Is mechanical engineering good outside itself?

The above post prompted me to write this article. What I write is an opinion piece, of course. Let me know if you agree.

I am a #mechanicalengineering professor, I teach #mechanics courses, and I think this is a good subject to study even if you want to do things later that are not in mechanical engineering at all. I think mechanics is good training for brains, even if those brains are used later for other subjects. But I may be biased.

The immediate distracting issue is that the syllabus of mechanical engineering is a bit old fashioned, and there are many good opportunities in other newer areas, and mechanical engineers are obviously going there. But the syllabus of some other subjects is a bit old fashioned, too ... like Sanskrit, Latin, History. The point is whether mechanical engineering gives you any advantage outside itself. Does it have, in some non-obvious way, useful #transferableskills?

So here is some anecdotal data.

In #IITKanpur we have a #design program. They admit students with engineering backgrounds as well as design backgrounds. A professor from there told me some years ago that the engineering students initially struggle to develop #designthinking. However, among the engineering students, the ones who adjust most quickly are the mechanical engineers. Hmm.

My brother is a senior guy in the Bank of America. He is a former mechanical engineer. He told me his group of 17 people has 4 former mechanical engineers. 5 out of 18? That's another "Hmm" ... no?

Musing on these matters leads me to #fluidmechanics. Consider two fluids: #water and #air. Now think of a #fish. Over millions of years of evolution, its body and muscles and bones and nerves have evolved to deal effectively with water and not with air. A fish can thrive in water more than it can in air. Its body is designed to be strong in water. Fish whose bodies were not evolving to learn how to deal better and better with water would have an #evolutionary disadvantage. We might say that the fish has evolved to be in water. No? Now think of a #bird. Same thing as the fish, but air instead of water.

Musing further, I asked a group of young students to name the best forms of #exercise for #everyone. They said, in this order, #walking, #running, and #swimming. Now think of our own million years of evolution. We spent a long time walking, some time running, and even less time swimming. You could say our bodies are designed primarily to walk, then to run, and only then to swim. Humans who did not evolve to become better walkers probably had a disadvantage in the human lifestyle of those times. No?

Think further. Suppose we want to become fitter and stronger still. Just walking isn't enough. We go to a #gym. There we lift weights with our arms, and do other strength building activities that are somewhat natural for our bodies. For example, most people do not do exercises where they lift weights using twisting motions of their necks. Except for the most highly competitive people, our activities in the gym just involve more strength training in activities that are not too different from what the body can do almost naturally. No?

OK. Enough musing. Let us get to the point.

At some time in our evolutionary history, our brain development accelerated. This was not an accident, and was probably not because some higher power wanted us to write better poetry. The poetry is a bonus, a fringe benefit, surely. The brain development must have given us some evolutionary advantage. How?

Well, language, first of all. Language is the vehicle of thought. With more complex language we were able to think more deeply about more complex things. But which things? Probably not poetry, as I said above.

I propose that the evolutionary advantage we got from our brain was that it helped us to think about, figure out, and exploit the world of that time.

And - ready? - the world of that time had only #mechanics and #geometry. Obviously, there was chemistry and electricity and magnetism and so on, but we (humans) did not know any of these things. We knew hot and cold, perhaps, but we did not understand enthalpy and entropy and so on. Boolean algebra had not yet been invented.

So, if our brains were to give us an evolutionary advantage, they would have to do so in a world where the exploitable ideas were in mechanics and geometry. For this reason, I propose that our brains are #designed for geometry and mechanics. All the other things we have learned, including thermodynamics and chemistry and magnetism and voltage and current and semiconductors and Boolean algebra and computer science, have only appeared very, very recently. On evolutionary time scales, they never existed.

If you agreed with me on the fish, you pretty much have to agree with me now, no?

Mechanics. Cutting, breaking, rubbing, bending, sharpening, balancing, throwing, aiming, motion, velocity, acceleration, rocks on rocks to build structures, load transfer from rock to rock, straight lines, bends, going above, going around, intercepting a moving target, water flowing downhill, the design of traps, maybe even bows and arrows, and so many aspects of life in those times that you can imagine.

And now back to the gym analogy. If indeed mechanics and geometry was what our brains evolved to do best, then it is those subjects that are somehow natural for many of us even now - when we want to build our strength and fitness for eventual brain use in other fields.

And so, my younger friends, it does not matter what you want to do in your #careers. It may not be a bad idea to come to #IITKanpur if you can, take my mechanics class, and pay careful attention to #freebodydiagrams. It may make you a better computer person, business analyst, hedge fund trader or banker some day.

Let me know what you think!