The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is the full expression of what "You and Your Research" outlined. It's a book about thinking; more specifically, a style of thinking by which great ideas are conceived.

  1. ​Gifts of knowledge to humanity​
  2. ​Hamming-greatness​
  3. ​It cannot be taught in words​
  4. ​Preparing for problems​
  5. ​Student's future, not teacher's past​
  1. ​You and Your Research​
  2. ​Chance favors the prepared mind​
  3. ​Serendipity​
  1. Gifts of knowledge to humanity

    There are many commonalities we can admire in these endeavors: the dazzling leap of imagination, the broad scope of applicability, the founding of a new paradigm. But let’s focus here on their form of distribution. These are all things that are taught. To “use” them means to learn them, understand them, internalize them, perform them with one’s own hands. They are free to any open mind.

    In Hamming’s world, great achievements are gifts of knowledge to humanity.

    Referring to Hamming's frequent scientific references: Einstein, Tukey, Shannon, Hopper.

  2. Hamming-greatness

    Hamming-greatness is tied, inseparably, with the conception of science and engineering as public service. This school of thought is not extinct today, but it is rare, and doing such work is not impossible, but fights a nearly overwhelming current.

  3. It cannot be taught in words

    How to be a great painter cannot be taught in words; one learns by trying many different approaches that seem to surround the subject. Art teachers usually let the advanced student paint, and then make suggestions on how they would have done it, or what might also be tried, more or less as the points arise in the student’s head—which is where the learning is supposed to occur!

  4. Preparing for problems

    I firmly believe in Pasteur’s remark, “Luck favors the prepared mind.” In this way I can illustrate how the individual’s preparation before encountering the problem can often lead to recognition, formulation, and solution.

    1. ​Chance favors the prepared mind​
  5. If you know what you are doing

    In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.
    In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.

  6. The homogeneity of knowledge

    The standard process of organizing knowledge by departments, and sub-departments, and further breaking it up into separate courses, tends to conceal the homogeneity of knowledge, and at the same time to omit much which falls between the courses.

    Another goal of the course is to show the essential unity of all knowledge rather than the fragments which appear as the individual topics are taught. In your future anything and everything you know might be useful, but if you believe the problem is in one area you are not apt to use information that is relevant but which occurred in another course.

  7. An information service society

    Society is steadily moving from a material goods society to an information service society. At the time of the American Revolution, say 1780 or so, over 90% of the people were essentially farmers—now farmers are a very small percentage of workers.

    What will the situation be in 2020? As a guess I would say less than 25% of the people in the civilian workforce will be handling things; the rest will be handling information in some form or other. In making a movie or a tv program you are making not so much a thing, though of course it does have a material form, as you are organizing information.

    1. ​Auditory Hallucinations from Offworld Megafarms​
    2. ​Data Farming​

    I like the concept of an 'information farmer' as a kind of dystopian techno-future job description.

  8. A matter of choice and balance

    More than ever before, engineering is a matter of choice and balance rather than just doing what can be done. And more and more it is the human factors which will determine good design—a topic which needs your serious attention at all times.

  9. "Real programmers"

    At the time the Symbolic Assembly Program (SAP) first appeared I would guess about 1% of the older programmers were interested in it—using SAP was “sissy stuff,” and a real programmer would not stoop to wasting machine capacity to do the assembly.

    Gatekeeping is a sign of soon-to-be-obsolete ways of thinking. Anyone who claims real experts would never do something a certain way are sure to be left behind quickly.

    Modern equivalent probably include those who say real web developers would never use tools like Wix or Webflow. If not these tools, then tools like them will surely change the industry as radically as symbolic programming changed early computation.

  10. History tends to be charitable

    History tends to be charitable. It gives credit for understanding what something means when we first do it. But there is a wise saying, “Almost everyone who opens up a new field does not really understand it the way the followers do.”

    The reason this happens so often is the creators have to fight through so many dark difficulties, and wade through so much misunderstanding and confusion, they cannot see the light as others can, now the door is open and the path made easy.

