Computers, Bridges, and Climate Prediction

November 24th, 2007
climate change, critical thinking

With modern computing technology and advances in engineering, you might think that designing and building a structurally sound and safe bridge would be a no brainer. After all, many of us as kids might have spanned a small stream with a fallen log, or placed an old board across a convenient space and made our own play bridges. So how difficult can bridge building be?

As it turns out, it’s still a lot more complicated than what a computer can handle. This article from Science News (Bad Vibrations) is very interesting and will make you hesitate when crossing any bridge.

Here’s an interesting point from the article:

Whether computers can supplant empirical models remains debatable. With improvements in computational fluid dynamics to describe wind flows, “maybe in 10 years, [computer simulations] may take over from wind tunnel tests,” Goodyear says. But others disagree. “We’re still a long way away from that,” Ferguson says. “There’s so much going on in a wind tunnel—to model it accurately [on a computer] is next to impossible.”

Here’s my question: if engineering is not - and cannot rely on computer design and simulation of bridges - how can the rest of the world rely on computer analysis of climate and climate prediction? So much so that as a society we are willing to sacrifice 80% of our energy because a computer model says we must!

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