p.xi This book is about the universal method. It is about
what you do, what I do, what every human has done at every minute of every day since the birth of humanity. Would
you change any aspect of your world? If so, you need a universal method to guide you along the steps you must take.
p.1 You and I are participating in a magnificent experiment to see whether Nature's latest wrinkle, the
human species armed with its new weapon, intelligence, has survival value.
p.28 A heuristic is anything that provides a plausible aid or direction in the solution
of a problem but is in the final analysis unjustified, incapable of justification, and potentially fallible.
p.49 The individual engineer, in his role as engineer, is defined by the set of heuristics he uses in
his work, including the heuristics he has learned in school, developed by experience, and gleaned from the physical
world around him... No two engineers are alike.
p.61 As we have already have seen, the engineer's best solution to a problem is found by trade-offs in a
multivariant space in which criteria and weighting coefficients are the context that determines the optimal solution. There
is never an implication that a true, rational answer even exists. The answer the engineer gives is never the answer
to a problem, but it is his engineering best answer to the problem he is given - all things considered.
p.62 Specifically, I claim that: 1. The engineering solution to a problem has no reality
apart from the heuristics used to obtain it, and 2. Everything in engineering is a heuristic.
p.67 The engineer uses hundreds of these simple heuristics in his work, and the set he uses is a fingerprint
that uniquely identifies him.
p.94 The engineering method is the use of heuristics to cause the best change in a poorly understood
situation within the available resources.
