Engineering in computing and science

In March 2003, the members of the American Physical Society met in Austin, Texas, to talk about their research. As Physics Today‘s news editor, I went there too.

Covering a big physics meeting is grueling. Unlike real scientists, science reporters have to pay attention to every field and subfield without bias or favor. Not surprisingly, halfway through the meeting, after two days of superconductivity, biological physics, statistical mechanics, and so on, I needed a break.

I walked from the Austin convention center to the historic Driskill Hotel at the corner of Brazos and 6th Streets. There, in the hotel’s café (“Austin’s original socializing parlor”), I ordered a reviving espresso and opened a diverting magazine.

Once caffeine molecules had blocked my adenosine receptors—or whatever it is caffeine does to make one feel pleasantly edgy—my attention left the polar bears in the article to settle on a large group of students at a nearby table. They dressed and sounded like physicists. Here, I thought, was a chance to interrogate Physics Today‘s next generation of readers. I approached their table and introduced myself.

But they weren’t physicists. The group had two components: undergraduate seniors from the University of Texas’s chemical engineering department and high school seniors from around the US. Chris, one of the undergraduates, explained the plan: “We want to recruit the best high school students to the best chemical engineering department in the country.”

Then, perhaps emboldened by his own confident words, he took a risk: He asked me, in front of the high schoolers, whether I thought chemical engineering was an interesting and rewarding choice of career.

Of course, the first chemical engineering thing I thought of was an enormous smelly-smoke-belching chemical plant. Next, my mind recalled that Paul Dirac abandoned his early career as an electrical engineer to become a theoretical physicist. Fortunately, in the milliseconds before I replied, the aeronautical engineer Theodore von Kármán came to my rescue. To the delight of Chris and his fellow recruiters, I quoted von Kármán: “The scientist describes what is: the engineer creates what never was.”

The aphorism popped back into my brain last month, when I received a press release from Stanford University about a prototype handheld camera that can take pictures of large depth of field even with a wide aperture, a task that’s impossible with conventional cameras.

To work, the Stanford camera incorporates an additional element: a square array of 90 000 or so tiny lenses, each of which, in the words of the excellent press release, “separates back out converged light rays received from the main lens before they hit the photosensor and changes the way the light information is digitally recorded.”

We’re used to compact engineering marvels—iPods and so on. But when I investigated further, I was struck by something else: The camera relies just as much on a sophisticated computer algorithm as it does on clever engineering or physics. Indeed, the computer algorithm inspired the engineering.

Computational scientists—and their friends, like me—tend to regard the products of engineering, principally the computer, as tools to use and command. Here, however, was the case of engineers creating what never was—except, that is, in the equations encoded in a computer algorithm.

This essay by Charles Day first appeared on page 88 of the March/April 2006 issue of Computing in Science & Engineering , a bimonthly magazine published jointly by the American Institute of Physics and IEEE Computer Society.