Abstract:
The recent room-temperature superconductor LK-99 controversy highlighted significant challenges within scientific communication and raised critical questions about the role of engineering in societal advancement. LK-99’s rapid rise and fall from scientific prominence reflects a need for essential virtues of engineering practice. This article analyzes the engineer’s societal role and establishes a framework to emphasize the importance of three virtues – joy, compassion, and rigor. These virtues are crucial for fostering responsible innovation and advancing human well-being through technology.
Introduction:
In late July, Korean researchers published a paper on an unprecedented phenomenon: “For the first time in the world, we succeeded in synthesizing the room-temperature superconductor working at ambient pressure…” [1]. The team discovered that LK-99 material demonstrated magnetic levitation under standard conditions, which had previously only been achieved in conjunction with the use of expensive cooling systems. LK-99’s potential engineering applications span several critical sectors. Transportation systems could be revolutionized through more efficient maglev railways; energy infrastructure could benefit from enhanced storage capabilities; computing systems could become unprecedentedly efficient by transcending traditional semiconductor thermal limits. The possibilities were endless.
Researchers worldwide gradually attempted to replicate their success [2]. The scientific community initially attributed failed replication attempts to diamagnetism, material impurity, and accidental oxygen introduction. However, further investigation revealed that LK-99 was an insulator rather than a superconductor. By August, the scientific community had broadly recognized the initial LK-99 paper as a fluke.
The LK-99 controversy highlights fundamental issues in scientific methodology. The premature publication claiming LK-99 as a superconductor excited interest in resistance-free electrical technologies but failed to uphold essential scientific processes like replication and peer review. This incident raises vital questions about engineers, their work, and their responsibilities to society. To answer these questions, this article examines three core engineering virtues – joy, compassion, and rigor – and argues that these virtues are essential for engineers to advance human well-being through technology.
An Engineer’s Role in Society:
Before establishing essential engineering virtues, it’s necessary to understand an engineer’s role in society. One can understand the engineer’s societal role by comparing it to mathematics and science. Mathematics formalizes observations of the world, while science applies these mathematical principles to understand natural phenomena. Engineering takes this understanding further by transforming scientific knowledge into practical solutions for society’s needs. This ties engineering to social benefit and differs from mathematics’ pursuit of purely theoretical knowledge. This fundamental connection between engineering and society defines the field’s core purpose: to apply scientific principles to advance human civilization.
In his article “Virtuous Engineering,” Jon Schmidt falsely claims that risk management is engineering’s primary social role [3]. This claim also oversimplifies the societal role of engineering by mischaracterizing both engineers’ authority and public accountability. Engineers do not have the exclusive authority, education, or basis to make moral judgments about their work. Engineers operate within a comprehensive system of checks and balances, including corporate legal departments, ethics divisions, and government regulations. Management decisions guide their work in response to market demands and investor priorities. This division of responsibilities where engineers focus on technical solutions while other professionals handle legal and ethical oversight is integral to modern innovation. This specialization makes engineers excel at engineering, not philosophizing, and vice versa.
The relationship between engineers and the public is more nuanced than Schmidt suggests; the public is not simply a passive recipient of consequences without recourse. No individual can fully control engineers’ decisions, and systems that oversee engineering decisions have significant limitations. Legal reforms often take effect too late to prevent initial harm, and market forces frequently produce irrational outcomes. Stakeholder input tends to represent only a narrow population segment, leaving many powerless within these large economic and political systems. This lack of effective oversight enables companies to conceal harmful side effects of their products or ignore dangerous pollutants from their manufacturing processes. Thus, engineers must apply scientific observation to promote social good while utilizing available systems to prevent such actions. Risk management is only one component of this broader mission. Schmit’s view of risk management as an engineer’s core role understates engineering’s fundamental purpose to enhance human well-being.
Joy
Engineers need to be joyous. Engineering emerges from the intersection of scientific principles and societal needs, drawing strength from its humanitarian goals and scientific foundations. Thus, engineers should deeply appreciate the universe’s fundamental laws and marvel at human ingenuity to conquer the cosmos with these rules. This appreciation manifests as an intrinsic joy in discovery and creation, providing a powerful internal drive to transcend external pressures like management demands or deadline constraints.
