Healthy insights inspired by engineering
My dream is that fewer people suffer from psychosomatic complaints. In my view, engineers do not have these complaints as often. I think I know why: technical insight can also help put things into perspective in other areas. I am thinking of the following:
When my weight presses on a floor, the floor pushes back with the same force. This is called action and reaction. The same applies to people: the more pressure you put on them, the more resistance you get.
If you pull a block across the ground with a rope, it gets easier once the block is moving: the initial resistance has been overcome. With activities, too, getting started takes more energy than keeping going.
As a structural engineer, I design buildings whose strength is considerably higher than the stresses caused by the loads. With other systems under load, too, you need to make sure the strength is much higher than the load. In sport, however, there is a strong, injury-prone tendency to push your body right to the limit of its strength.
Engineers readily accept the circumstances within which something has to happen, which they often call boundary conditions. An engineer knows that applying a force to a large mass achieves little, since F = m × a, where F is the force acting on an object, m its mass and a its acceleration. Boundary conditions can be compared with a large mass. It is therefore more effective to work within the existing boundary conditions.
When conveying information, you could compare mass with the amount of rhetoric used to make a claim. If you share information with the same force, the more rhetoric there is, the smaller the acceleration of the information. So with a lot of rhetoric, less information gets across in a fixed speaking time than with a relaxed presentation.
This dream is competing for a place in the book that publishes the fifty best dreams. To mark the Dutch royal succession, every household in the Netherlands can collect the book free of charge in the autumn.