21–30 of 57 posts
The 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…
Engineering lacks such rigid definition. I've thought about it a lot, and I think deep down engineering is always optimization.
If you invent a new need for people and fill it with a toy, that would be marketing. But if you solve previously solved problem better, that's engineering. You got closer to the optimum, even though the way you solved might be described as "invention". So engineering inventions would be just leaps in optimization.
Now if you optimize economical or cultural stuff, that would not be engineering. So engineering is "optimization of technology".
I do not think "engineering" as a term should be expanded to the fields this article suggests. The term started off as "art of building of siege engines". And so far we don't have "sales-engineering". It's called marketing and it works pretty good considering there is big human factor everywhere. Medicine is good term too. These fields are just naturally more difficult to squeeze accurate data out.
I think the best model how to deal with the human factor comes from medicine. Rigorous meta-analysis is pretty solid. If we import the way tech or natural science is researched, that would be: "just use better instruments and measure more carefully". Which is pretty obvious dead. Because you will just get more expensive studies that still disagree with each other.
Could someone parse the following heading for me, please? "Trendy teaching as confusing science for engineering" (I'm not a native English speaker)
The quote consists of seven words, where a word in this context is a lexical unit that consists of alphanumeric characters, and the words are separated by some kind of whitespace.
science 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.
In short, hypotheses are the key instruments to investigate into unknown(and hopefully, consistent) world.
"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…
Have s look at an IC engine and the tolerances required for an engine to work.
Let alone say correctly designing nuclear rectors to handle two phase flow in its cooling loops.
Engineering, 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?
Chomsky said some interesting things about science’s impact on engineering/medicine: “Until very recently engineers learned from the sciences, but most of what they knew was craft. The crafts were so much more advanced than theoretical understanding that the engineers worked like artists. You know, you learned how to do it. Physics didn’t really get to contribute to engineering theory until fairly recently. In fact,…
Science is commonly defined as usage of scientific method. So science is just trying to find truth with the best possible tools. Nothing more and nothing less. I think here is the common and problematic misconception. Scientists are saying "look, we used the best tools" and people are hearing "hey, we found the truth!". But science is not about the destination, it's all about the journey. Engineering lacks such rigid…
https://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 :)
If you know what you're doing, it's engineering; if not it's science. ~ Richard Hamming