The engineering method

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Image by Diego Delso. Courtesy of Wikipedia

Many complex structures predate the scientific method. How?

‘What matters… is that it works.’

The archaeological site Göbekli Tepe, located in modern-day Türkiye and believed to have been built 10 to 12 millennia ago – some 6,000 years before Stonehenge in England – features circular rooms constructed with remarkable precision and aligned with one another. How were people who so clearly predated recorded mathematics – let alone geometry or the scientific method – able to build such sophisticated structures? This is the question that Bill Hammack, an engineer and professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, explores in this short video, created as a companion to his book The Things We Make (2023). Moving from Göbekli Tepe to the Pantheon in Rome and the Gothic cathedral Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, he examines what he calls ‘the engineering method’ – a form of knowledge that, unlike the scientific method, prioritises practical results over fundamental understanding.

Video by Engineer Guy

Producers: Rohan Bhatt, Nick Damen, Finn Hall

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