I hesitated.
“Because failures can affect people when they're vulnerable.”
She nodded.
“That's a good reason to care.”
I smiled.
Then she became serious.
“But caring about an application doesn't make the engineering correct.”
I laughed nervously.
“I know.”
She raised one eyebrow.
“Do you?”
Then she pointed toward a diagram.
“Explain why you think this heat-transfer model is appropriate.”
For the next hour, she challenged almost every assumption in my proposal.
I left exhausted.
And strangely excited.
For the first time in months, someone had examined my ideas closely enough to find their weaknesses without dismissing the underlying purpose.
I worked hard.
Not always successfully.
Some experiments failed.
Some simulations contradicted our expectations.
Several materials performed well under one set of conditions and poorly under another.
But Professor Lin believed careful failure was part of serious research.
She taught us to document results honestly.
To distinguish measured performance from projected performance.
And never to turn a promising laboratory result into an extravagant commercial claim.
That last lesson became particularly important.
Investors loved dramatic numbers.
They wanted large efficiency improvements.
Lower costs.
Longer operating life.
And immediate commercial readiness.
But engineering progress rarely followed a straight line.
A prototype could work brilliantly in one environment and require years of development before it could be manufactured reliably.
I learned to resist the temptation to exaggerate.
The idea that eventually became my patented invention had begun before I arrived in Taiwan.
During my final undergraduate years, I developed a conceptual arrangement for passive heat transport using a patterned channel structure and specially selected materials.
The concept wasn't commercially ready.
My first independent prototype was disappointing.
But I kept detailed records.
Dated drawings.