“There’s no such thing as a small change,” said Norman Augustine GS ’59 during a lecture in the Friend Center on Wednesday night.
Augustine’s lecture attracted more than 75 students and professors from the University.
Though topics ranged from getting Buzz Aldrin on the phone to subsonic aircrafts, Augustine spent the greater part of the lecture discussing the “Dirty Dozen”: keys to a well-engineered system.
During his analysis of the most essential problems to avoid when doing systems engineering, Augustine emphasized the importance of being able to work with unanticipated problems and utilizing foresight whenever possible.
“Remembering to think of all the components of different systems beforehand is really important as an engineer,” said mechanical and aerospace engineering major Daphne Rein-Weston ’12, referring to Augustine’s “Dirty Dozen.”
Augustine also recounted striking examples of the situations he has encountered that illustrated the “Dirty Dozen.”
He explained that a spacecraft meant to go to Venus missed the planet due to a missing hyphen in a backup loop that was never tested.
Augustine also discussed the collapsed Tacoma Narrows Bridge and how it exemplified the complications of “non-linearities.”
He noted that engineers failed to realize that the bridge would collapse because the vortex of the bridge was equal to the external frequency of the wind.
Quoting Winston Churchill, Augustine said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else.”
Augustine called attention to his Princeton education as a strong foundation for a career in engineering. He was especially pleased with the University’s liberal arts core, noting the importance of knowing how to write well as an engineer.
Augustine ended the lecture with a discussion of the innovations he has witnessed in his lifetime and those he anticipates will be invented in the near future. In addition to breakthroughs in medicine and the possibility of interacting with machines on a human level, Augustine spoke of the advances that researchers have made in communication and technology in just the past few decades.
“The world is just one intergrated entity,” he said.
Augustine is the former chairman and chief executive of Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation’s largest defense contractor.
He is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and the U.S. Department of Defense’s Distinguished Service Medal.
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