Professor: Idiot or Glossing-Over?

Turin · Post by **Turin** » 2006-05-04 02:49pm

This year I've returned to college in order to finish my degree. I first started my work towards my BArch (Bachelors of Architecture) 10 years ago at a different university, and got about 2/3rds of the way through the program, minoring in Environmental Sciences, before I decided that architecture wasn't for me (despite a ~3.6GPA) and I left school planning on transferring soon thereafter to study to be a secondary school educator. As happenstance would have it, I ended up employed at an architecture firm, which rekindled my love for the work and now 7 years later my lack of degree is limiting my otherwise fairly rapid career advancement, so I'm back in school.

I told you that story so I could tell this one in context. So I'm being required to take this Power & Lighting Systems course... it's been a bore because my on-the-job experience has had a lot of power-related work, so I breezed through the first half of the course without opening a book and getting a perfect score on the exam. So we start the lighting half of the course last night and the professor (who is a "lighting engineer" by profession) starts talking about the basics. Again, most of this stuff I had 10 years ago in basic physics (if not high school).

He's chattering away and putting up a diagram of the electromagnetic spectrum and wham, it hits me that this guy, despite probably being a halfway decent lighting designer, doesn't understand the fundamentals at all. He's saying that 186,000 mi/sec is the speed of light in the air and is putting sound waves at the far right of the electromagnetic spectrum. What's more, when I turn my head to look around the room with what was probably a rather astonished look on my face, no one else seemed to have noticed and they were all busily scribbling away that sound was on the EM spectrum. When I questioned him (politely) on it, the reply was "well they're kinda like radio waves."

I was frankly too surprised to get into it with him at that point. The rest of the class goes on with him demonstrating a very tenuous grasp on how light actually works (wave/particle duality, for example), yet attempting to explain it anyway. Not a real confidence booster there in either the professor or my classmates who should all have had basic physics by now and should know better.

Now I understand that a lot of the building trade is done by "rule of thumb" rather than calculation from first principles. But are engineers in general ignorant of the fundamental principles involved, or is this guy an exception to the rule? The architecture profession is a bit odd because it's decidedly not an engineering profession despite the superficial similarities -- we're more process managers and artists than engineers -- so maybe I'm just thinking that engineers have a "deeper" education than they really do? Anyone else run into this or is this just the exceptional bozo? (In which case, how did this guy get to be a prof?)

[apologies in advance for what became a longist rant and/or if the mods feel this is in the wrong spot]

Dooey Jo · Post by **Dooey Jo** » 2006-05-04 03:30pm

Huh? How can anyone confuse sound and EM waves? They're nothing like each other...

The only type of engineer (AFAIK) that doesn't require basic physics training is Software Engineers. Well, I don't think they do, anyway.

But that is extraordinarily bad. You sure he meant sound waves and not micro waves or something?

Keevan_Colton · Post by **Keevan_Colton** » 2006-05-04 03:35pm

Wouldnt "lighting engineer" be a bastard child of an interior designer and a low rate electrician anyway?

Turin · Post by **Turin** » 2006-05-04 03:39pm

Well he drew a big line across the board and had Gamma, Xray, UV, Visible Light, and Infrared going across from smallest wavelength on up. Then he wrote "Radar" and "Sound" as the next two. He then broke out the visible spectrum as a separate diagram and he manged to get that right (including the wavelengths). Maybe it's just because this guy is normally working in the visible spectrum, but you'd think he'd have the basic physics down.

Kuroneko · Post by **Kuroneko** » 2006-05-04 04:46pm

Well, human-audible sound has frequency range of roughly 20Hz-20kHz, corresponding to about 1.7cm-17m wavelength, which is a large chunk of the radar band (18MHz-18GHz on the electromagnetic spectrum). That's a tenuous link, but that's about the only reason I can think of as to why "radar" and "sound" would go together in such a discussion.

kheegster · Post by **kheegster** » 2006-05-04 06:50pm

Turin wrote:Well he drew a big line across the board and had Gamma, Xray, UV, Visible Light, and Infrared going across from smallest wavelength on up. Then he wrote "Radar" and "Sound" as the next two. He then broke out the visible spectrum as a separate diagram and he manged to get that right (including the wavelengths). Maybe it's just because this guy is normally working in the visible spectrum, but you'd think he'd have the basic physics down.

