An Engineers Purpose
This week, I had a string of events take place that made me ponder something all of us scientific persons consider, the meaning behind our existence. I know what you may be thinking, “we went from rebar, to the meaning of life”, not necessarily. The meaning of life is for you to consider. The PURPOSE of our existence is, when considered on our own terms, is to advance in some form. Whether it be building a family, becoming wealthy, or simply pushing for spiritual enlightenment, we all are striving for that next step on the ladder.
“That’s great Thomas, but how does it relate to your week or anything scientific?”. Glad you asked. In Thermodynamics this week, my professor had mentioned a relatively new definition of the 2nd law of Thermodynamics defined by Gyftopoulos and Beretta. This definition comes more than 100 years after the Clausius statement.
Upon returning from school that day, I had turned the TV on briefly to see that an episode of Futurama was on. In the episode, Professor Farnsworth discovers the last known unknown of the universe, the smallest form of matter in the universe. After doing so, he loses all meaning to live. Figuring his entire life was dedicated to science, having nothing to research and solve left him without purpose.
Later that same day, I had looked over the Moment Area method for solving for the slope of deflection and deflection of a beam with given loads. The process graphed the value of the bending moment over the constant flexural regidity, then found the area of this graph, and finally multiplied that by the centroid of the graphs area. I thought to myself, why develop a method so abstract when there are methods already available? Futurama and Themodynamics had answered my question.
Just because something has a “method”, or has been defined in a specific manor, doesn’t mean we can move on. Engineers and Scientists will always find their purpose in life because the material we can work with and develop is infinite; there is no theoretical limit to what can be discovered, re-worked, or re-defined.
