2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Aeronautical engineering education should be explicitly based in a systems engineering thermodynamic worldview, incorporating a corresponding engineering epistemology and ontology. Too often, engineers have been encouraged to think of engineering practice as ‘merely’ applied science. Walter Vincenti, a student of Edwin Layton, in his seminal book, What Engineers Know and How They Know It, challenged the dominant scientific worldview. He noted: “Modern engineers are seen as taking over their knowledge from scientists and, by some occasionally dramatic but probably intellectually uninteresting process, using this knowledge to fashion material artifacts. From this point of view, studying the epistemology of science should automatically subsume the knowledge content of engineering.” He counters: “Engineers know from experience that this view is untrue. “Aeroplanes are not designed by science, but by art – in spite of some pretense and humbug to the contrary. The creative, constructive knowledge of the engineer is the knowledge needed to implement that art.” A provocative consequence is that engineers are able to understand airplanes in a way that scientists cannot, never will.
George Bugliarello further argued that engineers should be taught that they are, and engineering practice is, a natural extension of evolution. The entailment is that system evolution is, and always has been, a cumulative, recursively enabling engineering enterprise. Both the history and the current technological structures and functions of reality are open to an engineering understanding, in a way that is not open to science.
Duke’s Henry Petroski bolsters, “If you want to change the world, don’t ask a scientist, ask an engineer”. Since there are no engineers, indeed, in particular, no inquirers, in the scientific worldview, it can’t make sense of itself, and cannot account for how it was learned. It is not self-referentially coherent. Petroski argues that everything you thought of as science can only be properly understood in terms of a more general, self-inclusive, participant engineering epistemology. John Dewey distinguishes Spectator and Participant representations of inquiry.
Oxford’s Peter Atkins pointed out that there are two histories of thermodynamics. “Carnot traveled toward thermodynamics from the engine. Boltzmann traveled to thermodynamics from the atom.” Then Atkins surprises, “Thermodynamics still has both aspects.” Engineering thermodynamics is more general, subsuming and superseding the mechanical formulations. Engineering thermodynamics is conceptually more sophisticated, able to make sense of the engineers’ constrained freedom, as well as system evolution.
To establish systems engineering thermodynamics in aeronautical education, inclusion of its history will be important. Leonardo da Vinci (1490) explored and analyzed the flight of birds. In his ‘geometry done with motion’ he presented an engineering thermodynamic conception of ‘motion’, as well as recognizing a deep structural unity in running, swimming, and flying (cf. also Bejan). Lazare Carnot (1803) noted that the well-known principle of engineering practice that there is always a tradeoff between time/velocity and strength/power has the important entailment that engineers have options as to how they accomplish a task (cf. Florman). Engineers must necessarily make choices, in pursuit of optimum paths and structures. Carnot emphasizes that the ‘well-known principle’ cannot be understood within any ‘rational mechanics’.
More recently, Duke engineer Adrian Bejan analyzed the flight of birds and the evolution of airplane design from an systems engineering thermodynamic perspective. Both Leonardo and Bejan are able to recognize, and understand, the irreducible component of turbulence in all real, path dependent transformations. Bejan recognizes, in concert with Carnot, that what engineers bring to the seemingly full table of scientific knowledge is time, and with it the grasp of the irreversible arrow of time and its understanding as the path to better design, better system organization.

1. Bristol, Terry. “The Engineering Knowledge Research Program” in Fritzsche, Albrecht and Sascha Julian Oks (Eds). (2018) The Future of Engineering: Philosophical Foundations, Ethical Problems and Application Cases, Springer. Heidelberg, Berlin, New York ISBN 978-3319910284
2. Layton, Edwin T. (1971) The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession. Case Western
3. Vincenti, Walter (1990) What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History, Johns Hopkins U Press
4. Vincenti, W.G. (1979) “The Air-Propeller Tests of W. Durand and E. Lesley: A Case Study in Technological Methodology, Technology and Culture, vol. 20, (4).
5. National Academy of Engineering (1991) (Bugliarello ed.) Engineering as a Social Enterprise.
Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/1829.
6. Petroski, Henry (2011) The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems. Vintage Press
7. Dewey, John (1929) The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action. Minton, Balch & Co.
8. Atkins, Peter, (1984) The Second Law, Scientific American Books, W. H. Freeman, New York
9. Capra, Fritjof (2006) The Science of Leonardo; (2013) Learning from Leonardo
10. Carnot, Lazare (1803) The Fundamental Principles of Equilibrium and Motion, Principes fondamentaux de l'équilibre et du mouvement. Bachelier, Paris
11. Florman, Samuel (1994) The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, St Martins Press, NY
12. Bejan, A., and JH Marden (July-Aug 2006) “Constructing Animal Locomotion from New Thermodynamics Theory, American Scientist.
13. Bejan, A. (2014) “The Evolution of Airplanes”, J. Appl Physics, 116, 044901
14. Bejan, Adrian (2000) Shape and Structure from Engineering to Nature
15. Bristol, T. (forthcoming 2024) “What hath Bejan Wrought”, in Special Issue on Freedom, Design and Evolution, in International Communications in Heat and Mass Transfer (ICHMT)