Let's assume that you, the reader, have been educated in the basics of science and perhaps some branch of engineering. You have access to textbooks and handbooks, and you are comfortable with a computer. One day, you find yourself faced with a technical problem. If this problem happens to be essentially identical to a previous problem, which you were trained to solve, clearly you will have no difficulty. Unfortunately, however, the variety of technical problems that you might encounter is enormous. The chance is small that a given problem will be an exact replica of a familiar problem. In...