Harnid Arastoopour
I am an engineer. Engineers are consumers of science. If the science is not good, we start from the wrong foot and everything is going to be disastrous. Let me make clear what I mean, drawing on my own field, chemical engineering.

What is chemical engineering? Chemical engineering is the design, development, and management of the process and facilities that convert raw material into useful products-working hard to get the optimum procedure to make better materials or better products. I will give an example.

What do we do with our waste? The chemist can look at it and say: uh huh, there is carbon, there is hydrogen, and these two can combine together, we can get some hydrocarbons out of it. Great! It's fuel, petroleum, gas. With scrap tires, we can get gas, oil, and carbon-three useful products-that's great!

An engineer will take the idea and try to develop a process that's feasible. We have to worry about heat transfer and fluid dynamics. We have to worry about process control, about the reaction, about the design's economics. The idea may be important scientifically. We really can convert a to b and get a useful product. But if we have to spend more money than we're getting out of it-if, for example, we'll get oil out of this product but at a cost three times more than imported oil-the process is not feasible.

Good engineering is also different from good science because we engineers have to be much more careful in what we do. Chemical engineers are involved with all aspects of the energy, environment, food processing, pharmaceutical and chemical industry. These industries are critical to modern life. Their impact on us is immediate. If we're wrong, we create a lot of problems immediately. So, it is important to be careful and know what is good science and what is good engineering.

How can we provide our students a good engineering background? First, we need knowledgeable faculty and students. It's also important that both of them are committed. Next, we need sufficient financial support. Unfortunately, the percentage of GNP devoted to education and research in the United States is lower than in most European countries. We need laboratories, equipment, and staff. We also need the opportunity for people who are doing the work to update.

Janine Larsen
I am going to limit my talk to how I try to convey what is good engineering to students, mostly undergraduates. Those are the students that I'm trying to reach because they are going to go out and do the hard brunt-work of engineering while the rest of us do our brunt-work research here.

The main thing I try to do during any lecture is ask the question, "Does this make sense?" I never expect students to come up with one line of an equation without looking at it and looking at the results and asking, "Is this a reasonable answer?" If you don't ask that, you miss some of the most obvious problems, such as being off by a factor of ten.

The most important place for looking at results and asking these questions is in a laboratory. For much of your undergraduate education, you know the right answer before you start the experiment. It's easy and tempting when you get the wrong answer because you had the heat on the chemicals too long, to fill in the right answer anyway. Of course, that should never be allowed.

An upper level undergraduate lab in engineering often is the first time you're ever faced with no one right answer. All of a sudden, you have to design and test your design. That's where, for the first time, you're going to say, "How am I going to report this and what happens if I don't get the answer I expected?"

Probably the most important thing to do there is to try to teach students that it's O.K. to report that you didn't get what you expected. That's the only thing you can report. In fact, those are the most interesting lab reports because then I get to listen to how you think through the problem. Where could this have gone wrong? Why wasn't it what I expected? Perhaps, that's where the most exciting results are going to come from.

Our graduates will not only design and test, they will also be asked to project from the results. What does this mean either to a project or to just a specific incident? The ability to take an observation and project into the future its impact on the design, is important.

One example of how important this can be comes from an engineer at Morton Thiokol, an engineer who had tested an O-ring and found that it wasn't going to hold up. Although he did his job and reported what he learned, other people further up tried to suppress that information. The result was a disaster. I try to make my students realize that's the type of responsibility they carry whenever they do engineering.

Hassan Nagib
There is no conflict between good science and good engineering. All good science is good for engineering. It is impossible to find in the history of science an example of good science that has not been good for engineering.

What is surprising is that good engineering can cultivate good science. Today, we're doing better science because of the engineering that goes into microprocessors and many other things.

Good science reveals the secrets of nature. Engineering, on the other hand, is a way of using those secrets to solve problems other than those that nature has already dealt with in its own way. The biggest difficulties for engineering are political and economic. That's why it's important for engineers to study history.

Today, countries like Japan, Korea, and Germany are doing some fabulous engineering-not just good engineering-while in this country, we are just pointing fingers at each other. The political and economical situation is part of the difficulty. Much funding comes from mission-oriented agencies. Some agencies are not supposed to be mission oriented, for example, the National Science Foundation or the health organizations. But today, the issue is how non-mission-oriented can they continue to be under the pressure of an economy that's looking for certain breakthroughs.

Science and engineering develop through empiricism. That's why almost everybody that spoke before me alluded to the falsification of data, fudging and so forth. Often the breakthroughs come from empiricism, from experiment.

Once you have a breakthrough, you need to build on it. This building is the most fruitful part of the process, but it's the most tedious and difficult. That's when the theory and the models are important. What makes good engineering is, as Professor Arastoopour said, solving problems. He talked about chemical engineering. I'll talk about aeronautics.

Good engineering begins with a well-defined problem. I tell my students that's half the job. On the other hand, as a result of recent advances, we have tools in engineering not readily available to science. In engineering, we have things like looking at problems from a system's point of view using computational models to simulate. Simulation is a lot more powerful in engineering. I think that the next century is going to show a remarkable increase in our efficiency.

I'd like to give you some examples of how good engineering can be and how bad engineering can be. If you look at a B-2 Bomber, you will notice a very interesting similarity between it's tail and that of birds.

The flight of animals has been studied for many years. The most interesting results came from a British scientist living in India. He had been sent to India on a long mission he found boring. So, for about fifteen years, he took every opportunity to go up to the mountains, watch the flight of birds, and write down his observations. The book that resulted is the most valuable one for anybody in aerodynamics.

Contrast that with some bad engineering that went on. During World War II, NACA, the predecessor of NASA, wanted to look at the efficiency of bird flight. They bought birds of all kinds, killed them, froze them, put them in a wind tunnel-for example, suspended frozen geese-and measured the forces. They learned very little.

What scares me when a sophomore or junior does not do well on an exam or a set of homework problems is not that he or she is going to get a bad grade. What scares me is that that student may one day be designing the blender that my daughter will use. The first time I used the Cuisinart, I tried to get its blade to spin with the cover off. I couldn't. The designer made it so well that I had to be very creative to make the blade spin with the cover off. That's an example I give my students. I say, "I hope that you're inability to solve this problem does not mean that one day you will fail in the design of a simple blender because that will cost somebody a finger, a hand, or a life:' Ethics looms large for anybody who is trying to turn good science into good engineering.