Engineers motivated primarily by intellectual curiosity rather than commercial success tend to pursue more responsible solutions. This principle applies across disciplines. For example, fascination with human biology, rather than sales targets, should drive the work of pharmaceutical researchers. At the same time, physics innovations like LK-99 should stem from curiosity about natural laws rather than the pursuit of recognition. Such intellectual whimsy leads engineers to consider broader implications and perfect their innovations before rushing them to market. The essential question guiding any engineering endeavor should not be “Will this advance my career?” but “What discoveries await in this creative process?”
However, pursuing knowledge can be dangerous when unchecked by moral considerations. Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film Oppenheimer powerfully illustrates this by portraying theoretical physicist Oppenheimer’s journey [4]. Initially driven by scientific curiosity, Oppenheimer and his team of passionate physicists channeled their expertise into the first nuclear explosion in the Manhattan Project. However, after the devastating blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer’s subsequent haunting visions reveal the consequences of unbridled scientific pursuit. This cautionary tale finds a modern echo in the LK-99 superconductor controversy, where the rush to achieve a breakthrough led to premature and false claims. Fraudulent claims, like the LK-99 incident, demonstrate how unchecked scientific zeal can generate false hope and wasted resources. These examples underscore why other moral restraints, such as compassion and rigor, must bind to the love of knowledge to ensure its positive application.
Compassion
An engineer must be compassionate. Engineers face conflicts between maintaining objectivity and caring for those affected by their work. As Schmidt notes in “Risk and Virtue Ethics,” this conflict raises a crucial question: “Is it possible for engineers to exhibit genuine care for the people affected by their work while not experiencing any feelings toward them whatsoever? Can we be completely indifferent and still ‘hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public’…?” [5]
The solution lies in understanding compassion’s role in engineering. Genuine compassion goes beyond mere sympathy – it requires understanding the conditions and contexts that shape people’s decisions. Through this deeper understanding, engineers can achieve both objectivity and care. To be objective, engineers must comprehend how different circumstances influence human behavior and decision-making. Similarly, genuine care emerges from this thorough understanding of others’ situations. Thus, compassion serves as the foundation for both virtues, enabling engineers to make decisions that are both technically sound and humanely considered.
Rigor
An engineer should be rigorous, a virtue that operates on multiple levels. At its foundation, rigor means respecting the scientific method, trusting scientific institutions, and following established protocols. It also entails having faith in the rules of science as a positive guiding force toward the common good. Rigor breeds integrity and transparency, making documentation, standardization, and communication essential rather than bureaucratic burdens. These practices ensure that scientific knowledge remains accessible and valuable to the broader community.
While engineers must work within rigors defined by societal structures, this norm doesn’t diminish their moral agency. Instead, it describes the specific ways they can effect change beyond their systems. Rather than being powerless cogs in a machine, engineers exercise influence through their particular responsibilities. This agency becomes crucial in collaborative engineering environments, where diverse teams must work with precision and care. The 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter disaster exemplifies the consequences of insufficient rigor: the probe was lost due to a simple unit conversion error between American and metric measurements, resulting in significant scientific losses [6]. Engineers could have prevented this incident if they had stepped out of their isolated national systems and ensured consistent unit usage in international teams. Such incidents demonstrate how engineering decisions can have far-reaching implications, potentially affecting human lives when applied to crewed missions. Therefore, engineering rigor is not merely a technical necessity but a moral imperative to advance technologies and protect those affected by engineering outcomes.
Conclusion:
Engineers are responsible for improving human lives with scientific principles, which requires three essential virtues: joy, compassion, and rigor. Joy drives engineers to creative innovations. Compassion validates these innovations and ensures that they serve human needs. Rigor provides a systematic approach to disseminating the inventions. These virtues could motivate novel advances in sustainable nuclear fusion, superluminal transportation, or room-temperature superconductivity beyond LK-99. By cultivating these qualities in the next generation of engineers, humanity will achieve unprecedented scientific breakthroughs and usher in a golden age of progress.
By Stefano Corno, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California
About the Author:
At the time of writing this paper, Stefano was a junior studying Mathematics and Computer Science. One day, he hopes to design computer architecture for AI applications.