thermodynamics was a result of the steam engine.
I have worked on several projects where reverse engineering would have been unlikely.
There are many subtleties of some devices that are almost impossible to ascertain.
The trace elements in the materials, the history of annealing, the importance of certain
tolerances -- in short, the art of making something work that a cursory examination could
not ascertain. You could make an exact duplicate of something according to the state of the
art, and it simply wouldn't work. There are numerous examples of devices that just don't work
as well as the brand name products.
A couple of examples I remember are:
Rolls Royce bought the design of an automatic transmission from an american company.
They took the drawings, improved the tolerances and polished the metal, but, alas, it just
didn't work.
The Americans were trying to develop jet engines, but without much success. Mr. Whittle
in England had success by loosening tolerances on bearings and just being clever.
In analog electronic design, there are just so many subleties that one must really be an artist
to create a precision component, many non-obvious considerations one might easily overlook,
such as thermal emf from slightly different metal alloys, light sensitivity of semiconductors,
non-linear behavior of dielectrics, piezo electric effects of stress in materials.
An engineer might say, for example, this is an aluminum part, I'll duplicate it.
What he isn't aware of is that it is 6061-T6 aluminum with the grain running along the
frammistat axis at 10 degrees off axis, then heated to 190 oC for 3 minutes after riveting.
In other words, if I were asked to reverse engineer certain devices, I would probably miss
many critical aspects of them.
Having on occasion worked with these artists, I was awed with the subleties of their
designs and realized that there was no way I would have been able to reverse engineer their
designs without their knowledge.
Jed Rothwell wrote:
The machine would be an expression or embodiment of the theory. The machine describes the theory to an engineer or physicist more clearly than any paper could. As far as I know, all machines in history have been easy to reverse engineer
