“This is a television series that shows many engineering marvels. And I thought that the title was really good: ‘Impossible Engineering.’ So for me engineering is really making the impossible possible. And what I added, which is ‘using systematic and rigorous understanding.’”
“This one in particular was the launch of Apollo 8. And Apollo 8 was the first time that man went out of the gravitational field of the Earth and went around the moon. You know the ‘Earthrise’ photograph, yeah? It was this mission.” Explore more >>
“I quite like it because this is from the 1870s, I think, and you can see that this guy is, it feels like quite a modern photo. The way it’s set up, it’s kind of stylised, and this way of demonstrating power, demonstrating mastery. If we look at the guy, you can’t see it very well, but he looks in command.” Explore more >>
“There’s lots in this picture really because it doesn’t just set humans and engineered infrastructure in context. It shows what engineering’s done for us, you know. Energy provision, connectivity, roads, simply supporting life of human life on Earth.” Explore more >>
"Engineering is through tinkering, through being playful with the world that’s around us. So, understanding fundamentally how things work to the point where I can start to wonder around ‘how can I hack them.’ That’s the first step: ‘how can I change them?' and ‘how can I make through a systematic process changes to these things I’m playing with to make them do what I want?’”
"This never delivered, at least not this particular project, fundamental understanding of thrust. But it worked. Maybe that’s the point. Does it do what it’s supposed to do? And who cares about fundamental understanding?” Explore more >>
“All of these tanks contain essentially homogenous mixtures that have been brought together from a bunch of varying sources. Modesto brings in grapes from all over California and outside of California to create something that consumers will recognise consistently as being the same wine.” Explore more >>
“The whole idea of learning by building immediately struck an intellectual chord in me. I thought that was a really interesting thing. And so I was interesting in this. The more I got into synthetic biology, the more I had to engage with more traditional engineering.” Explore more >>
“A good engineering system is a system that you use every day and you don’t even realise that it’s been engineered. It is just doing what it has been built for in such an elegant and beautiful way that you don’t even realise that there is a lot of understanding, rigorous aspects put into the process to make it work.”
“It poses a sense of, ‘alright, we are taking all of these natural things but we are going to make sure that we can control what we put out even if we can’t control what we put in.’” Explore more >>
“This is actually the prototype of the transistor they used in order to file the patent of the transistor. And it’s ugly. It’s absolutely non-standard. You can’t use it, or at least you can’t anymore.” Explore more >>
“Engineering associates a lot, for me, with design. And if you look up the dictionary for ‘design,’ it says, ‘purpose, planning, or intention that exists, or is thought to exist,’ which is an important thing, ‘behind an action, fact or material object.’ And I’m quite interested in designs that are not obvious from the look of it.” Explore more >>