Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

Yet the bookshelf is also conspicuous in its absence. When we enter a living room without books or bookshelves, we wonder if the people in the house do nothing but watch television.

No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art. Contrary to their popular characterization as intellectual conservatives, engineers are really among the avant-garde.

That decision falls to scientists, engineers, and managers – with at least the tacit approval of company officers and boards of directors. All complex technology is inseparably coupled to an equally complex team of people and systems of people who should interact with one another as smoothly and with as clear a purpose as a set of well-meshed gears.

This cartoon scientist wants to look, act, and think like Einstein: casually and comfortably dressed, if not somewhat unkempt and disheveled; unconventional, but in a curiously impish and self-conscious way; irreverent and individualistic, except when it comes to dressing in a nonuniform uniform and championing his specialty.

Failure analysis is as easy as Monday-morning quarterbacking’ design is more akin to coaching. However, the design engineer must do better than any coach, for he is expected to win every game he plays. That is a tough assignment when one mistake can often mean a loss. And when defeat occurs, all one can hope is to analyze the game films and learn from the mistakes so that they are less likely to be repeated the next time out.

Some positive persisting fops we know, Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so; But you, with pleasure own your errors past, And make each day a critic on the last. – Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism.

It is the process of design, in which diverse parts of the “given-world” of the scientist and the “made-world” of the engineer are reformed and assembled into something the likes of which Nature had not dreamed, that divorces engineering from science and marries it to art.

All conventional wisdom has an element of truth to it, but good design requires more than an element of truth – it requires an ensemble of correct assumptions and valid calculations.

There’s so much written about the Titanic, and it’s hard to separate what’s fact and what’s fiction. My understanding is that the way the Titanic was designed, the emphasis was placed on surviving a head-on collision.