User:Gordon Vigurs

Nationality: British

Domicile:   United Kingdom

Qualifications: Educated to first degree level (BSc Aeronautics and Astronautics), self-educated over the past 25 years

Religion:   Mind your own business

Profession: Engineer

=Interests:=

Technological history during the development phase. i.e. Steam engines before 1800, railways before 1900, aeroplanes before 1920, battleships before 1905. Too much history is dedicated to the final design solutions adopted, and their application, when the period of greatest interest to the true engineer, is the stage when the solution was being sought through an entire set of bizarre experimental designs. Rather than laugh like an arrogant buffoon at our forebears' attempts to solve engineering problems within the technological constraints of their day, the wise will ask themselves - why did they do it that way? and in so doing will learn much.

If, as current wisdom appears to decree, engineering products derive solely from customers' specifications, why didn't the Wright Brothers build a B52?

My articles are probably not the best, because they do not follow the telephone directory paradigm of restricting themselves to the 'what' of an entity, they diverge into the world of 'how' and 'why', for such is the nature of engineering knowledge.

The pre-occupation with lists of semi-related facts is the reason many of the advanced science and engineering articles are uninformative. The avoidance of elucidation merely means the articles are devoid of depth. Unfortunately, many would be editors cannot tell the difference between elucidation and bias.

An encyclopedia is a compendium of knowledge, and knowledge does not consist simply of phrases which a parrot can be taught to recite. It is the relationship of facts to all other facts, usually expressed in words, mathematical formula, or possibly images and sounds, with varying degrees of ambiguity. These are mere labels, vehicles for the conveyance of knowledge, but do not constitute knowledge themselves. A book does not 'know' anything.

=Quotes=

The wise organise; science is built from facts as a house is built from stones, a collection of facts is no more science than is a pile of stones a house. - Henri Poincaré

When you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science. - Lord Kelvin

=Philosophical Bias=

The unwise consider themselves unbiased. That is mere self deception. I shall outline my biases, based like everybody else's, on irrational beliefs and experience.

My view on science lies somewhere between instrumentalism and fallibilism. The instrumentalist viewpoint perceives the universe as a Rohrschach test, with no structure in it other than that contrived by the human mind. Theories serve to facilitate predictions, but if an observation disproves a revered theory, it comes as no great shock, indeed it is to be expected. A period in history in which theories are not being regularly revised in the light of observation, such as our own, is a period of stagnation. This is also reflected in the modern dogmatic adherence to existing ideas, which was once alien to science.

The fallibist view, like instrumentalism, also considers falsification as the purpose of empirical experiment, as it is impossible to demonstrate that experiments that have not yet been done will support existing theories. Likewise even if we have discovered the absolute truth about something. we have no way of proving that it is.

Fallibilism tends to believe that the truth is being approached asymptotically by the process of refining theories by exposing falsehood, whereas the instrumentalist view is that as far as absolute truth is concerned, we will never know how far from it we are. However, science generates theories which are useful for building technological artefacts, which make life easier, or threaten to wipe it out, so if the criterion for truth is usefulness, there is a pragmatic case to be made. The difficulty with this approach arises when we try to define a pragmatic use for the universe.

However, the sum of human experience is merely an infinitesmal point in space and time of the universe, yet we imagine that this is sufficient to explain all that exists. All observations can apparently be explained and interpreted by applying existing theories, just as the ancient Greeks could interpret all their knowledge of chemistry in terms of four elements. Corroboration proves nothing.

It is evident that wisdom is to be sought elsewhere.

=Articles=


 * Gyro Monorail
 * Monorail history
 * Hunting oscillation
 * Directional stability
 * Stability derivatives

=Contributions to Existing Articles=
 * adhesion railway
 * Flight dynamics
 * Pitching moment
 * Rifled muzzle loader
 * Crosswind landing
 * Italian ironclad Caio Duilio
 * Range (aircraft)
 * HMS Inflexible (1881)

=Translations of Articles=


 * Scherl from the German article August Scherl