Naive questions

I try to set some time aside every week to think about naive questions. The kind that would get you laughed at in a conference or a board meeting. The kind that turns into an inspiring discussion in the right bar. They are probably wrong, but that’s not the point.

Questions

To be expanded…

How did safety engineering get invented for different disciplines, and how do their invention relate to engineering and theory?

Inspired by davidad's tweets: 1, 2, 3

It seems commonsense that a deeper (theoretical) understanding helps both engineering as well as safety engineering. Which one do you think does theory help more? And which development helped grow theory research more?

My intuition is that:

  1. First we started building something by trial-and-error, empirical results.
  2. We formulated some safety best practices. But they are all heuristics from the trial-and-error.
  3. Then we started gaining theoretical understanding of what we are doing.
  4. Only then do we become able to advance "safety engineering".
  5. At the same time, we also get much better at building that thing - much better at engineering.

How well does this mesh with real-life? In the bridges' case, safety engineering was invented separately, well after we understood how to build bridges - and well after we built a lot of bridges. The pioneers in safety engineering oft have formal math background. This seems to match the intuition above.

That said -

  • We did build a lot of bridges, and have a lot of them fail, before safety engineering came about. And how much did theories for safety engineering help with bridge capability?
  • Did the field advance by novel theory works? Or was it more about the application of existing theories?
  • Related to that question is: did safety engineering require an entirely different set of theories that have little to do with bridge capability? (This seems obviously true to me: for example, environmental wear-and-tear and the process of metal rusting does not affect capability, but we need to understand them for safety.)
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