Rapporteur's paper

Six of the seven papers to the Session on Tunnels concern tunnels in rock and only one deals with tunnels in soft ground. This in my view gives an unbalanced view of the relative importance of tunnelling in hard and soft ground and an attempt will be made to redress this matter.

But first some thoughts on why we instrument and make measurements in the first place. Measurement has always been a part of engineering with science becoming more involved from the 17th Century onwards.

It is useful then to consider how science has permeated engineering and understand the strong links and similarity of attitudes in these two disciplines. The following quotations from Bernal (ref. 1) in his Science in History provide much insight into the matter: