Mechanical engineering traces its roots to the math and physics of Newton, the sketches of da Vinci, the power of the steam engine and the exuberance of the Wright brothers’ epic flight.

Far from resting on its laurels, however, this discipline has evolved to solve modern problems in health, energy and transportation. But perceptions have not necessarily kept pace with reality.

“There is a traditional view that ME is about cars, robots and thermodynamic cycles, and this is true up to a point, but we’re so much more than that,” says Ken Goodson, chair of mechanical engineering at Stanford.

Far from basking in past glories, today’s mechanical engineers tell stories across a huge span of length scales, as big and as small as they can imagine.

“When you look under the hood,” Goodson says, “you see all this macro, micro and nano work that’s being integrated throughout what we do.”

Some mechanical engineers design the blades of massive turbine engines for jets, film the beating wings of birds in flight or study blood flows through the heart. Others track interactions between cells, tinker with the atomic structures of batteries or, as Goodson’s own research lab exemplifies, invent nanoscale cooling strategies to keep the ever-shrinking transistor from overheating.

“We still do the big stuff we are famous for, but if you go into some of our labs you’ll see people using electron microscopes, or doing small-scale things that you might have imagined in a medical school or in a cutting-edge bio, chemistry or physics lab.”

The spine of mechanical engineering is a deep understanding of the forces that govern the behavior of components and systems, forces with magnitudes that scale up or down relative to size. Insights into mechanics and materials, dynamics and controls, design and manufacturing, all apply to systems large and small alike. Studies of fluids and heat, also known as the thermal sciences, are as relevant today at the nanoscale as at they are the macroscale.