The third eye of science

The diminished status of the engineering profession in the United States between the 1930s and the 1960s led engineers to make a limited attempt to set the record straight. Important forums were created —the Society for the History of Technology, for example— to examine concepts that had long been accepted almost automatically. In a little more than thirty years, considerable progress was made in clarifying what science and technology are, how they evolved historically, how they relate to one another, how they participate in innovation and technical change, and how their forms of knowledge differ. One basic point became clear: technology is not simply “applied science,” and technological knowledge is different from scientific knowledge. It is this last distinction that concerns us particularly here.

When considering the importance of engineers, their significance is not quantitative but strongly qualitative. In the United States and Europe, engineers account for less than one percent of the population. Yet because they are the people who design —that is, invent— airplanes, highways, bridges, automobiles, telephone systems, hydraulic systems, heating and air-conditioning systems, computers and television networks, all of which directly influence everyday life, their impact is far greater than their numbers would suggest.

Engineers are generally reluctant to acknowledge their social influence and resist the idea that they exercise political influence. They tend to see themselves as people who simply follow orders, including those given by governments. Yet it is often engineers who prepare the list of options from which politicians ultimately choose. A few examples are enough to illustrate this. In 1961, when Kennedy decided to put a man on the Moon in order to overtake the Soviets, he was choosing from a menu that NASA technologists had already prepared for him. A few years earlier, television films produced by Walt Disney had brought some of the ideas of Wernher von Braun and his team to the public. One of them, “Man in Space,” was requested by President Eisenhower so that he could watch it with senior Pentagon officials. Von Braun immediately understood how important that screening could be. In 1968, as Apollo was preparing to travel to the Moon, he called the producer and told him: “Well, it looks like they are following our instructions…”.

From an engineering point of view, scholars argue, design —the intentional adaptation of means to achieve a preconceived end— is the essential activity. To design is, of course, to invent. An engineer who brings elements together in new combinations relies above all on a visual process, mentally manipulating devices or machines that do not yet exist. Before something can become real, it must first exist as an idea. Through their countless choices and decisions, technologists have helped determine, in a physical sense, the kind of world in which we live. Pyramids and cathedrals do not exist because of geometry, structural theory or thermodynamics, but because they first existed as representations, literally as “visions,” in the minds of the people who conceived them.

The mind’s eye is therefore essential to every kind of technological invention and development. But its importance is not confined to technology. Historians of science have documented many cases of great scientists whose thinking was strongly nonverbal and who approached their research through models and mechanical analogies. Albert Einstein said that he rarely thought in words. He had to work hard to translate his visual and “muscular” images into conventional verbal and mathematical language. Richard Feynman, the celebrated theoretical physicist, argued that Einstein failed in his later attempts to develop a “unified theory” because he “stopped thinking in concrete physical pictures and became a manipulator of equations.”

In reality, the “mind’s eye,” the locus of our remembered and imagined reality, is, as Ferguson shows, an organ of extraordinary capacity and subtlety that all of us possess to a greater or lesser degree. It gathers and interprets far more than the information that enters through our eyes. It is where a lifetime of sensory information —visual, tactile, muscular, visceral, auditory, olfactory and gustatory— is stored and interconnected. An ordinary experience helps illustrate this: driving a car through traffic and maneuvering to pass another vehicle on a busy highway involves instantaneous, largely unconscious judgments about positions, relative speeds and the influence of a large number of moving and stationary objects. The mind’s eye combines what our physical eyes see with our sense of where we are located in the surrounding space. Verbal thought can succeed only to the extent that the thinker possesses an adequate set of sensory experiences that the mind’s eye has transformed into usable visual information.