Tag Archives: Engineering

Engineering synaesthesia

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A street in Sante Fe

A street in Sante Fe

One of the most memorable places we visited when we lived in the United States was Sante Fe, New Mexico.  We rented a house on a hillside that was walking distance from downtown.  The landscape is stark, vast and vivid all at the same time.  Georgia O’Keeffe captured it beautifully in her paintings.  In our house in Liverpool, we have a number of prints from her paintings that we bought during a visit to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Sante Fe about ten years ago. So it was a nostalgic experience to visit the O’Keeffe exhibition at the Tate Modern in London a few weeks ago and reacquaint ourselves with familiar originals as well as enjoy paintings we had not seen before. ‘Red and Yellow Cliffs‘ (1940) was one of my favourites in the exhibition which was reminiscent of many of the landscapes in New Mexico.  I also enjoyed the room entitled ‘Abstraction and the Senses’ that contained a series of paintings in which O’Keeffe took inspiration from sensory stimulation and expressed in her paintings the feelings induced by ‘signals’ from senses other than sight, such as hearing music.  This is known as synaesthesia: ‘the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body’, according the Oxford Online Dictionary.  Some people suffer from synaesthesia and hearing particular sounds might trigger a sensation of taste, or letters might be associated with colours, for instance ‘A’ with red. It can be very useful, for instance I ‘see’ numbers laid out in patterns and so can perform mental arithmetic pictorially.

Engineers make use of similar phenomena to visualize patterns of variables that are invisible.  For instance, moiré interferometry uses the interference between regular arrays of lines to magnify tiny differences in the arrays and generate visible fringe patterns – this is useful in comparing the dimensions of two objects to which the arrays are attached.  In photoelasticity, polarised light is used to generate colour fringe patterns that are contours of stress in transparent components or models of components [see my post entitled ‘Art and Experimental Mechanics‘ on July 12th, 2012].  Unfortunately this elegant, but analogue, technique has been almost completely usurped by digital analysis using computers. Many of these computers have a touch screen that convert your thoughts, conveyed by the tap or swipe of your fingers, into text or commands for devices attached physically or wirelessly to the computer. And, virtual reality goggles, head sets and haptic devices allow the computer to reverse the process by transmitting signals to our senses, which often confuse us as they become intermingled in a new form of synaesthesia.  Georgia O’Keeffe died in 1986 at the age of 98 and so missed out on this aspect of the digital revolution but it might have generated a whole series of beautiful paintings.

Sources:

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/synaesthesia/Pages/Introduction.aspx

Engineering is all about ingenuity

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Painting from Okemos High School Art Collection at MSU

Painting from Okemos High School Art Collection at MSU

Who was the first engineer?  It’s a tricky question to answer.  Some sources cite Ailnolth, who lived in the second half of the twelfth century and worked on the Tower of London, as one of the first to be called an ‘ingeniator’.  The word comes from the Latin and the Roman writer, Vitruvius, describes master builders as being ingenious or possessing ‘ingenium’.  Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519) was perhaps the first person to be appointed as an engineer.  The Duke of Milan appointed him ‘Ingenarius Ducalis’ or Master of Ingenious Devices.

So it would appear that an engineer is ‘a skilful contriver or originator of something’,  which is the third definition in the on-line Oxford Dictionary after ‘a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines or structures’ and ‘a person who controls an engine especially on an aircraft or ship’.  This type of engine, which uses heat to do work, is a relatively recent invention probably by Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen in the early eighteenth century.  Engineers have been contriving, designing and inventing ‘works of public utility’ [quote from my older hard copy Oxford English Dictionary] for many centuries before the heat engine hijacked the terminology.

Why does this matter?  Well, many people have a misconception that engineering is all about engines, the heat kind; and yes, some of us do design, build and maintain engines but very many more engineers contrive, design and invent works of public utility – in the broadest sense of the words, i.e. just about everything ‘invented’ in the world. In other words, engineering is using human ingenuity to produce something useful; preferably something that improves the quality of life – oh, but now we are moving into ethics and I will leave that for another day!

Sources:

Blockley D, Engineering: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Auyang SY, Engineering – an endless frontier, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Little W, Fowler HW & Coulson J, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, C.T. Onions (editor), London: Guild Publishing, 1983.

