One of my oldest worn out sayings, “Vince-isms” as my friend Brian King, the chairman of the Illinois/Wisconsin COSMOS User Group calls them, is that engineers, especially ones utilizing analysis techniques, “need to learn to differentiate what they know from what they think they know.” When you actually come to grips with how little you really know vs. what you always assumed you knew, it is a pretty humbling experience…and that’s OK.
Just recently, I was called in to sort of “referee” a discussion on buckling where one engineer who had been involved in analysis for several years thought a certain class of problems should be solvable but a colleague was adamant that this couldn’t be done. Since the first engineer’s attempts at doing it were failing (Singular Matrix Error), the confidence the second had in his statement seemed justified. However, the problem was really an easy one for COSMOSWorks, or any FEA with a buckling solver. The problem as modeled was missing one constraint in a direction that was needed for numerical stability. (The solver needs a path to ground in all degrees of freedom.)
I know a lot about this FEA stuff but more than anything, I know how much I don’t know. Consequently, I try not to make definitive statements, especially in the negative, if I’m not 100% sure. (I was a consultant for several years. In ‘consultant school’ we’re taught to be as ambiguous as possible… keep ‘em guessing!) In this case, I read the buckling controversy e-mail in the car and wasn’t going to make a definitive statement about this either way until I’d checked, (& I ‘knew’ we should have been able to do this.). This may be one of the hardest lessons an engineer can learn. No matter how much we think we know, we are only scratching the surface of what we should know. I’ve been surprised too many times to have to worry about getting too confident in thinking I know all the answers. (If I start to slip on this, my wife brings me back to my senses!) Learning to say “I don’t know.” with confidence and self-assurance will help all of us see the problem in front of us more clearly.
-- Vince
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