I discovered there are at least two categories of truth. The first I would call 'general truth' which is knowledge which is available or verifiable to anyone. This is the stuff of science but also includes anything you personally know and could verify to someone else.
The second category is 'personal truth' which although it is no less rigorous to you personally you could not verify it to anyone else. Such may be an event in your history which affected you deeply but apart from your account it is not verifiable to or by anyone else.
The distinction is important in order to know what to exclude when talking about discovering truth. It is the former that I am interested in pursuing in this blog. I am being careful about definitions here in order to maintain 'clear thinking', its a natural part of engineering.
Talking about engineering we may now make a few interesting observations. While science is a search for truth of the general kind, engineering is more concerned with the application of those truths. Science deals with observations, hypotheses, experiments and theories, while engineering deals with application, test, verification and sometimes formal certification.
Engineering gets going where science leaves off ie with truth or verified, reliable knowledge. That is how we got from the Wright Brothers to the Moon in just 66 years. Scientists may hold a theory and have a few failures or negative observations awaiting future verification or falsification. They might even loose a few lab rats but by the time engineers get the knowledge, failure is not an option.
So truth is more the stuff of engineering than science really.
Have a nice day..
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