So, one question to ask ourselves is, what is engineering? How do we define, what is engineering? Well, the definition I like to use is one put forth by Steve Senturia, one of our professors who is now retired.

He defined engineering to be the purposeful use of science. All right, so what is 6.002 about? So, 6.002 is a first course in engineering. And I like to view 6.002 as the gainful employment of Maxwell's equations.

Many of you have seen Maxwell's equations before. Most of you should have. And they are hard stuff. 6.002 is all about teaching you how to simplify our lives, make things simple. So, if you can gainfully employ Maxwell's equations, gainfully employ the facts of nature to build very interesting systems.

So let me show you how the transition is made. So, there's a world around us, nature, so we made some observations in nature. We make measurements, and we can write down large tables of measurements.

So, for example, we can take objects and measure the voltage across them, and look at the resulting current through the elements. So, we may end up getting a bunch of values such as [CHALKBOARD]. So, we start out life with making measurements on what exists.

And we build a bunch of tables. Now, we could directly take these tables, and based on observations of these tables, we could go ahead and build very interesting engineering systems that help us out in day-to-day lives.

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But that's incredibly hard. Imagine having to resort to a set of tables to do any kind of useful work. So what we do as engineers, we first layer a level of abstraction. We look at all the data, and somehow layer abstraction such that we can simplify or much more succinctly put in a simple equation or a simple statement what these numbers are telling us.

OK, so for example, our physics laws, so laws of physics for example are simply abstractions, the laws of abstractions. So, these sets of numbers can be codified by Ohm's law, for example, V is equal to RI, the voltage current, relates to the resistance of the object.

So, V is equal to RI is a law that succinctly describes a set of experiments, and replaces a large number of tables with a very simple statement. You could call this the law, or you could call it an abstraction.

OK so you see laws of physics, call them abstractions of physics if you like. Similarly, there are Maxwell's equations and so on and so forth. So, this is what is. This is what's out there. OK, and a law as an abstraction describe the properties of nature.......

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