I was always told that Engineers are scientists with thumbs and engineers defiantly do do scientific experiments - as we did at my first Job.
Science vs. Engineering
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Re: Science vs. Engineering
#12Re: Science vs. Engineering
#13science is about 'why', while engineering is about 'how'.
Re: Science vs. Engineering
#14Could someone parse the following heading for me, please? "Trendy teaching as confusing science for engineering" (I'm not a native English speaker)
It means teaching according to the latest (scientific) trends/discoveries as opposed to teaching what provably works.
Re: Science vs. Engineering
#15The easiest way I found to describe the differences between science and engineering (and I think about this fairly often) is by analogy with learning how to drive a (manual) car. There are a few key skills one needs to master to be able to drive a car through any kind of circuit: from the basics, such as shifting up and down and the appropriate times, to drifting at will. Given enough time and "research", people can…
I don't really know, computer science seems concerned with equipping the student with the best tools to solve a problem, and mastery in the creation of them. Computer engineering concerns itself with similar concepts, but at a lower level of abstraction. It's still not EE, which is lower still.
I studied computer/electrical engineering for part of my undergrad, and computer science for my masters. The biggest difference I recognized was the level of abstraction. Each has it's own maths, systems of reasoning and analysis.
Re: Science vs. Engineering
#16Engineering, in contrast, is the technique of using science to produce tools we can consistently use in the world. Semantically, wouldn't one call a neanderthaler creating/perfecting a useful tool an engineer as well, even though science was not really used directly?
Science is a great tool to improve greatly our understanding about how the world works, but it's not necessary to know SOME facts.
Stone age people were smart, and they knew that things go down, some materials are harder than others and a pointing object hurts. Engineering is the process of using that to build a construction like Newgrange or a spear to hunt. Making use of your understanding of the world to take advantage of the medium.
Science just allows you to greatly increase the understanding of the world, in a more precise manner and at a faster pace. You learn properties of rocks (science) that can be used to infer newer materials, lighter and more resistant than others (engineering), or to predict with more precision star movements (science) and allow you better navigation through sea (engineering).
Re: Science vs. Engineering
#17science is about 'why', while engineering is about 'how'.
Generally accepted philosophy of science is positivism, which states that 'why' in general is unanswerable and we should satisfy ourselves with descriptions. Therefore science is more about precise descriptions and their predictive power.
Re: Science vs. Engineering
#18Engineering, in contrast, is the technique of using science to produce tools we can consistently use in the world. Semantically, wouldn't one call a neanderthaler creating/perfecting a useful tool an engineer as well, even though science was not really used directly?
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Re: Science vs. Engineering
#19https://xkcd.com/242/
Not really directly related to the OP (sorry), but I have always wondered how the hell people manage to remember the right xkcd. Awesome :)
Re: Science vs. Engineering
#20"Imagine trying to build a device based on the information that acceleration due to gravity is probably between 9 and 13 m/s^2" Software engineering must be a special case. Half of it is about handling uncertain states and preparing for unknown future uses.
Actually, this is where I stopped reading because in my opinion the author gets it exactly backwards.
Engineers need to build things with safety thresholds. Most devices will probably experience situations where it is accelerating at a greater rate than just that due to gravity. Engineers work in a messy world without controls and try their best to deal with non-ideal scenarios. They live in a world where a cow often cannot be idealized as a sphere. Because of this, the precise acceleration often doesn't matter, what matters is that the device works exactly within some range of operating environments. Only in cases of metrology do engineering devices need precise measures of external factors.
Meanwhile, scientists need precise measurements of environmental influences because they seek to eliminate them from experiments. otherwise, the signal cannot be distinguished from the noise. That is why the mass of an electron is known to an exaggerated precision, not because an engineer needs to build a device for it, but because (gross simplification) the precision is needed to be able to subtract electron related signals from the Higgs boson signal.