  11. Mass production of variable products

    Computers have opened the door much more generally to the mass production of a variable product, regardless of what it is: numbers, words, word processing, making furniture, weaving, or what have you. They enable us to deal with variety without excessive standardization, and hence we can evolve more rapidly to a desired future!

    1. ​The Nature and Art of Workmanship​
  12. Making coal miners into programmers

    Many humans at present are not equipped to compete with machines—they are unable to do much more than routine jobs. There is a widespread belief (hope?) that humans can compete, once they are given proper training. However, I have long publicly doubted you could take many coal miners and make them into useful programmers.

    1. ​Manual labor​

    Richard Sennett argues the exact opposite stance in The Craftsman.

  13. A minimum size to fish

    There is the famous story by Eddington about some people who went fishing in the sea with a net. Upon examining the size of the fish they had caught, they decided there was a minimum size to the fish in the sea! Their conclusion arose from the tool used and not from reality.

    1. ​Every Tool Shapes the Task​
  14. Spelled with a lowercase letter

    I used to tease John Tukey that you are famous only when your name was spelled with a lowercase letter such as watt, ampere, volt, fourier (sometimes), and such.

    Maybe it's when your name becomes an adjective. Keynesian economics. Corbusian architecture.

  15. Why it can't be done

    Moral: when you know something cannot be done, also remember the essential reason why, so later, when the circumstances have changed, you will not say, “It can’t be done.”

    When you decide something is not possible, don’t say at a later date it is still impossible without first reviewing all the details of why you originally were right in saying it couldn’t be done.

  16. Intellectual shelf life

    Let lab equipment lie idle for some time, and suddenly it will not work properly! This is called “shelf life,” but it is sometimes the shelf life of the skills in using it rather than the shelf life of the equipment itself! I have seen it all too often in my direct experience. Intellectual shelf life is often more insidious than is physical shelf life.

  17. Beware of jargon

    Beware of jargon—learn to recognize it for what it is, a special language to facilitate communication over a restricted area of things or events. But it also blocks thinking outside the original area it was designed to cover. Jargon is both a necessity and a curse.

  18. I walked the crest of the dune

    Thus piece by piece I walked the crest of the dune, and each time the solution slipped on one side or the other I knew what to do to get back on the track.

  19. God loved sand

    “God loved sand, He made so much of it.” I heard, inside myself, that we were already having to exploit lower-grade copper mines, and could only expect to have an increasing cost for good copper as the years went by, but the material for glass is widely available and is not likely to ever be in short supply.

  20. The Hawthorne effect

    At the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric, long, long ago, some psychologists were trying to improve productivity by making various changes in the environment. They painted the walls an attractive color, and productivity rose. They made the lighting softer, and productivity rose. Each change caused productivity to rise. One of the men got a bit suspicious and sneaked a change back to the original state, and productivity rose! Why? It appears that when you show you care, the person on the other end responds more favorably than if you appear not to care. The workers all thought the changes were being made for their benefit and they responded accordingly. In the field of education, if you tell the students you are using a new method of teaching, then they respond by better performance, and so, incidentally, does the professor. A new method may or may not be better, indeed it may be worse, but the Hawthorne effect, which is not small in the educational area, is likely to indicate that here is a new, important, improved teaching method. It hardly matters what the new method is; its trial will produce improvements if the students perceive it as being done for their benefit.

  21. The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics

    We now see that all this “truth” which is supposed to reside in mathematics is a mirage. It is all arbitrary, human conventions.

    But we then face the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Having claimed there was neither “truth” nor “meaning” in the mathematical symbols, I am now stuck with explaining the simple fact that mathematics is used and is an increasingly central part of our society, especially in science and engineering. We have passed from absolute certain truth in mathematics to the state where we see there is no meaning at all in the symbols—but we still use them! We put the meaning into the symbols as we convert the assumptions of the problem into mathematical symbols, and again when we interpret the results. Hence we can use the same formula in many different situations—mathematics is sort of a universal mental tool for clear thinking.

