And the number of this post shall be '666'

This is the six hundred sixty-sixth post here at The Abstracted Engineer, and as such I feel I owe it to my readership to talk about the Devil, and how "the devil" relates to science and engineering.

You see, dear readers, TAE does not believe in a devil. The idea that some angel in Heaven named Lucifer defied God, fell, and became some sort of super-powerful semi-God bent on the destruction of all things good in the Universe makes for an awesome movie, but is a difficult tale to wrap one's head around. First, I have explained many times (to anyone who will listen to my shouting) that putting human faces on deities is a limited and understated way of describing them. God is not a wizened, white-bearded grandfather sitting in a cloud-world watching the humans below struggle through their daily lives. God is, if omnipotence and omnipresence are to be believed, all-things at all times, and therefore describing God as a flying spaghetti monster is just as accurate (though equally imprecise) as the grandfather-image described above. Similarly, since Augustine (and probably before), the words of the Bible and the characters (and caracatures?) located within were not considered literal, but rather a poetic and lyrical description of a gigantic allegory for God, Humanity, and the relationship between the two. Stories of Lucifer's fall are not meant to be read literally (and for the most part weren't, until the last two centuries), rather they were meant to serve as a guide, a sort of parable without the convenient section heading so prevalent in the New Testament. So although I found the movie Constantine very entertaining, the idea that God and Satan are waging a secret war on Earth for our souls, in fact the idea that Satan (creepily portrayed by Peter Stormare) is sort of hanging out, and can, at the drop of a hat, stop time and come pay us a visit basically goes against basic logic (if Satan can stop time and wanted to end the Earth, why not just indefinitely stop time?).

What the heck, dear readers might be asking, does this have to do with science?

My point is that "the devil" is not a personage, not some malevolent being twitching puppet strings in the darkness above (or below). The devil is the doubter, the hate-monger, and the ones who only see one answer to a problem.

Take an old engineer. He's lived a long, healthy life, and in the twilight of his career, here comes some young, upstart newbie fresh out of engineering school. The newbie is assigned, under him, to design a small power plant facility that burns natural gas. The newbie, bright and energetic, comes up with a new way to use VFD-driven motors to save tons of energy in the cooling system at the plant. Only thing is, the control system is twice as complex, and requires an extra fan assembly in the exterior wall of the building. The senior engineer, who has designed dozens of natural gas power plants in his long and storied career, shoots down the young engineers idea, telling him that the contractors (in his experience, which is vast, he reminds us) will invariably screw up the control sequence and therefore they must design this facility (which is essentially a giant bomb) to be a simple as possible. But the young engineer implores him, arguing that control sequencing has come so much farther, and black-box control systems are now commonplace - and cheap.
Nevertheless, the senior engineer does not relent, and the facility goes in with a simple, inefficient, primary-secondary system that uses loads of electricity (the very thing the power plant is attempting to produce).
Now, I disclose I am a young engineer and occasionally get hotheaded at the elders at my company. But nevertheless, the devil here is the unflinching elder, who (thinking he is doing the right thing) refuses change. He is near retirement, and does he really want one of his last projects to be a contracting nightmare, with cost overruns when the control system doesn't work. He acknowledges, on some deep level, that the young engineer may be right - and when that young engineer is a senior engineer he can do whatever he damn well pleases - but he will not try new things when he has built a career doing what works.
Then again the devil is the young engineer too, because in his anger that his smart idea has been quashed, he talks trash to his peers about the senior engineer, day-dreaming about the day the old crank retires. He tells his peers how he could do the senior engineers' job, and better, and make the company more money. "High-risk, high-reward!" the young engineer trumpets. And he mulls and fumes about how long it takes him to move upward, when money and power will be his.

Or take this example: A smart scientist develops a method to identify a genetic disease with a "lab-on-a-chip" device for a mere $40 a use. Immediately "the devil" climbs aboard, as the scientist's peers gnash their teeth for not coming up with it, and write editorials to peer-reviewed journals claiming the inaccuracy of such a test method. The scientist then writes back, claiming that he alone is the brilliant pioneer amongst a cadre of old-fashioned plebians. Meanwhile the pharmaceutical companies have taken the $40 test and turned it into a convenient, over-the-counter product...that costs $100. The insurance companies, realizing that the knowledge gleaned from the test could better help them assess risk, raises rates company-wide and cover a small portion of the test ($20), claiming that "the increased costs of insuring those afflicted with the genetic disease in question warrant the policy rate increase." No mention is made of the fact that the people who test positive were already being covered by the insurance company at their old premium rate (and the insurance company was doing just fine). Meanwhile, other scientists at other companies have reverse engineered the product and come up with tons of other genetic diseases that also could be detected. They've also shaved the cost down to $25/test thanks to mass-production methods, but the OTC price still hovers around $100. The original test-making pharmaceutical company sues, claiming infringment. Faced with this sudden smorgasbord of easy genetic tests, insurers are forced to limit patients to 5 tests per person (or 10 per family).
The devils here are numerous and varied!

The point is that in science and engineering, the devil is harder to see than a mischievous, pointy-eared fellow with fire coming out of his eyeballs. The devil is as much about emotion as anything else. The devil drives people to steal the work/credit from others, or to undermine authority, or to refuse change because it requires hard work, or to be lazy and fake data, or a host of other things that happen every single day in the world.

And that brings us back around to theology. When you think about science and engineering, the "Seven Deadly Sins" seems especially applicable. In genetic testing case above, we managed to hit every single one of them: the scientist's peers were envious, and then the scientist was prideful in his defense. The pharmaceutical company was greedy, and then wrathful in their lawsuit. The other pharmaceutical companies were slothful by reverse engineering the genetic test, and lustful by stealing the idea. And the insurance company was gluttonous to raise rates on their clients without true justification. Did I catch them all?

And yet, every single person had their justification for their acts. The scientist was only defending himself from his attacking peers. The peers were only attempting to better the total body of scientific knowledge and help the public be informed to causal doubt about the genetic test. The insurance company new that people with the genetic disease would be expensive and needed to pad their books so they didn't go bankrupt, at which time no one would be covered. The pharmaceutical companies are trying to get the product out where it can help people! We all invite the devil into our lives with a good justification! Especially scientists and engineers.


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