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1/n. Why can& #39;t Ivor Cummins, @fatemperor, not grasp the complexities of Covid? Why is his reasoning so simplistic?
2/n We have to go back to the 1980s and the education that chemical engineers like myself and Ivor received.
3/n Chemical engineering deals with highly complex systems but, back then, the computational tools we had were limited, to say the least. We relied on (ingenious) graphical techniques to solve problems.
4/n Nonetheless, we were first class "calculators", but the way we were taught, we often didn& #39;t really understand quite why the methods we used actually worked.
5/n Our calculations often depended on using "correlations", i.e., experimentally-derived equations relating one parameter (e.g. a Reynolds number) to other parameters (e.g. a heat transfer coefficient or a mass transfer coefficient - coefficients had hid our ignorance.)
6/n These equations allowed us to design processes despite not having any deep understanding of the underlying physical and chemical phenomena
7/n Pragmatism was the name of the game.
8/n It was only when I had to teach these things and I began to work with biologists that I realized that having a traditional engineering education is not necessarily a good background to have if you want to understand complex multi-faceted problems.
