A bit of an aside but...
In all these discussions of "experts", (and also because I am myself an engineer), I am constantly reminded of a couple of amateurs from Dayton, Ohio.
Orville and Wilbur Wright had no formal education beyond high-school, yet they are the best examples of truly great engineers that I have ever encountered or read about. But the interesting and relevant thing about their story is the role of the "experts" of the time. One of those experts was Samual Langley who was probably the most highly regarded "expert" of the era regarding the problem of manned flight.
During the three years that the Wright brothers worked out the problem of flight, they spent a total of $3,000. Langley, financed by the Army, spent $50,000 during that same period. The Wright brothers efforts resulted in the first manned flights on the beach near Kitty Hawk. Langley's effort ended in the embarrassing film of his aerodrome lumbering off its perch and dropping like a rock into the Potomac River. Because no one wanted to listen to the Wright brothers before their success (they weren't "experts" like Langley was), they were unable to get any auto-company to risk supplying them with an engine for their experiments. So they had to build their own internal combustion engine from scratch. At a time when internal combustion engines were about as high-tech as a cell phone is today, they calculated the horsepower they needed for their Flyer, designed a single stroke engine, and then got their bicycle shop employee to machine it. It lacked any cooling system (except air flow) and so it would overheat and cease up after running for a couple of minutes. Which is why their first flights were so short. It is thought that if they had had a means of cooling their engine, their first flight would not have ended after 120 ft; they instead would likely have flown the 1/2 mile to the nearby village of Kitty Hawk, if not back again.
Another leading expert of the time was Otto Lilienthal who had compiled tables of lift-and-drag for various wing shapes. Most everyone experimenting with manned flight (and there were many beside the Wright brothers) used Lilienthal's tables as the de-facto best data available. But the Wright brothers got some puzzling results during their experiments when using Lilienthal's data. Instead of figuring that the expert must be right and that they were doing something wrong, they ultimately decided that the Lilienthal was just plain wrong. That led them to spend a whole season designing and building their own wind-tunnel and force measuring devices. They compiled their own data tables from scratch,and then used them to design their propellor blades. The Wrights' lift-and-drag tables were used by aeronautical engineers for many years after (right up to and after WWI if my memory is correct.)
There are several morals to this story:
1) Education does not make an expert -- Experience does.
2) One must know when to "listen to the experts" and when to say "the experts are wrong".
3) Amateurs become experts in retrospect -- after their ideas prove to be correct.
In all these discussions of "experts", (and also because I am myself an engineer), I am constantly reminded of a couple of amateurs from Dayton, Ohio.
Orville and Wilbur Wright had no formal education beyond high-school, yet they are the best examples of truly great engineers that I have ever encountered or read about. But the interesting and relevant thing about their story is the role of the "experts" of the time. One of those experts was Samual Langley who was probably the most highly regarded "expert" of the era regarding the problem of manned flight.
During the three years that the Wright brothers worked out the problem of flight, they spent a total of $3,000. Langley, financed by the Army, spent $50,000 during that same period. The Wright brothers efforts resulted in the first manned flights on the beach near Kitty Hawk. Langley's effort ended in the embarrassing film of his aerodrome lumbering off its perch and dropping like a rock into the Potomac River. Because no one wanted to listen to the Wright brothers before their success (they weren't "experts" like Langley was), they were unable to get any auto-company to risk supplying them with an engine for their experiments. So they had to build their own internal combustion engine from scratch. At a time when internal combustion engines were about as high-tech as a cell phone is today, they calculated the horsepower they needed for their Flyer, designed a single stroke engine, and then got their bicycle shop employee to machine it. It lacked any cooling system (except air flow) and so it would overheat and cease up after running for a couple of minutes. Which is why their first flights were so short. It is thought that if they had had a means of cooling their engine, their first flight would not have ended after 120 ft; they instead would likely have flown the 1/2 mile to the nearby village of Kitty Hawk, if not back again.
Another leading expert of the time was Otto Lilienthal who had compiled tables of lift-and-drag for various wing shapes. Most everyone experimenting with manned flight (and there were many beside the Wright brothers) used Lilienthal's tables as the de-facto best data available. But the Wright brothers got some puzzling results during their experiments when using Lilienthal's data. Instead of figuring that the expert must be right and that they were doing something wrong, they ultimately decided that the Lilienthal was just plain wrong. That led them to spend a whole season designing and building their own wind-tunnel and force measuring devices. They compiled their own data tables from scratch,and then used them to design their propellor blades. The Wrights' lift-and-drag tables were used by aeronautical engineers for many years after (right up to and after WWI if my memory is correct.)
There are several morals to this story:
1) Education does not make an expert -- Experience does.
2) One must know when to "listen to the experts" and when to say "the experts are wrong".
3) Amateurs become experts in retrospect -- after their ideas prove to be correct.
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