Engineering at Large
The World As We Rebuilt It
For your Science Action production, take charge of one topic from our themes of Climate Science, Fusion Physics, or Engineering at Large…
Close-up of hardware architecture for efficient acquisition and processing of physically-complex electrical signals from neurological or cardiovascular systems (Verma Lab, Princeton). Photograph courtesy Frank Wojciechowski.
Look around. It’s an engineered world.
From temperature-regulated rooms with round-the-clock lighting to land or aerial transportation and a computation-communication complex that facilitates human migration around the globe, we live in a world created by our own clever imaginations and rigorous calculations—transformed into engineering marvels.
Engineers have reappropriated phenomena manifest in biology, chemistry, and physics to create antibiotics, wrinkle-resistant garments, ink pens, portable computers, bridges, and fiber optic networks, among many other constructs and devices. Such scientific advances form the fundamentals of a new way of living on the Earth, but look beneath the glossy shine of these modern achievements and you’ll find a collection of engineering principles and models that allows mankind to build things repeatedly and reliably.
In Engineering at Large, we examine these principles and models, and describe how they function.
