A look to the past

Spanish philosopher George Santayana is credited with the aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” while British statesman Winston Churchill wrote, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Professor Karl Von Terzaghi said “The major part of the college training of civil engineers consists in the absorption of the laws and rules which apply to relatively simple and well-defined materials(...). This type of education breeds the illusion that everything connected with engineering should and can be computed on the basis of a priori assumptions. As a consequence, engineers imagined that the future science of foundations would consist in carrying out the following program: Drill a hole in to the ground. Send the soil samples obtained from the hole though a laboratory with standardised apparatus served by conscientious human automatons. Collect the figures, introduce them into the equations, and compute the result. Since the thinking was already done by the man who derived the equations, the brains are merely require to secure the contract and to invest the money. (…). No such formulas can possibly be obtained except by ignoring a considerable number of vital factors”.

We will leave everyone to decide how they are doing.