 

More uncertainty about matter and energy

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woodlandvalley

When I wrote about wave-particle duality and an electron possessing the characteristics of both matter and energy [see my post entitled ‘Electron uncertainty’ on July 27th, 2016], I dodged the issue of what are matter and energy.  As an engineer, I think of matter as being the solids, liquids and gases that are both manufactured and occur in nature.  We should probably add plasmas to this list, as they are created in an increasing number of engineering processes, including power generation using nuclear fission.  But maybe plasmas should be classified as energy, since they are clouds of unbounded charged particles, often electrons.   Matter is constructed from atoms and atoms from sub-atomic particles, such as electrons that can behave as particles or waves of energy.  So clearly, the boundary between matter and energy is blurred or fuzzy.  And, Einstein’s famous equation describes how energy and matter can be equated, i.e. energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared.

Engineers tend to define energy as the capacity to do work, which is fine for manufactured or generated energy, but is inadequate when thinking about the energy of sub-atomic particles, which probably is why Feynman said we don’t really know what energy is.  Most of us think about energy as the stuff that comes down an electricity cable or that we get from eating a banana.  However, Evelyn Pielou points out in her book, The Nature of Energy, that energy in nature surrounds us all of the time, not just in the atmosphere or water flowing in rivers and oceans but locked into the structure of plants and rocks.

Matter and energy are human constructs and nature does not do rigid classifications, so perhaps we should think about a plant as a highly-organised localised zone of high density energy [see my post entitled ‘Fields of flowers‘ on July 8th, 2015].  We will always be uncertain about some things and as our ability to probe the world around us improves we will find that we are no longer certain about things we thought we understood.  For instance, research has shown that Bucky balls, which are spherical fullerene molecules containing sixty carbon atoms with a mass of 720 atomic mass units, and so seem to be quite substantial bits of matter, exhibit wave-particle duality in certain conditions.

We need to learn to accept uncertainty and appreciate the opportunities it presents to us rather than seek unattainable certainty.

Note: an atomic mass unit is also known as a Dalton and is equivalent to 1.66×10-27kg

Sources:

Pielou EC, The Energy of Nature, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Arndt M, Nairz O, Vos-Andreae J, Keller C, van der Zouw G & Zeilinger A, Wave-particle duality of C60 molecules, Nature 401, 680-682 (14 October 1999).

 

Electron uncertainty

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daisyMost of us are uncomfortable with uncertainty.  Michael Faraday’s ability to ‘accept the given – certainties and uncertainties’ [see my post entitled ‘Steadiness and placidity’ on July 18th, 2016] was exceptional and perhaps is one reason he was able to make such outstanding contributions to science and engineering.  It has been said that his ‘Expts. on the production of Electricity from Magnetism, etc. etc.’ [Note 148 from Faraday’s notebooks] on August 29th 1831  began the age of electricity.  Electricity is associated with the flow of electric charge, which is often equated with the flow of electrons and electrons are subatomic particles with a negative elementary charge and a mass that is approximately 1/1836 atomic mass units.  A moving electron, and it is difficult to find a stationary one, has wave-particle duality – that is, it simultaneously has the characteristics of a particle and a wave.  So, there is uncertainty about the nature of an electron and most of us find this concept difficult to handle.

An electron is both matter and energy.  It is a particle in its materialisation as matter but a wave in its incarnation as energy.  However, this is probably too much of a reductionist description of a systemic phenomenon.  Nevertheless let’s stay with it for a moment, because it might help elucidate why the method of measurement employed in experiments with electrons influences whether our measurements reflect the behaviour of a particle or a wave.  Perhaps when we design our experiments from an energy perspective then electrons oblige by behaving as waves of energy and when we design from a matter perspective then electrons materialise as particles.

All of this leads to a pair of questions about what is matter and what is energy?  But, these are enormous questions, and even the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman said ‘in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is’, so I’m going to leave them unanswered.  I’ve probably already riled enough physicists with my simplistic discussion.

Note: an atomic mass unit is also known as a Dalton and is equivalent to 1.66×10-27kg

Source:

Hamilton, J., A life of discovery: Michael Faraday, giant of the scientific revolution. New York: Random House, 2002.

Pielou EC, The Energy of Nature [the epilogue], Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.