Engineering: An Endless Frontier (review)

"I am a physicist who has turned from doing physics to thinking about science and technology," writes Sunny Y. Auyang on the first page of this unabashedly spirited book. It is a work that presents the reader with a challenge as well as a biographical framework. Engineering, in this age of the computer and bioengineering, has become increasingly scientific; and the effect of this on the history of technology is, one must admit, disorienting. For who, other than scientists, can tell the tale of the ever-more-wondrous developments? And who, other than scientifically schooled readers, can comprehend these enigmatic fables? It is all very well for Auyang to reassure us with soft words: "To make this book enjoyable to a wide range of readers, I have used the concise style standard in scientific references and have avoided topics of only scholarly interest" (p. viii). And indeed, the first half of the book is devoted to historical reviews of four traditional branches of engineering—civil, mechanical, chemical, and electrical/computer—and consists of material that is generally accessible. But the second half, "which delves into the technical and professional content of engineering" (p. 7), presents challenges of comprehension more daunting than "a wide range of readers" may want to tackle.

There are snippets that are quite wonderful. I particularly liked the author's discussion of the difference between visualization—a facility that is highly valued by both engineers and scientists—and mathematical understanding: "Many physical properties and processes, from quantum mechanics to electronic signals, are not conducive to visualization. For complex and nonspatial forms, mathematics, with its capacity to articulate relational structures, is perhaps the best medium for conception" (pp. 203– 4). To this old-school civil engineer, that is nicely phrased and engagingly insightful. But when the topic is Einstein's thoughts on the epistemology of science, or iterative analysis-synthesis-evaluation cycles as pondered by Socrates, Leonardo, Galileo, Newton, and Descartes, I begin to lose my bearings. And when Auyang turns to systems theories, and states—without technical or historical explication—that the Kalman filter is an improvement over the Wiener filter "partly because it relaxes the latter's assumption of stationarity" (p. 215), I am at sea both technically and historically.

Of course, Auyang is entitled to address an audience at any level she selects, and she is clearly capable of speaking more directly to historians if and when she chooses. Unhappily, in the early chapters—referred to in the publisher's blurb on the dust jacket as "whirlwind histories"—although the material, as I have said, is mostly accessible, it is the author who appears to be confounded. She has read widely, and shows empathetic understanding of what engineers do. But when addressing the profession's history and traditions, like a tourist in a foreign land she has come away with a number of mistaken impressions.

For example, professional societies: Auyang states that "efforts to form a national fraternity of engineers started in 1886, culminating in the foundation of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 1964" (pp. 118–19). This misconstrues what has happened. The National Academy of Engineering is an honorary elective society, with a membership of approximately two thousand, established (indeed in 1964) under the same charter granted by Congress in 1863 to the National Academy of Sciences. The academies are mandated to provide advice to the federal government on scientific and technical matters, and, along with the Institute of Medicine, they fulfill this mandate through activities of the National Research Council. On a completely different track, efforts to form a "national fraternity of engineers" are generally dated to the formation of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1852 (followed by the Mechanicals in 1880, the Electricals in 1884, and so on) and then to the Engineering Council in which the main specialty societies sought to coordinate their activities at the beginning of World War I.

After decades in which several such affiliations between the separate disciplines ended in...