2002-05-23|Simplification: New Engineering, New Science, New Technology
To whom it may concern
I saw an unusual full-page advertisement of a book entitled "The New Engineering" in the IEEE Spectrum (2002-05, Page 56), and quickly ordered a copy out of curiosity.
In "The New Engineering" by Eugene F. Adiutori, Ventuno Press (ISBN 0-9626220-1-X), Adiutori boldly challenges the engineering establishment. The book is full of criticisms of conventional engineering, but it offers a genuinely workable alternative, i.e., the behavioural methodology.
A glance at the proposal to abandon the concept of electrical resistance may give an impression that the book comprises crackpot nonsense. Open-minded engineers, however, should find the book refreshing and revealing, and see the light in the reasoning of the behavioural methodology that the book cleverly demonstrates. The book exposes mathematical flaws in conventional engineering, pointing out the origins of its complexity and dimensional homogeneity going back in history to Maxwell (1873), Fourier (1822), Newton (1701), Galileo (1638) and even Aristotle in ancient Greek.
I read the book from cover to cover, uncovering a few minor errors. I found that the fundamental principles of the new engineering are sound, and the behavioural methodology presented is logical and rational. The book claims that resistance (R), inductance (L) and capacitance (C) should all be abandoned in favour of the behavioural methodology because the ratios of primary parameters in non-linear behaviour are variable. Even if the new engineering were universally adopted, I think these ratios would still be useful for identifying electrical components with linear behaviour (e.g., resistor colour coding).
Before resistance (R), inductance (L) and capacitance (C) are abandoned in favour of the behavioural methodology, the implication for impedance in AC analyses, and Fourier transform and Laplace transform methods, among others, should be evaluated. Should other ratios such as electrical conductivity, magnetic permeability and optical index of refraction be also abolished in favour of the behavioural methodology?
The book dramatically illustrates the essence of the problem with the conventional engineering by mathematical analogues of plotting (y/x) versus (x) in the case of modulus analysis, and plotting (y/x^2) versus (x) in the case of friction factor analysis. These forms complicate the solution of non-linear problems because they conceal the behaviour that they are intended to reveal. The proposed behavioural methodology uses common-sense mathematics to separate (x) and (y) in order to plot (y) versus (x), allowing engineers to simply read the graph.
Although I am not qualified to verify the example problems in mechanical engineering, the book should have universally adopted SI/metric system of measurements (e.g., J/(s*m^2*K)) in order to further simplify engineering education instead of English/Imperial system of measurements (e.g., Btu/(hr*ft^2*F)). In the "NH3 Power Canada" project that I am presently working on to develop a novel hydrogen generator, I am having hell of a time trying to understand documented ammonia gas pressures in "psi", "bar", "atm" and "g/cm^2", while using only "kPa" should have avoided any cumbersome and unnecessary unit conversions. The situation is nothing but a chaos when there are more than 3 000 conversion factors on 23 pages in "CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics".
Remarkable consistency is maintained throughout the book, making corresponding comparisons among electrical phenomena (resistance), heat transfer phenomena (coefficient), and stress/strain phenomena (modulus). In its attempt to make a point, the book is rather repetitive in presenting the advantages of the behavioural methodology in various examples. The effect of "Copy & Paste" is all too evident, causing a few errors to show up.
Instead of using an arbitrary I-V curve for the electrical behaviour in some example problems, the book should have used the tunnel diode which exhibits a real non-linear I-V curve with "negative variational resistance".
Partial adoption of the new engineering would be confusing even though it is a more logical approach, so I long for the day when the new engineering is ubiquitous. The only one advantage of the conventional engineering is that it is currently used globally. Like the SI/metric system of measurements whose merit is evident to any student, I expect that the adoption of the new engineering would be slowed by stubbornness, procrastination and arrogance of the conventional engineering. The starting point for the reform of engineering education may be to have something like Schaum's Outline Series, which already publishes the "SI/metric edition", offer the "new engineering edition".
Once upon a time, my physics professor at the university said that the sun could be mathematically shown to revolve around the earth, but the equations to describe the behaviour become much more complex than cartesian or polar co-ordinates. There is an analogy of simplicity with the proposed behavioural methodology as a new frame of reference.
Long ago, I had an argument with a semiconductor physicist over a set of equations for semiconductor modelling in which the parameters were inter-dependent with one another, similar to the situation of non-linear resistance in the book. I was advocating an approach in which the parameters are mutually exclusive, i.e., separate and explicit. It would be wonderful if the behavioural methodology can indeed simplify other disciplines of science so that all scientific problems could be solved with primary parameters separated.
Coincidentally, "A New Kind of Science" by Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Media (ISBN 1-57955-008-8), was published just a few weeks later. Quoting others since I have not read the book myself, Wolfram states that cellular automata operations (simple programs that run repetitively) underlie much of the real world, and describes how simple computational mechanisms can produce all of the complexity we see and experience. In other words, the algorithm can be mightier than the equation.
I have been promoting absolute simplicity and consistency myself. I feel hopeless for the future of human civilisation whenever I receive a simple meeting announcement or an invoice statement (20 lines of information) in a huge 2-MB PDF file attachment with fancy but useless graphics, or whenever I encounter a webpage which should have been a 2-kB HTML file but is mindlessly bloated (by a factor of 10) to a 20-kB HTML file produced by Micro$loth Word with a lot of duplicate data and redundant code.
Hence, I am starting a "New Information Technology" movement. The patented "Multi-Lingual Knowledge Matrix Method and System" technology (Canadian Patents 2 256 266, 2 260 373) provides a multi-lingual knowledge matrix having knowledge packets representing mutually-exclusive knowledge at high level of abstraction. (One aspect of the innovation is a method for encapsulating multi-lingual knowledge packets of an element and its components in a multi-lingual knowledge matrix having a plurality of dimensions. Another aspect of the innovation is a multi-lingual system having language-independent algorithms to compile knowledge packets by a correct-by-construction matrix operation.) The patent-pending "Chameleon Text Morphing" technology (Canadian Patents 2 345 933, 2 345 937, 2 346 174) provides a series of techniques to process documents in order to maintain simplicity and consistency by minimising duplication, overlap and redundancy. (The Document Assembler assembles static documents from a single template and a plurality of modular text components or functions hierarchically. The Document Generator dynamically generates customised document in real time from a single source text based on personal preferences in a personal profile. The Document Presenter adapts a single source text to multiple documents having different degrees of complexity, i.e., an executive summary document versus a detailed document, a private secret document versus a public document, etc.)
It is a myth that knowledge doubles every 18 months. In fact, it is the amount of publication that has proliferated thanks to desktop publishing and the Internet World-Wide Web, not the real core knowledge (except biotechnology, maybe). After a century of uncontrolled progress in engineering, science and technology, I am ready for a period of reflection and simplification so that I can digest and possibly enjoy the progress of humanity for a change! For example, adopting simple one-to-one (1:1) aspect ratio for every human interface would eliminate the need for landscape and portrait orientations as well as the black stripes on the digital television set. How about developing a single compact device instead of a myriad of brand-specific remote controls and function-specific handheld devices (with different kinds of batteries, of course)? What about a mechanism to alleviate the need to remember an astronomical number of usernames/passwords and PINs? The list goes on and on and on...
