The Value of Engineering
I spend 80 percent of my time on engineering.152
Engineering is, for all intents and purposes, magic, and who wouldn’t want to be a magician?153
Q: What drew you to engineering?
I have a physics background and grew up in an engineering-centric household. I’m still more an engineer than anything else.154
My dad is an extremely talented electrical and mechanical engineer. We built model airplanes and circuit boards together when I was a kid. He tutored me, and I didn’t even know it at the time.155 I also did things like make model rockets. In South Africa, there were no premade rockets. I had to go to the chemist to get the ingredients for rocket fuel, mix it, and put it in a pipe.156
There were lots of “engineery” things around me. When I asked for an explanation, I got the true explanation of how things work.157 When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But I came to understand “dark” just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength—four hundred to seven hundred nanometers. I thought, well it’s silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore.158
I was very technology oriented as a kid growing up in South Africa.159 With our first computer came books to teach yourself programming. This was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. When I was about twelve, I started programming and selling my own games to buy new games. I was hooked. I’d spend money on better computers, Dungeons & Dragons modules, and things like that. I was nerdmaster3000.160
I wasn’t that much of a loner, but I was quite bookish. I was reading all the time. I would be reading, working on my computer, reading comics, that kind of thing.161
When I was young, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I got older. I thought the idea of inventing things would be cool, because I read a quote from Arthur C. Clarke: “A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” That’s really true.
If you go back three hundred years, you’d be burned at the stake for things we take for granted today. Being able to fly is crazy. Being able to see over long distances, communicate, and instantly access all the world’s information from almost anywhere on the earth. This would all be considered magic in times past. It actually goes beyond that. Many things we take for granted today weren’t imagined in times past, even in the realm of magic.
I thought if I could advance technology, that would be like being a magician. That would be really cool.162
At one point, I was thinking about doing physics as a career. But to really advance physics these days, you need new data. Physics is fundamentally governed by the progress of engineering.
There is always debate about, “Which is better, engineers or scientists? Aren’t scientists better? Wasn’t Einstein the smartest person?” Personally, I think engineering is better because without engineering, you do not have any new data. You hit a limit.
You can be smart within the context of the limits of the data you have, but unless you have a way to get more data, you can’t make progress. Galileo engineered the telescope, which allowed him to see Jupiter had moons. If you want to advance civilization, you must address the limiting factor. The limiting factor is the engineering. Therefore, you must address the engineering.163
I certainly admire the discoveries of the great scientists. They’re creating a deeper understanding of how the universe already works. That’s cool—but the universe, in a way, already knows that. They’re discovering what already exists.164
Science is discovering the essential truths about what exists in the universe.
Engineering is about creating things that have never existed before.165