Often, designers and engineers launch into the design process without having any evidence that their concept will actually work. If they are unlucky, they might spend months working on a concept only to discover that their idea is fundamentally flawed when it comes to the testing phase.
This could have been thought through better
With a bit of common sense and a basic understanding of physics, such disasters can be avoided! By knowing a few simple equations such as Work = Force x Distance and by using educated guesses for the values, a realistic estimate can be obtained. Whilst this may not give you a totally accurate value, it can at least provides an order of magnitude.
This can tell you one of three things: It can completely rule out an idea, it can prove it beyond any doubt or it can keep it within the realms of possibility. It's true that certain things can only be determined through practical experimentation but in most cases, a few quick calculations can remove a lot of uncertainty.
In the talk, we were given a few example problems to apply this theory to. It was amazing that even by using figures that were just educated guesses, we could get very close to the correct answer. Also, the result could be drastically different from what you might expect. One such example was that if you took the entire human race and piled it up into a cone with sides sloped at 45 degrees, it would be just 1000m tall. For reference, that's smaller than Ben Nevis which stands at 1344m. Perhaps what was even more surprising was that the energy density of this cone would be higher than that of the sun!
I think it is often easy to be intimidated by the idea of using maths to solve problems. Many of us seem to have it hard-wired into our brain that even with simple calculations, maths is really difficult and should only be attempted by leading experts. In his demonstration, Ben Craven demonstrated that this is not the case.
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