Engineering: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

How do we judge the quality of information on which we depend to make decisions that could risk someone dying?

Science is an activity of ‘knowing’, whereas engineering and technology are activities of ‘doing’ – but both rely on mathematics as a language and a tool.

In other words, energy is the capacity for work in a process and is an accumulation of power over time. During these processes, some of the impedance dissipates energy (resistance), some of it stores potential (capacitance) some of it stores flow (induction). For example, the dissipation or loss of energy through a resistance in an electrical circu

However, if they go unnoticed or are not acted on, then the pressure of events builds up until the balloon is very stretched indeed. At this point, only a small trigger event, such as a pin or lighted match, is needed to release the energy pent up in the system. The trigger is often identified as the cause of the accident but it isn’t.

humans make mistakes, and natural hazards, such as earthquakes, do occur. So they often have back-up, or contingency, plans – this is known as defence-in-depth.

The purpose of the fault and event tree analysis is to enable the engineers to understand the interactions between the various components of a system, and hence to design possible defence-in-depth schemes if appropriate, and therefore reduce the chances of all failures of components (such as a battery) to a level where the total chance of failure i

systems thinking’. A system is a combination of things that form a whole. Immediately, we can distinguish a ‘hard system’ of physical, material objects, such as a bridge or a computer, from a ‘soft system’ involving people. Hard systems are the subject of traditional physical science. They comprise objects as tools that all have a life cycle – they

In a similar way, engineers examine the safety of a nuclear reactor by drawing enormous logic diagrams covering many pages which trace how an event (such as a pump that fails to circulate cooling water in the nuclear reactor) might affect other parts of the system. These are called event trees.

Looking inwards, your structural subsystem of bones and muscles is also a holon with its own emergent properties such as your body size or muscular dexterity. Looking outwards, your family is a holon with its own emergent properties such as happiness or closeness. The highly connected neural connections in the brain create emergent consciousness. W