1. Education. Little attention has been devoted to teaching NDE, or Nondestructive Evaluation, in engineering colleges, especially in Civil Engineering. This is surprising because if we want to solve the infrastructure problem with the related cost of trillions of dollars, the first step is nondestructive condition evaluation of the structures and this should start in engineering colleges. Such start could be based on on the engineering philosophy that use always the method that works best. Whether it is scientific or empirical or in between, that is secondary. A corollary is that any relationship taught, for NDE or others, should be (a) reliable, (b) simple, and (c) numerical. The application of these principles, however, is difficult because concrete is a multi-phase viscoelastic composite with high attenuation. This paper shows several approaches, how to reduce these difficulties. 2. Research. There has been tremendous advancement in materials science produced by the use of methods of physics and chemistry. These methods are called "scientific" methods, even when the original methods are simplified for engineering purposes. During the past decades there has been a strong movement also in cement and concrete technology to rate a method better if it is thought to be more "scientific." The problem with this way of thinking is that there is no acceptable definition of the term "scientific." What is scientific for a civil engineer is not scientific for a materials engineer, what is scientific for a materials engineer is not scientific for a physicist, let alone for a mathematician, etc. So, I propose to substitute the term "scientific" for the rating of a test method with the following principle: the better is supported a method by experience, the better the method. Examples from the NDE area and others, are presented to illustrate the principle.
