Extreme science and engineering
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EDITORIAL
Extreme science and engineering Andrew Kusiak1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Introduction The progress in science and engineering over centuries has been uneven with spikes in discoveries and innovations. The developments in early centuries, marked with the names such as Archimedes (400 BC), Aristotle (300 BC), Galileo Galilei (fourteenth century), and Isaac Newton (fifteenth century), have built the foundation of mathematics and science that sparked progress in technology in later years. The first industrial revolution (ca 1760–1840), begun with the transformation from manual to mechanized production. This in turn has ignited progress in agriculture with the invention of a steel plow by John Deere in 1837, the way of life attributed to the telegraph invented by Samuel Moore in 1844, and economic and social changes reflected in the income distribution and organized labor. The second industrial revolution begun around 1870 with the expansion in technology and bringing new infrastructure (e.g., railroads, electric energy) and products (e.g., a telephone, an electric bulb). The twentieth century and especially the twenty-first century have brought spikes in events not seen in the previous centuries. This can be best illustrated with the growing green gas (CO2) emissions and pollutions in general. The environmental phenomena have caught attention of the scientists and the public and are good examples illustrating extreme events, ranging from the extreme temperatures at different spots around the globe, frequent floods, fires, unusual rainfall patters, and pandemics such as Covid-19. The limits in technology, e.g., the quest for speed of processing in the semiconductor and computer industry have sparked search for new capabilities, including quantum computing expected to provide an order of magnitude gains in processing power. A cursory review of the
* Andrew Kusiak andrew‑[email protected] https://research.engineering.uiowa.edu/kusiak/ 1
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242‑1527, USA
literature across science and engineering domains points the use of the term ‘extreme’ in multiple contexts. The major science and engineering domains impacted by the extreme events are listed next. Biology—Examples of extreme events include: Behavior of partially unfolded proteins under extreme temperature and pressure conditions (Heremans 2004); Transformation of the genome size in conifers (trees used as the source of softwood, resins, and turpentine) growing in an extreme environment (Sedel’nikova 2016); Extreme biology of meteorites (Lee et al. 2017). Computer engineering—Neural networks have progressed in the scale and capability and thus allow to model complex phenomena reflected in their names such as extreme, deep, and broad neural networks. Economy—Disparity of income and standard of living between the poor and the wealthy. If no action is taken, this gap is to grow in years to come. The Covid-19 pandemics might have
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