As Kuroneko pointed out, perhaps the diagram was to give an idea on the scale of the wavelengths involved? Although this means that he could have put in 'ocean waves' into the same diagram as well.

Zero · Post by **Zero** » 2006-05-04 07:09pm

Reminds me of when my Chem teacher had us calculate the wavelength of a frog, although that was as a joke...

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-05-04 07:36pm

I seriously doubt that a "lighting engineer" is a real engineer. It sounds more like one of those made-up terms, like "audio engineer", which is really just a glorified technician.

Gil Hamilton · Post by **Gil Hamilton** » 2006-05-04 07:51pm

Darth Wong wrote:I seriously doubt that a "lighting engineer" is a real engineer. It sounds more like one of those made-up terms, like "audio engineer", which is really just a glorified technician.

"Lighting engineers" is a glorified term for an electrician that specializes in setting up lighting situations. Most places that hire such people require them to have a mechanical or electrical engineering bachelors degree, usually the latter.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-05-04 07:54pm

If someone was a qualified electrical engineer, he would call himself an electrical engineer, not a lighting engineer.

Gil Hamilton · Post by **Gil Hamilton** » 2006-05-04 07:58pm

Don't ask me, I just know they typically want you to be an electrical engineering degree holder when they hire you to be a "lighting engineer". Really, from the descriptions of their job I've read, they sound like electricians who just do one sort of thing. I guess "electrician" is too mundane sounding, but that's what they do.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-05-04 08:06pm

I can't even find an American Association of Lighting Engineers. There's the IEEE for sparkies, the ASME for gearheads, the ASCE for the civvies, etc., but nothing for lighting engineers. Are you sure they require a real engineering degree, as opposed to one of those pseudo-engineering tech school things?

Gil Hamilton · Post by **Gil Hamilton** » 2006-05-04 08:19pm

According to the IEEE website, there are Lighting Engineering Groups as part of their Gray Book. I assume then that they are in with Electrical Engineers. They have listed, for instance, the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America.

Winston Blake · Post by **Winston Blake** » 2006-05-04 08:25pm

Darth Wong wrote:I can't even find an American Association of Lighting Engineers. There's the IEEE for sparkies, the ASME for gearheads, the ASCE for the civvies, etc., but nothing for lighting engineers. Are you sure they require a real engineering degree, as opposed to one of those pseudo-engineering tech school things?

For what it's worth, there appears to be one in the UK.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-05-04 09:06pm

Gil Hamilton wrote:According to the IEEE website, there are Lighting Engineering Groups as part of their Gray Book. I assume then that they are in with Electrical Engineers. They have listed, for instance, the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America.

I would be interested in knowing whether the retard mentioned in the opening post is a member of this association. If so, I can only surmise that he must have gone to a truly shitty school: one which should ideally lose its accreditation if it ever had it.

SpacedTeddyBear · Post by **SpacedTeddyBear** » 2006-05-04 10:26pm

I hope that the comment about "186,000 mi/sec is the speed of light in the air and is putting sound waves at the far right of the electromagnetic spectrum" was just a major slip of the tongue. The fact that he didn't use metric units gives me some doubts about his qualifications.

Turin · Post by **Turin** » 2006-05-04 10:41pm

Well keep in mind that I'm in the US and all building-trades-related engineers here still use the US system of measurement and not metric (you should see the problems it causes when they use European-manufactured equipment). So that explains the metric thing.

