The Building Blocks of Mechanical Engineering

 

Growing up I was a massive Lego kid. Going to the mall the only interest to me was being able to shower through the Lego store and hopefully be able to convince my parents to buy me a new set for me to work on for the next couple of hours. Following the instructions and building the set as designed was fun, but what brought even more excitement was rearranging certain pieces to freestyle and customize the set as I pleased. The beauty of design and a gateway for me into the world of mechanical engineering.

With so much liberty in designing you often ask questions of what is allowed. Someone, for example, may ask “what is a robot?” From robotics I learned that an appropriate response would be “it depends who you ask.” There is no singular way to define a robot and rather there are properties that allow us to classify something as a robot or not. You would think these would be constraints and would force all robots to be basic, and bland with no personality to them whatsoever, and yet there are so many varieties and multiple new and exciting developments. Boston Dynamics are well known for their advanced robots that are able to make complex movements that replicate that of people, and yet there exists, DRAGON, a robot that resembles a serpentine. A new concept that has its own style compared to that of Boston Dynamics and solves problems seen with modern drones as it is able to fly through smaller places due to its dexterity and form into shapes to carry cargo [3]. A pessimist can label this as drones glued together, but this creativity and innovation that will keep the industry alive. These engineers are well aware of the properties of a robot, yet they all decided to take their own approaches with their own visions.

I find it hard to agree that the field or science as a whole is currently in a stale uninspiring position simply because there are no new insights into nature as revolutionary as the theory of evolution, the double helix, quantum mechanics, relativity and the big bang [1]. This is not to say that it is not possible to make such a discovery. “ In the end it turned out to be the Newtonian theory of gravity which had to be modified to make it compatible with the invariance properties of the Maxwell theory.” [1]. But do we really need such a theory to exist for the field to be exciting again? Is editing and adding onto existing theories not enough? Afterall gravity, one of the groundbreaking theories, had to undergo multiple revisions to fit in line with other related theories before it was deemed acceptable [1]. There has yet to be any massive new theories developed that can compete with the discovery of evolution for example, however there is still much to look forward to in terms of innovation and discovery in the field of Mechanical Engineering. While on co-op at a construction firm, I learned about a new department the company had implemented two years ago. This was the innovations team whose sole purpose was to search for the next big line of work to begin putting money towards. A couple of years ago this was solar energy, as a result the company began to give laborers and foremen the proper training in order to be able to work on these jobs and help us grow as a company.

To feel less pessimistic about the future of  science simply because there isn’t a new earth shattering theory being developed is absurd. New theories may not be developed in the field and yet new groundbreaking technology is still being developed. The theories are merely the base plate, on which we can place different Lego bricks as we please to push the limits of what is feasible. The possibilities are endless. You can go by the book and design something standard and known, or you can take a brick and place it elsewhere to make it your own. Creativity is key and what will keep the field alive and well for generations to come.



Works Cited
[1] file:///C:/Users/chris/Downloads/Hawking%20END.pdf
[2] https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/yrb9e7uefpeqrlkiasoc6octxtnm5g
[3] https://qz.com/1313946/scientists-built-a-flying-robot-dragon

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