Technology & Engineering
Applying science under constraint — cost, time, materials and the certainty that something will fail.
20 fields · 234 topics · 289 curated works
Forces, motion, heat and the machines that manage them.
Foundations & Overviews · Statics · Dynamics · Strength of Materials · Thermodynamics (Applied)
Vehicles that operate in air and vacuum, where mass budgets are brutal.
Foundations & Overviews · Aerodynamics · Compressible Flow · Flight Mechanics · Aircraft Structures
Generation, transmission and use of electrical power and signals.
Foundations & Overviews · Circuit Analysis · Signals & Systems · Power Systems · Power Electronics
Small computers doing one job, usually with no operating system to help.
Foundations & Overviews · Analog Circuit Design · Digital Circuit Design · Semiconductor Devices · VLSI Design
The built environment — the discipline whose failures make the news.
Foundations & Overviews · Structural Analysis · Reinforced Concrete Design · Steel Design · Geotechnical Engineering
Chemistry scaled from the flask to the plant.
Foundations & Overviews · Material & Energy Balances · Transport Phenomena · Reaction Engineering · Separation Processes
Structure, property, processing, performance — and the relationships between them.
Foundations & Overviews · Crystal Structure & Defects · Phase Diagrams · Mechanical Behaviour of Materials · Metallurgy
Engineering discipline applied to code, as distinct from computer science.
Foundations & Overviews · Systems Design at Scale · API Design · Cloud Architecture · Infrastructure as Code
Machines that sense, decide and move — kinematics, motion planning and grasping, where control theory meets hardware.
Foundations & Overviews · Robot Kinematics · Robot Dynamics · Motion Planning · Localisation & Mapping
Making a system behave, despite disturbance and uncertainty.
Foundations & Overviews · Feedback Control · PID Control · State Space Methods · Frequency Response Methods
Engineering constrained by biology and by regulators.
Foundations & Overviews · Biomechanics · Medical Imaging Systems · Biomaterials · Tissue Engineering
Controlled release of nuclear energy, and everything that must not go wrong.
Foundations & Overviews · Reactor Physics · Reactor Design · Thermal Hydraulics · Nuclear Fuel Cycle
Engineering the interface between industry and ecosystems.
Foundations & Overviews · Water Treatment · Wastewater Engineering · Air Pollution Control · Solid Waste Management
Producing and moving energy at civilisational scale.
Foundations & Overviews · Thermal Power Plants · Wind Energy · Solar Energy Systems · Hydroelectric Power
Optimising whole systems of people, machines and material.
Foundations & Overviews · Operations Research (Applied) · Supply Chain Engineering · Production Planning · Quality Engineering
How things are actually made, at volume and at tolerance.
Foundations & Overviews · Machining & Metal Cutting · Casting & Forming · Welding & Joining · Additive Manufacturing
Ground vehicles, from powertrain to crash structure.
Foundations & Overviews · Internal Combustion Engines · Electric Powertrains · Vehicle Dynamics · Chassis & Suspension
Vessels and structures that operate in seawater.
Foundations & Overviews · Naval Architecture · Ship Hydrodynamics · Hull Structural Design · Marine Propulsion
Extracting resources from the subsurface.
Foundations & Overviews · Reservoir Engineering · Drilling Engineering · Production Engineering · Well Logging
The professional and human side — where most catastrophes originate.
Foundations & Overviews · Engineering Design Process · Engineering Ethics · Risk & Safety Analysis · Root Cause Analysis
No prior grounding assumed.
Appendix F: Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle
Richard Feynman · 1986
Management estimated failure probability a thousandfold better than engineers did; reality cannot be fooled by public relations.
+32 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
A Treatise on Hydraulics
Mansfield Merriman · 1889
Derives open-channel flow, pipe friction and weir formulas from experiment and puts them to work sizing the water-supply and drainage systems a civil…
+98 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
De Re Metallica
Georgius Agricola · 1556
Documents mining and metallurgy as practised across sixteenth-century Europe in exhaustive technical detail — ventilation, timbering, ore dressing,…
+156 more at this level
12 of 289 works
Richard Feynman
Management estimated failure probability a thousandfold better than engineers did; reality cannot be fooled by public relations.
Assumes no engineering background — Feynman explains each part before he uses it
≈10 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026David J. C. MacKay
Puts every energy source and use on the same per-person units so the arithmetic, rather than the rhetoric, decides what is possible.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William Mitchell Gillespie
Teaches surveying as a chain of geometric constructions from field measurement to plotted map, and was the standard American text on the subject for half a century.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Mansfield Merriman
Derives stress and strain in beams, columns and shafts from first principles and ties every formula back to a testing-machine result an undergraduate could reproduce.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gardner D. Hiscox
Explains the internal combustion engine as it was actually being built at the turn of the century — ignition timing, valve gear, carburetion — for the mechanic who had to maintain one, not just theorise about it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Orville Wright & Wilbur Wright
The Wrights' own account of the reasoning behind their aircraft's design — three-axis control through wing-warping linked to the rudder, and a deliberately unstable airframe that made that control effective — laying out a design logic every conventional aircraft since has inherited.
about 55 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Frank B. Gilbreth
Argues that any manual task can be decomposed into a fixed vocabulary of elementary motions whose sequence and redundancy can be analysed and reduced, founding motion study as a discipline distinct from Taylor's time study.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Richard M. Felder & Ronald W. Rousseau
Teaches that almost every chemical process problem reduces to careful bookkeeping of mass and energy across a defined boundary, and that most student errors come from an unclear boundary rather than bad arithmetic.
Henry Petroski
Argues that engineering progress is driven less by successes than by the close study of failures, because a design that works only reveals that it was adequate, while a design that fails reveals exactly where the margin ran out.
James K. Roberge (MIT OpenCourseWare)
Builds classical feedback control design from a real operational amplifier's behaviour rather than an abstract block diagram, arguing that intuition for stability, noise and nonlinearity is best built from a physical circuit before it is generalised.
link checked 17 Sept 2026K. Eric Drexler
Argues that molecular manufacturing — building objects atom by atom using molecular assemblers — is a natural extension of the self-assembly already seen in biology, and treats runaway self-replication as an engineering safety problem to be designed against rather than an inevitability; the assemblers it proposes remain contested as physically implausible at the scale described.
Roger Boisjoly
Boisjoly's own account of trying and failing to stop the Challenger launch argues that an engineer's technical judgment was overridden by a management process built to produce agreement rather than to weigh evidence.