Engineering: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

The answer is that we cannot eliminate risk, but we can learn lessons and we can do better to make sure the risks are acceptable.

Clearly, all possible faults are not equally likely, so engineers will assess the relative frequencies of faults.

systems and different again from a software specialist. These specialisms pose new risks since the relationships between levels and, more importantly, between the ways of understanding of specialists in those levels, are not straightforward.

The characteristics of each layer emerge from the interacting behaviour of the components working in the layer below.

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

attempt to get synergy where a combined effect is greater than the sum of the separate effects. It

Engineering is, in its most general sense, turning an idea into a reality – creating and using tools to accomplish a task or fulfil a purpose.

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.