Engineering should *NEVER* involve intuition. Engineering does not
require
exact answers as long as you have error bars but the second that you
revert
to intuition and guesses, it is *NOT* engineering anymore.
Well, we may be using the word "intuition" differently.
Given your examples, we are.
I'll give a very simple example of intuition, based on the only
Not too interesting, but rigorous.
Yeah. Generally if it's rigorous, it's not considered intuition.
However, one wouldn't bother to use this formula if the soil was too
different
in composition from the soil around Vegas. So in reality the civil
engineer uses
some intuition to decide whether the soil is close enough to the right
kind of soil,
to use our formula.
Now this *could* be made more rigorous, too ... in principle ... but in
practice
it isn't.
I would have phrased this as "The civil engineer uses some simple rules of
thumb . . . . " which tend to be pretty well established and where they do
and do not apply also tend to be pretty well established to. I've never
really heard the word intuition used to describe this.
And so, maybe some houses fall down ;-)
But not many do. The combination of rigorous formulas applying to
restrictive
cases, together with intuition telling you where to apply what formulas,
works
OK.
Yeah, you seem to be using the word intuition where I use the words "rules
of thumb". An interesting distinction and one that we probably should both
remember . . . .
-------------------------------------------
agi
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