ABSTRACT
In this article, the author describes the task facing an engineer in providing expert testimony. However, to a court, a young person who knows how to design "the beam in question" is an expert, because he or she has sufficient special knowledge above that of the jury to be allowed to express an opinion about the beam. To an engineer, not only in-depth, but broad knowledge is required for a person to become an expert. For example, if the authorities want to predict how much grain the Soviets will want to buy next year, they ask five or six experts. For example, one attorney, after finding out that the author had expertise in dynamics tried to qualify the author as an expert in "physics" simply because dynamics was a topic in physics. The other attorney, older and wiser, did not object to having the author qualified to give expert testimony in the case, because the author was an expert.
