It touched a nerve with engineers because nobody listens to engineers and they’re getting completely sick of it. Engineers are paid to work things out on paper

It touched a nerve with engineers because nobody listens to engineers and they’re getting completely sick of it. Engineers are paid to work things out on paper and determine whether something will work or not. Bridges, airplanes, power distribution systems, those kinds of things. They don’t use arrogance, they use math. This isn’t particle physics - there are no “unknown unknowns” here that required a real world experiment. The economic infeasibility of solar roadways was an absolute slam dunk case. So now we have confirmation that it was, in fact a bad idea all along. What’s the reaction? “Well, nobody could have predicted this! We had to try.” No, you didn’t have to waste all that money, you could have just listened to competent people in the first place, who all predicted this. I mean, excuse the hyperbole, but you may as well applaud the audacity of launching Challenger in temperatures below the booster o-rings’ rated spec. Who knows? It could have worked!