Welcome to the Harsh World of Mechanics! The purpose of this blog is to share interesting tidbits about the field of engineering mechanics, particularly its historical development.

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Today, every engineer is taught the fundamental equations of structural mechanics in school: beam theory, column buckling, and statics, to name a few. However, in the workplace, most analysis is performed on the computer, usually with software that implements the finite element method. The fundamental equations are mainly used as a sanity check, telling the analyst whether his or her colorful stress results are reasonable given the loads and geometry of the problem. While the finite element method is both powerful and indispensable, I feel that young engineers (myself included) rely too heavily on it for results. It seems for any structural problem, our first resort is often going directly to Abaqus or Ansys. While there is nothing wrong with this, given that most problems have complex geometries with no theoretical solutions, I feel that our fascination with the finite element method has caused us to overlook the importance and relevance of the theory we learned in school. We are so familiar with FEM that we often do not try to derive a theoretical solution before jumping to our favorite software. Hence I think we may have lost touch with the vast field of theoretical mechanics and the useful results and ideas derived by those before us.

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In this blog, I aim to reinspire interest in these older problems and ideas of mechanics, mainly through short vignettes. Each blog post will talk about something interesting related to mechanics, usually with a historical twist. I hope revisiting these older ideas will give you perspective and a sense of appreciation of how the field of mechanics has gotten to where it has today.