At the entrance to almost any office building in Colombia, a notebook is waiting. A person arriving with a laptop must stop, write down the brand, the serial number, their name and the time, and only then can they move on toward the elevator. Nobody believes that this record protects anything, neither those who demand it nor those who comply with it, and yet it is repeated in companies, public agencies, universities and clinics across the country, every day, with an almost religious obedience. The ritual has no owner, nobody audits it and nobody remembers who decided it, yet nobody dares to abolish it, because eliminating a control looks like a personal risk, whereas keeping it costs nothing to the person who keeps it. That small notebook sums up, in one square meter of reception area, a deep trait of Colombian society: the conviction that what is difficult is, for that very reason, what is right. This trait is cultural before it is legal. It is learned in offices, in schools and in fa...

  The landing of the first man on the Moon is the best demonstration of what a society can achieve when it understands the world and transforms it. Hundreds of thousands of people, with tools far more modest than today's, took human beings all the way there and brought them back safe and sound. None of it was an accident. It took deep knowledge, the ability to turn that knowledge into concrete solutions, and an enormous team that worked as a single unit toward a goal no one had ever imagined. That combination has a name: engineering, in the oldest sense of the word, the exercise of ingenuity. And in it lies the exceptional value of engineering, which resides not only in machines, bridges or rockets, but in the attitude that makes them possible. To engineer is to understand the world, to apply complex knowledge to real problems, and to build what did not exist before. The engineer starts from the conviction that reality can be known, that what is known can be turned into solut...