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Henry Petroski
(2 Jun 1942 - )
American engineer and science historian who teaches in his field of civil and environmental engineering, and has written several popular books revealing the background, both success and failures, of the civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical, and structural engineers, whom he regards as unsung heroes in history.
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Science Quotes by Henry Petroski (3 quotes)
Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.
— Henry Petroski
From an interview. As quoted in Cornelia Deanmay, 'An Engineer Who Revels in Success of Failure', New York Times (3 May 2006).
It is imperative in the design process to have a full and complete understanding of how failure is being obviated in order to achieve success. Without fully appreciating how close to failing a new design is, its own designer may not fully understand how and why a design works. A new design may prove to be successful because it has a sufficiently large factor of safety (which, of course, has often rightly been called a “factor of ignorance”), but a design's true factor of safety can never be known if the ultimate failure mode is unknown. Thus the design that succeeds (ie, does not fail) can actually provide less reliable information about how or how not to extrapolate from that design than one that fails. It is this observation that has long motivated reflective designers to study failures even more assiduously than successes.
— Henry Petroski
In Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering (1994), 31.
books.google.comHenry Petroski - 1994
No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art
— Henry Petroski
To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1992), 62.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) --
Carl Sagan
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