The phrase “it’s not an exact science” often surprises me, mainly because nothing probably is. To an outside observer it may seem to be a craft of precision, but its practitioners know that if anything, science and engineering is fundamentally comprised of abstraction and approximation. The greatest engineering marvels, the most breathtaking scientific breakthroughs are nothing but an approximation with tolerances. A probability, that in all sense of practicality, the stated hypothesis is true. Engineers have a word for the process of approximation inherent in their design process; they call it “eyeballing it”. Slang for approximation a particular measurement that is perhaps too tedious, or too complicated to account for, and can be successfully approximated with little consequence to the overall system.
