A Good Engineer Always Does the Math Before the Test!
Most of one's training as an engineer, is theoretical. How do you predict how many times a coil spring can be compressed before it breaks? At the university, theory is important, and it's also all one can afford since testing is expensive. When you enter the working world, you have access to design guidelines and test equipment. This can make an engineer lazy. Worse yet, we invented Finite Element Analysis. This is a very valuable, but very misleading tool. Here is an example: This a simple I-beam like holds up most buildings. Red is high strain and blue is low. When you calculate that beam in college, you get one peak stress. Here, you have a picture of stress at every point on the beam! It's amazing! It's beautiful! It must be correct! Sadly, it is only as good as the input assumptions. So, do you give up and just go to testing? No, you use the potentially inaccurate FEA and hand calculatio...
