Structures Quotes

“Mathematics is to the scientist and the engineer a tool, to the professional mathematician a religion, but to the ordinary person a stumbling-block.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“When you climb the tower of a cathedral it becomes shorter, as a result of your added weight, by a very, very tiny amount, but it really does become shorter.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“Thus energy may be regarded as the universal currency of the sciences,”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“In our material world, every single happening or event of whatever kind involves a conversion of energy from one into another of its many forms.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“Survival became a matter of chasing and being chased, eating and being eaten.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“Nowadays, whether we like it or not, we are stuck with one form or another of advanced technology and we have got to make it work safely and efficiently: this involves, among other things, the intelligent application of structural theory. However, man does not live by safety and efficiency alone, and we have to face the fact that, visually, the world is becoming an increasingly depressing place. It is not, perhaps, so much the occurrence of what might be described as 'active ugliness' as the prevalence of the dull and the commonplace. Far too seldom is the heart rejoiced or does one feel any better or happier for looking at the works of modern man. Yet most of the artefacts of the eighteenth century, even quite humble and trivial ones, seem to many of us to be at least pleasing and sometimes incomparably beautiful. To that extent people—all people—in the eighteenth century lived richer lives than most of us do today. This is reflected in the prices we pay nowadays for period houses and antiques. A society which was more creative and self-confident would not feel quite so strong a nostalgia for its great-grandfathers' buildings and household looks.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“to get anywhere worth while without the higher mathematics is not only impossible but that it would be vaguely immoral if you could.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“it is quite possible to break a bow by ‘shooting’ it without an arrow.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“Joule, that is the work done when one Newton acts through one metre.*”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and so the total amount of energy which is present before and after any physical transaction will not be changed. This principle is called ‘the conservation of energy’.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“Numerically, the stress in any direction at a given point in a material is simply the force or load which happens to be acting in that direction at the point, divided by the area on which the force acts.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“stress’ in a solid is rather like the ‘pressure’ in a liquid or a gas. It is a measure of how hard the atoms and molecules which make up the material are being pushed together or pulled apart as a result of external forces.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“The science of elasticity is about the interactions between forces and deflections.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“furniture designers, incredibly, are not taught during their formal training how to calculate the deflection in an ordinary bookshelf when it is loaded with books,”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“The older shipwrights erred on the side of flexibility, and, though their ships were often excessively leaky, they seldom actually broke at sea. It required the administrative abilities of modern war-time governments to produce wooden ships which really did fall to pieces.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“reduction. Professor J. P. Paul, of the University of Strathclyde, tells me that his researches seem to indicate that a more important cause of fracture in old people is the progressive loss of nervous control over the tensions in the muscles. A sudden alarm may cause a muscular contraction which is enough to break off the neck of the femur, for instance, without the patient having experienced any external blow. When this happens the patient naturally falls to the ground -perhaps on top of some obstacle-so that the fracture is blamed, wrongly, on the fall rather than on the muscular spasm. It is said that similar fracture can occur in the hind leg of certain African deer when they are startled by a lion.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“When a structure fails or seems in danger of failing the natural instinct of the engineer may be to specify the use of a ‘stronger’ material: in the case of steel, what is known as a ‘higher tensile’ steel. With large structures this is generally a mistake, for it is clear that most of the strength, even of mild steel, is not really being used. This is because, as we have seen, the failure of a structure may be controlled, not by the strength, but by the brittleness of the material. [...] the toughness of most metals is undoubtedly reduced very greatly as the tensile strength increases.”
― J.E. Gordon, [(Structuresor Why Things Don T Fall Down)] [Edited by J Gordon] published on

“Strength is not the same thing as stiffness.
To quote from The New Science of Strong Materials: ‘A biscuit is stiff but weak, steel is stiff and strong, nylon is flexible (low E) and strong, raspberry jelly is flexible (low E) and weak. The two properties together describe a solid about as well as you can reasonably expect two figures to do.”
― J.E. Gordon, [(Structuresor Why Things Don T Fall Down)] [Edited by J Gordon] published on

“To make strong structures without the benefit of metals requires an instinct for the distribution and direction of stresses which is by no means always possessed by modern engineers; for the use of metals, which are so conveniently tough and uniform, has taken some of the intuition and also some of the thinking out of engineering.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“Where human life is concerned, it is clearly desirable that a 'safe' crack should be long enough to be visible to a bored and rather stupid inspector working in a bad light on a Friday afternoon.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“The quantity of energy required to break a given cross-section of a material defines its ‘toughness’, which is nowadays more often called its ‘fracture energy’ or ‘work of fracture’.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“High-quality swords are expected to be able to recover, elastically, after they have been bent so that the tip touches the hilt.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“Resilience may be defined as ‘the amount of strain energy which can be stored in a structure without causing permanent damage to it’.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“The scientific kind of energy with which we are dealing is officially defined as ‘capacity for doing work’, and it has the dimensions of ‘force-multiplied-by-distance’.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“Geometrical irregularities, such as holes and cracks and sharp corners, which had previously been ignored, may raise the local stress − often only over a very small area − very dramatically indeed.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“It is necessary to avoid confusion between the strength of a structure and the strength of a material.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“slope of the stress-strain diagram measures how readily each material strains elastically under a given stress.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“strain is a ratio, which is to say a number, and it has no units, SI, British or anything else. All”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“the SI (System International) habit is to make the unit of force the Newton.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“pressure acts in all three directions within a fluid while the stress in a solid is often a directional or one-dimensional affair.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down