Proposal for setting up a Department of Generalist Science and Engineering

This document is to propose a case to set up a new department, a Department of Generalist Science and Engineering. Our section in the university library would be filled with books in the Popular Science section, and our courses would be on cross fertilisation between the science and engineering subjects, and the concerns of design integration.

Curriculum

For over a century, the academic world has focused on the work of the specialists: experts who learn ever more about an ever narrower field. Since the capacity of each human mind is finite, the depth of the knowledge can only be increased if the width is restricted. However, the world still needs generalists, whose knowledge, though not so deep, is integrated over a far wider span of subjects. Such people have, at their disposal, a very powerful method of problem-solving, able to find solutions to problems by analogy, cross-pollination, and inductive learning (NS, 26-Sep-2020, p40). They are the integrators, bringing the work of the various specialists together.

Resources include books on popular science, and of the New Scientist weekly magazine. The Quora website, too, can be viewed as a world-wide tutorial system: sometimes it is me giving the tutorial on subjects that I feel confident to comment on; other times, it is me taking the part of the student, asking for a tutorial by someone more knowledgeable on the subject. Before that, there was usenet.

What we would want to teach the students in their first year, second year, third year; what they might do by way of student projects; what research students might do in the department.

Historical perspective

Examples in the past were able to be classed as "polymaths", usually people who had read a significant proportion of everything that had been written on most subjects. These include Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilee, Isaac Newton, and Benjamin Franklin (not an exhaustive list, yet) with the last person who was able to know just about everything about just about everything being Alexander von Humboldt (1769Ð1859).

The specialisation of engineering

Back in Leonardo da Vinci's day, there were only two types of engineering: military and civil (generally done by the same person, as evidenced by Da Vinci's CV, written in 1482, at the age of 30, to Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan).

Around the time the Stephensons (George and Robert) came along, mechanical engineering split off as a separate branch from civil engineering (the story has it that the locomotive-designing son, Robert, set up the Institution of Mechanical Engineers to cater for this new discipline, but barred his track-architecture father, George, entry, so he went off and set up the Institution of Civil Engineers).

Electrical engineering, chemical engineering, etc. followed later. So, civil engineering is, according to this view, everything that is left of non-military engineering, when you have subtracted off all the other specialities. A more sympathetic view, though, is to say that civil engineers design architectural structures (station buildings, bridges, embankments, cuttings, tunnels, etc.).

The specialisation of human skills and knowledge

The process is more general than that, of course. Homo sapiens is a social animal, with no individual in command of all knowledge, but instead distributed throughout the community. Human knowledge does not reside in any one head, but in the encyclopediae, libraries, and now the internet.

Even in Neolithic times, during the agricultural revolution, people were settling into village and farm life, with individual specialists in the farming, tool-making (wood, stone, and later bronze, and iron), animal butchering, food-cooking skills.

This remains even more true today, with it being more cost-effective for office workers, for example, to put in more hours to earn the extra money, to be able pay someone to do a given job, than to do the job themselves.

The need for integration

Naval architect; cathedral architect (head mason); railway engineer (to counter the specialisation described above); technical Integration and systems engineer on mega projects (ISS, ITER, etc.). A technical integrator is an engineer who constructs a large project (a nuclear fusion reactor, for example) by assembling coarse-grain components (superconducting magnets, cryogenics, cyclotron heating, microwave heating, cooling water, or vacuum systems). The engineer in the Central Integration Office (CIO) of the ITER Organisation does not need to be a specialist expert in any of those components, but does need an extremely wide-ranging knowledge across all of them, to be able to talk with the specialists in each of them.

The search for unification theories

The human brain excels at finding patterns in the sensory data (sometimes claiming to find patterns where there are none). This came with a huge survival advantage: being able to use inductive logic, and analogy, to solve problems based on past, unrelated situations.

Benjamin Franklin showed the unification of current electricity and static electricity. James Clerk Maxwell showed the unification of electrostatics and magnetism, as what is now known as the electromagnetic force. Electroweak unification (in which the weak nuclear force was unified with the electromagnetic force), grand unification (in which the strong nuclear force was unified with the electroweak force), and eventually the theory of everything (in which gravity is unified with the other fundamental forces).

The central theme of scaling laws

Galileo's explanations on scaling laws: the diameters of dog, human and elephant legs, for example. Model train sets that cease to look realistic when the scale is too small (window recesses are exaggerated). Only at human scales do electric motors become feasible for invention.

Central integration: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. But this means that abstraction (modelling) is then necessary to keep the problem tractable. Emergent behaviour tells us where abstraction can be made. Emergentist analysis is to reductionist analysis as bottom-up design is to top-down design. In each case, analysis or design, the two approaches are complementary, and there is a place for both, since there are things that one does that the other does not.

Technical writing

Technical writers routinely have to rewrite and restructure the documents on which they work (and not just act as typists or translators). Of course, they can only do this in subjects that they understand. This means that technical writers must understand as wide a spectrum of subjects as that in which they intend to write. This understanding does not need to be carried to the point of being able to put it into engineering practice, of course. It is only necessary to be aware of the new techniques and terminology, and to understand fully what they mean when they appear in a document.