(no subject)

[theweaselking]

"The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, you may have invented warp drive, but the chances are a lot better that you've screwed up."
- #19, Dave Akins' Laws Of Spacecraft Design.

Comments

[anivair.livejournal.com]

My favorite is this:
31. (Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development) You can't get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.

[glitteringlynx.livejournal.com]

Though the initial intent was with regards to engineering space craft, I have to admit that most of those laws can be just as applicable (at least in principle) to any design project of any type. For example: a novel.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

The aerospace industry runs on this.

10. When in doubt, estimate. In an emergency, guess. But be sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along.

NASA requires justification for numbers. "Engineering intuition" is an acceptable justification in the first few iterations. The people who've been there a while just put "WAG." (Wild-Ass Guess)

32. (Atkin's Law of Demonstrations) When the hardware is working perfectly, the really important visitors don't show up.

I'm fairly certain this is a law of nature. It's gotta be in the Principia somewhere.

Furthermore, there are some people who are hardware catalysts. Things just work around them. There are others who are hardware antagonists, and even if the rig was working perfectly five minutes ago, it stops when they come in the lab. Personal catalytic and antagonistic effects interact in strange and unpredictable ways.

And god help you if your advisor is an antagonist.

All engineers believe this and few will admit it.

38. Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say.

QFT

[sivi-volk.livejournal.com]

The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field.

Just that bit applies to so much of crack science... The rest of them are generally applicable to science too.