My kid - BS in Aero Eng, MS in Mechatronics/systems/or something - has a t-shirt that says this. I THINK the equation is something about fluid dynamics.
When he was finding something difficult, we’d say, “C’mon, it isn’t rocket science!” And he’d reply, “I know. If it were, I could DO it!”
One time I looked over his schedule, filled w/ math classes, and asked how much math he had to take. His response, “All of it, dad - ALL of it!”
And of course we have the expert opinion that, “Rockets are tricky!”
Since school he has been consistently employed by a rocket manufacturer, and now by a satellite manufacturer. Pretty sure by now he would call himself a quality engineer or something. Less sexy, but more marketable.
I guess this is a long way to say, call it what you want. Whether it is “science” or “engineering,” it is way beyond me!
I know this is an old thread, but that’s the point. Google Books and ngrams weren’t around back then.
I did a search and found that the phrase “not rocket science” used metaphorically was almost unheard of before 1990. The earliest date I could confirm was 1987. (There are a couple of dozen earlier dates. All are either misdated, second editions of earlier works, or snippits from magazines. Google dates a magazine snippit from the first issue in the bound library volume that it scans. That date is worthless for knowing the true date.)
“Not brain surgery” appears at roughly the same time. I did find one example from 1983 but the rest start very late 1980s.
These aren’t the earliest uses, of course. But going through the internet doesn’t help your case. Not rocket science can’t be found before 1985. Not brain surgery has a newspaper use in 1971 and some say it can be found in the 1960s.
Yeah, a 1985 date is much later than I would have expected. But language is often funny that way.
Actually that rang a bell… at the time that the “rocket science” term was likely coined during the Space Race between the US/USSR, it was sort of a weird blend of the two- it was both a lot of pure science AND a lot of hardcore engineering going on as well. So to the average layman it was all science, even if some was more strictly speaking engineering experimentation and testing. And it was widely perceived as very difficult stuff and also as very new stuff, as it was in its infancy in the 1920s, an awkward teenager in the 1940s and 1950s, and finally came into young adulthood in the 1960s.
Even now, it’s not easy engineering; look at how much SpaceX blows up, and they have the benefit of a lot of information from the earlier space program research. NASA and the missile manufactureres blew up even more stuff in the 1950s and 1960s in the process of figuring it out.
I am neither an engineer nor a rocket scientist, but I will contribute my understanding of the phrase. I always interpreted “Rocket Science” as really two things. An unusual form of engineering where the designers deliberately reduce safety margins to a minimum in an effort to save weight and increase performance. Not the usual approach for most engineers! And applying scientific research to cutting edge engineering. Things like figuring out the details of turbulent flow of high temperature high pressure combustion. So, it is a shorthand way of saying something is deliberately as hard as possible. Taking the easy way is rarely an acceptable choice.
At least that is how I have always interpreted the phrase.
I’ll admit I can’t offer counterexamples but this doesn’t seem right. I feel I remember hearing about the difficulty of rocket science back when I was growing up, which was long before the eighties. It’s also a poor fit historically; rocket science was a cutting edge field in the fifties and sixties but it was taken for granted by the eighties. If you were inventing an idiom to show how smart somebody was in the eighties you’d use computer hacking not rocket science.
I did some online searching and found some sites which claim the phrase first appeared in 1985. They cite a sports article in a newspaper, The Daily Intelligencer of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, which said, “Coaching football is not rocket science and it’s not brain surgery. It’s a game, nothing more.”
These sites said that the idiom brain surgery had been in use since the sixties (and I’ve found cites to back this up) which undermines the claim that rocket science was a new idiom. The context of the line indicates that the writer saw rocket science and brain surgery as two equivalent idioms; he apparently assumed both were familiar to his readers. He wouldn’t have invented a new idiom and placed it next to an established one.
I wish Sam Clements still posted. He was our go-to for word histories.
Nevertheless, it’s telling that nobody can find a pre-1985 usage of “not rocket science.” So even if one earlier usage suddenly appeared, we’d need to ask why it’s missing for all the years in between. It’s a puzzle.
Speaking as someone who as known some brain surgeons, and bio-medical engineers, and engineers from Seattle ----
You got that the wrong way around. Brain surgery isn’t Rocket Science.
Brain surgery is very careful work (even boring if you aren’t up for it), sometimes involving shift work and emergency call-outs, but it’s not tremendously intellectual