As for this guy's qualifications... in my experience most of the people I've worked with who do the engineering for lighting are electrical engineers who work for Mechanical/Electrical/Plumbing Engineering firms, although a registered architect is qualified to do basic lighting design. This prof works for a firm that specializes in lighting, so I suppose it's entirely possible that this guy is a lighting technical expert but not an engineer per se (much in the same sense that I'm technically an architectural designer/technician rather than an architect).

But the question would then be why he's teaching a class... my university certainly wouldn't hire someone with my level of qualification to teach a design studio. I'm going to have do a little digging on the faculty pages to see if I can track down this guy's qualifications now.

haard · Post by **haard** » 2006-05-05 04:34am

Dooey Jo wrote:The only type of engineer (AFAIK) that doesn't require basic physics training is Software Engineers. Well, I don't think they do, anyway.

Not in Sweden, anyway. It's not like a software engineer is anything like a real engineer - it's about approaching software development from an engineeringish point of view, more than a hackerish.

Netko · Post by **Netko** » 2006-05-05 08:33am

Future software engineer here (well, my degree will state computing engineer but its basicly the same thing). We have 2 semesters of basic physics plus a semester of basic electrical engineering which covers the applicable fields in more detail (under the old programme there were 2 semesters of basic el. eng. where one was used fully for the physics while the other was used for electrical networks (could be a bad translation)). Thats pretty much it tho.

Then again, the computing programme grew out of the electrical engineering programme here, so the same fundamentals remain.

Turin · Post by **Turin** » 2006-05-05 08:52am

Did a little digging this morning... the prof has his Bachelors of Architectural Engineering and is a member of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA). He's also apparently involved with the local chapter as a liason to one of the universities here.

So on the surface the guy is presumably supposed to be qualified... until you look at the actual qualifications to join the IESNA, which gives plenty of room for non-engineering artistic types to be members. It's a "big tent" organization for pretty much any professional or educator working with lighting, rather than a professional standards organization (like the AIA, for my profession, or the IEEE for wirenuts). The lesson here, folks, is don't take someone's qualifications at face value... something we see in the creationism vs evolution debate too.

Oh, and it's kinda scary the amount of information you can dig up on someone in just 5 or 10 minutes worth of work!

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-05-05 08:56am

He's obviously a moron who shouldn't be teaching that class, and to be honest, I would recommend that he be reported for incompetence and ethics code violations.

It is against the professional engineering code of ethics to represent yourself as an expert in a professional capacity where you are not in fact an expert, and this guy is clearly not competent to be teaching physics if he thinks that sound waves belong on the electromagnetic spectrum.

Turin · Post by **Turin** » 2006-05-05 09:15am

Darth Wong wrote:It is against the professional engineering code of ethics to represent yourself as an expert in a professional capacity where you are not in fact an expert, and this guy is clearly not competent to be teaching physics if he thinks that sound waves belong on the electromagnetic spectrum.

You know, that brings up the point that a lot of this problem is the fault of the architectural community. We (I'm using the term "we" loosely) have been "giving away" more and more of our scope of work to engineers over the last couple decades, in order to insulate ourselves from exposure to liability. Which makes sense but unfortunately we've also been giving away our managerial scope as well to construction managers. Which ends up leaving the architect as the designer of merely the aesthetic component of the project, rather than what our skill-set is best designed for, which is keeping an eye on the "big picture" of the project.

This has had a tendency to encourage building-systems engineers (M/E/P) to think that they can do our jobs, too. Clients aren't well educated enough to know the difference, and you run into the problem that I'm having on a job right now where the architect and the engineer are feuding over who is the "lead consultant" on a project. But when M/E/P engineers end up being the lead consultant on a large building project, they end up pushing hard on the architect to make bad design decisions because they make things simpler for the M/E/P side. (Quick anecdotal example: I've found that electrical engineers have a bad tendency to lay out a room without considering how they're actually going to get the equipment in there.) So there's a trend, at least in the US, of building systems engineers biting off more than they can chew, and maybe this is a factor in this guy's underqualification.

(Kind of a divergence from the original topic, maybe, but I thought it could spark an interesting tanget for those interested in the issue.)