New Scientist: How to think like a rocket scientist

Reposted from NewScientist.com

When you make important life decisions, do you ever ask yourself “What would a rocket scientist do?”

Me neither. But maybe we should reconsider, because a new book called The Seven Secrets of How to Think Like a Rocket Scientist, offers to help us in our everyday lives by teaching us the mental tricks of the trade used by actual rocket scientists.

The book is written by James Longuski, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue University in Indiana, US, who used to design missions and spacecraft manoeuvres at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

If advice from a rocket scientists frightens you with visions of obscure mathematical arguments, fear not. "There is not one single equation" in the book, Longuski says in a Purdue University press release.

One piece of advice offered up to readers in the book is to ask dumb questions. Longuski illustrates the need to do so by citing the failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter. It accidentally plunged into the Martian atmosphere and burned up because some mission engineers assumed their fellow team members were working in English units when they were really in metric.

That episode would seem to cast doubt on the utility of thinking like a rocket scientist. But presumably we are being encouraged to think like rocket scientists at their best, rather than when they are forgetting to convert their units.

I haven't read the book yet, let alone tried to put its advice into practice, so I can't say how useful it is. But it sounds like a nice detour from the standard self help book fare.

Reposted from NewScientist.com, David Shiga (Image: Springer Science + Business Media)