Engineers don't know anything.

This article had me until the very last paragraph:

But for Evans, it’s clearly just the first step. Already, he’s set his sights on bigger targets. Next on his to-do list is to equip the hulls of ocean tankers, a major source of global pollution, with pods. Already he’s been told it can’t be done. The design of hulls, he was informed, can’t be improved. Naturally it was an engineer, he said, who told him.

Naturally. What do engineers know, anyway? The portrayal of engineers as a class of technocrats trying to marginalize the lone inventor is a trope I could do with a lot less of. If Evans had asked an engineer whether his "vortex stabilizers" worked, they might have responded "you mean like the ones that come on the 2006 Mitsubishi Lancer Evo and have been extensively reported/tested before? Or the ones that have been on airplances since World War II?"

The reason, Mr. Evans, that engineers go to college for several years is to learn what as already been done so we don't make fools of ourselves later on when we "invent" decades old technology.


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