Elon seems to really want to get involved in this. Make no mistake, Boeing and SpaceX are fierce competitors for government contracts with very dubious selection processes.
I'm saying this because he is a businessman, not an engineer. He seems to be getting a lot of information about the 787s batteries inner workings when the number of airplanes and suppliers are very limited.
Edit: I'm not trying to be cynical, but I do think that if Elon really wanted to help he should contact Boeing and do it instead of playing politics.
My understanding is that Elon Musk, a physicist by education, is indeed an engineer and was very hands on in the engineering processes at SpaceX, so I'd assume he wasn't out of the technical loop that led to design decisions at Tesla.
I did a BSc in Physics. I consider myself a Physicist by education, just as I consider Musk to be. You are trained to be a Physicist whether you pursue a career in that field or not. As I mentioned on a post recently talking about research projects, my final year project in 1995, without going into too much detail, was modeling the expansion of the universe assuming a non-zero cosmological constant and tracing the paths of light through such an expanding/contracting/whatever universe, depending on assumed values, and studying the likely distribution of hydrogen absorption lines as it passed through a posited foam-like structure of walls and filaments of matter. This was a relatively off the wall topic at the time, but for anyone studying Physics today you'll know a lot of these things now represent the state of thinking in many ways. People might pursue these topics to a much deeper level in order to get a Masters or PhD but you still need to be a Physicist at any level to dive into such a project and produce a result.
At least that's my 2c - it's all just semantics, and as such there are many possible answers here :-)
By law, no one can practise as a "professional engineer" in Canada or the United States without a licence. The BS is just one part of becoming a professional engineer.
Right. A bit like an artist. You don't need an advanced degree in art to be an accomplished artist. Plus the idea of formalized education with narrowly focused advanced degrees is fairly recent, and for most of the history of the discipline Physicists have not been so qualified.
"I'm saying this because he is a businessman, not an engineer."
Musk is the Chief Designer at Space-X, Product Architect at Tesla Motors, and a member of the Stanford University Engineering Advisory Board. He has previously served as a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board. - Wikipedia.
No, but he has a bachelor's in physics along with his business degree. And from personal experience I can say that if you hang around enough with engineers you pick up a lot of things.
Naval Architecture, that's fascinating! That's Naval Architecture as in ship hulls or decks, not harbors etc?
Have to say, I poked around at a number of PE certification links first and found a lot of state PE offices linked with Land Surveying. Other sources like wikipedia note that PE certs in the US exempt many interstate industries such as Mechanical, Chemical, and Aerospace Engineering.
Yeah that's the only kind of PE I've met. As a profession they do not impress. These guys are incapable of imagining anything they haven't done before a hundred times, let alone doing it and putting their seal on it.
Generally speaking, you don't want creative processes for the construction of overpasses, highways, and building construction. You want something that is structurally sound, safe for the application in question, and of a design suitable to being bid on by multiple contractors.
I can't say that I blame them, if I recall correctly, putting their seal on it implies the assumption of legal liability for the fitness of the design by the PE. Under those circumstances, I would make strongly conservative decisions too.
Then there's that small matter of his founding an electric car company that uses Lithium Ion batteries. Oh and the rocket company. I can't imagine many people more qualified to talk about LiIon and aerospace.
I'm saying this because he is a businessman, not an engineer. He seems to be getting a lot of information about the 787s batteries inner workings when the number of airplanes and suppliers are very limited.
Edit: I'm not trying to be cynical, but I do think that if Elon really wanted to help he should contact Boeing and do it instead of playing politics.