominious badge of “idiotism” ?
Engineering is as much of an art as it is a science. I do not have a problem of engineering being put in a box.But i have a problem when that box has fixed dimensions.
That is counterproductive. Like any great idea, engineering should be put in a box.If anything, that helps us to understand how big the idea has become by measuring the dimensions of the box.But the box should be allowed to expand to infinite dimensions.
You see engineering is not very different from the works of Van Gogh and Leonardo da Vinci(in fact, Leonardo is perhaps my best case evidence that engineering like art, transcends boundaries).
But is engineering all about measuring things ? Perhaps not.It is about observation – very much like art and giving birth and form to an idea that exists only in one’s head. And like childbirth it is painful. Excruciating pain.
And perhaps you will find in the fringe is where the fun begins.
What Van Gogh tried to do was perhaps bend the rules of colour and form and create perhaps the world as he saw deem fit. He “fixed” the world – fixed it perhaps as he deem fit in his head.
Engineering is something like that.From observing a problem to constructing a solution, to painfully giving birth to an idea in its physical form – everything exists inside your head first.Perhaps the only difference is you are bound this time by the physical laws. But i am sure that it is bound to change in the future.
We have lived on the fringe for quite sometime and we will find ways around to bend it ,if not break it.
So i rest my case to you the reader – by saying that engineering is as much of an art as it is a science.We can create things ,bend things , break things and perhaps dent the universe a little by an idea, hoping that the idea would perhaps find a recipient like a “message in a bottle left in the ocean”.After all, hope is what science ,art and engineering all three bet their bottom dollar on – isn’t it ?
-Ranjan
Nirvana - The search within ! 