  22. What can be put into words

    It is not evident, though many people, from the early Greeks on, implicitly act as if it were true, that all things, whatsoever they may be, can be put into words—you could talk about anything: the gods, truth, beauty, and justice. But if you consider what happens in a music concert, then it is obvious that what is transmitted to the audience cannot be put into words—if it could, then the composer and musicians would probably have used words. All the music critics to the contrary, what music communicates cannot (apparently) be put into words. Similarly, but to a lesser extent, for painting. Poetry is a curious field where words are used but the true content of the poem is not in the words!

    1. ​Everything that can be said​
    2. ​Whereof one cannot speak​
  23. Initial psychological distance

    Creativity seems, among other things, to be “usefully” putting together things which were not perceived to be related before, and it may be the initial psychological distance between the things which counts most.

  24. Tossing an idea around

    Can we do anything to increase creativity? There are training courses, and books, as well as “brainstorming sessions” which are supposed to do this. Taking the brainstorming sessions first, while they were very fashionable at one time, they have generally been found to be not much good when formally done, when a brainstorming session is carefully scheduled. But we all have had the experience of “tossing an idea around” with a friend, or a few friends (but not a large group, generally), from which insight, creativity, or whatever you care to call it, arises and we make progress.

    1. ​Scenius​
    2. ​The Small Group​
  25. Prepare your mind for the future

    Probably the most important tool in creativity is the use of an analogy. Something seems like something else which we knew in the past. Wide acquaintance with various fields of knowledge is thus a help—provided you have the knowledge filed away so it is available when needed, rather than to be found only when led directly to it. This flexible access to pieces of knowledge seems to come from looking at knowledge while you are acquiring it from many different angles, turning over any new idea to see its many sides before filing it away. This implies effort on your part not to take the easy, immediately useful “memorizing the material” path, but to prepare your mind for the future.

  26. Stuck with a problem

    If you cannot drop a wrong problem, then the first time you meet one you will be stuck with it for the rest of your career.

  27. Experts and impossibility

    If an expert says something can be done he is probably correct, but if he says it is impossible then consider getting another opinion.

  28. Always time to fix it later

    As the saying goes:

    There is never time to do the job right, but there is always time to fix it later,

    especially in computer software!

  29. The average adult

    Averages are meaningful for homogeneous groups (homogeneous with respect to the actions that may later be taken), but for diverse groups averages are often meaningless. As earlier remarked, the average adult has one breast and one testicle.

  30. Solution to evaluation and back again

    A second reason the systems engineer’s design is never completed is the solution offered to the original problem usually produces both deeper insight and dissatisfactions in the engineers themselves.

    Furthermore, while the design phase continually goes from proposed solution to evaluation and back again and again, there comes a time when this process of redefinement must stop and the real problem be coped with—thus giving what they realize is, in the long run, a suboptimal solution.

    1. ​Co-Evolution of Problem and Solution Spaces in Creative Design​
  31. The heart of systems engineering

    While the client has some knowledge of his symptoms, he may not understand the real causes of them, and it is foolish to try to cure the symptoms only. Thus while the systems engineers must listen to the client, they should also try to extract from the client a deeper understanding of the phenomena. Therefore, part of the job of a systems engineer is to define, in a deeper sense, what the problem is and to pass from the symptoms to the causes.

    Just as there is no definite system within which the solution is to be found, and the boundaries of the problem are elastic and tend to expand with each round of solution, so too there is often no final solution, yet each cycle of input and solution is worth the effort. A solution which does not prepare for the next round with some increased insight is hardly a solution at all.

    I suppose the heart of systems engineering is the acceptance that there is neither a definite fixed problem nor a final solution, rather evolution is the natural state of affairs. This is, of course, not what you learn in school, where you are given definite problems which have definite solutions.

    1. ​What the problem is​
    2. ​Complete and consistent requirements​