Many objects in daily use have clearly been influenced by science, but their form and function, their dimensions and appearance were determined by technologists, artisans, designers, inventors, and engineers--using nonscientific modes of thought. Many features and qualities of the objects that a technologist thinks about cannot be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt with in the mind by a visual, nonverbal process. ①In the development of Western technology, it has he en nonverbal thinking, by and large, that has fixed the outlines and filled in the details; and rockets exist not because of geometry or thermodynamics (热力学), but because they were first a picture in the minds of those who built them.
The creative shaping process of a technologist’s mind can be seen in nearly every artifact that exists. For example, in designing a diesel engine, a technologist might impress individual ways of nonverbal thinking on the machine by continually using an intuitive sense of rightness and fitness. What would be the shape of the combustion chamber Where should the valves be placed Should it have a long or short piston Such questions have a range of answers that are supplied by experience, by physical requirements, by limitations of available space, and not least by a sense of form. Some decisions, such as wall thickness and pin diameter, may depend on scientific calculations, but the nonscientific component of design remains primary.
Design courses, then, should be an essential element in engineering curricula. Nonverbal thinking, a central mechanism in engineering design, involves perceptions, the stock in trade of the artist, not the scientist. ②Because perceptive processes are not assumed to entail. "hard thinking", nonverbal thought is sometimes seen as a primitive stage in the development of cognitive processes and infeiror to verbal or mathematical thought, ③But it is paradoxical that when the staff of the Historic American Engineering Record wished to have drawings made of machines and isometric(等比例 的)views of industrial processes for its historical record of American engineering, the only college students with the requisite abilities were not engineering students, but rather students attending architectural schools.
④If courses in design, which in a strong]y ytial engineering curriculum provide the backgound required" for practical problem solving, are not provided, we can expect to encounter silly but costly enors gccurring in advanced engineering systems. For example, early models of high-speed railroad cars loaded with high-tech controls were unable to operate in a snowstorm because the fan ed snow into the electrical system. ⑤Absurd random failures that plague automatic control systems are not merely trivital aberrations(失常); they are a reflection of the chaos that results when design is assumed to be primarily a prgblem in mathematics:
Which of the following does the author seem to be in agreement with