Vernon
A ..
Now there is a gap between the scientific and the practicing engineer, and it's a tough gap
to fill because you don't have very many people who know enough about theory.
Practicing engineers--most of them don't have the time to spend at all on the calculus and
things that goes into some of these theoretical applications to really understand how you
apply them.
The scientists, they come up with these theoretical ways of doing things, but they don't
have the time to find out whether they can get the data that goes into their procedures or
their formula and their models and so forth. So they just go on saying, "Well, it must
work, theoretically it's sound.
That was one of the reasons that the Hydrologic Engineering Center [HEC] was
established out in Davis [California]. It was to try to get people out there who had enough
smarts about the scientific side of the house and yet apply these things in the practical
sense, try to apply scientific theory to practical problems and see if they couldn't bridge
this gap and get more of these theory--more of the scientific theory into the hydrology then
had been in the past. But only if it was going to be useful, not just because it would look
good. They've done a pretty good job on that.
Of course, that is nearly impossible to do. But they've done a fairly good job whenever
they try to apply some of that scientific stuff, which they have gotten from different
professors. They're located in Davis, California, right next to the University of California
in Davis. They interact a lot with the professors there. At night you see HEC people who
teach courses over at the university so there is a lot of interplay there.
But it has always been a tough problem with this communication gap between the scientist
and the practitioners. Well, ASCE, I think, is the best organization for trying to bring the
two together. AGU [American Geophysical Union] is not as good an organization for this
purpose because it is primarily scientifically oriented. Most of the people who belong to
that organization are professors and scientists of one type or another whereas the ASCE
has more of the practicing engineers and they have a lot of professors, too, in ACSE.
So they get together more and they get a better chance to understand each others point of
view. Whereas in AGU you've got one scientist talking to another scientist. Neither one
of them have had any practical experience maybe in what they're talking about.
I think of my experience when I was taking graduate courses at Catholic University. I got
a Master's degree there by going to school at night for five years. One of my professors
was a guy by the name of Ken Young, who has an engineering firm here in Springfield
now. He was relatively fresh out of school and had his doctor's degree and all these fancy
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