ABSTRACT
Engineering can be so important in a scientific life. As a boy and then a trainee scientist at university, I used to think of engineering as building road or railway bridges, such as those by the pioneering English mechanical and civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859). The change in my opinion, that engineering was also instrumentation for science experiments, happened in 1979, when I visited the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and saw the 70-ton detector on a swinging arm rotating about the colliding beams interaction point. The detector had to be very precisely positioned, despite being so very heavy and bulky. At the time I was (partly) employed by the Science and Engineering Research Council, emphasising that engineering and science are juxtaposed!
