Reverse Engineering

 

Impossible

And if they said I'd find you beyond the rainbow's end
I would have said "Impossible, impossible, my friend"

To dream about what might have been
Is strange enough for me
But now it seems I'm living in
A dream too beautiful to be

So what is impossible?

“Man will never fly”.   “Bumble bees in flight violate the laws of aerodynamics ”.  “A man will never walk on the moon”  So said science at the time, according to how science understood it.  But engineers are asked to go beyond science all of the time.  Roman engineers built roads that we still use today, even though they did not yet have the benefit of Newton’s Laws.  The Sea Battalion, SeaBees,  the engineering arm of the US Navy, has the motto. "CAN DO" and the phrase "With willing hearts and skillful hands, the difficult we do at once, the impossible takes a bit longer." . 

Engineers are fine with doing the “impossible”, even if it takes a bit longer.  That is why man flies, bumblebees fly, man walked on the moon”, etc., because it really was possible.  Engineers observe something and then reverse engineer how it must have been done.

One of my favorite reverse engineering stories involves the original Star Trek ( yes, the William Shatner version). To make the Starship Enterprise seem more futuristic, there were automatic sliding doors in the corridors.  Today, this is commonplace. When I go to the supermarket, the front door automatically slides open when I approach it. However at the time of Star Trek, in the 1960s, these did not exist and a special effect created the illusion by having an off-screen technician manually slide the door.  But engineers looked at this effect and reverse-engineered how you would create an automatic sliding door, not knowing that in this case it was only a special effect.  If it doesn’t violate real laws of nature, and not just mankind’s current understanding of those laws, which is after all what science is, then reverse engineering may be useful.  Maybe the reason that scientists have to be careful about saying that something is impossible is because they were tired of engineers proving them wrong.