NU Splash Biography

Exploding space shuttles, collapsing bridges, exploding naval guns… sometimes designs fail, and sometimes they fail catastrophically. These failures can be dramatic, deadly, or sometimes just plain silly, but they have one thing in common: they are all preventable. In this class we’ll cover the technical missteps behind some famous engineering disasters (and some you may never have heard of). We’ll talk about how smart people can make bad designs, the importance of communication, and especially the value of common sense.

You probably have a good idea how far your house is from your school, how many songs fit on your iPod, and how much your cat weighs. But how to we get an intuitive feeling for really big or really small things? How many Willis Towers would you have to stack to reach the bottom of the Pacific Ocean? How many germs can fit onto one key on your keyboard? How much does a blue whale's tongue weigh in baby elephants? How many buckets of paint does it take to cover the Golden Gate Bridge? In this interactive class, we'll learn how to think about really big and really small distances, weights, and volumes in terms of things we already know. By the end of the class, you'll develop an intuitive understanding of what abstract numbers and units mean.

Exploding space shuttles, exploding Ford Pintos, exploding naval guns... Designs fail, and they sometimes fail catastrophically. Explosions (and collapses, crashes, and others form of destruction) result occasionally when complex engineering is implemented. This course covers the technical missteps behind some famous engineering disasters as well as the complex interactions between engineers and management that allow preventable disasters to happen.