Engineering and Science

Similarities and Differences

by

Lawrence Kamm

Consulting Engineer

It is the conventional wisdom of laymen that if you want a really great engineer you get a scientist. For example, the presidential commission investigating the Challenger disaster included the great theoretical physicist Dr. Richard Feynman, but no engineers. As a result Dr. Feynman, who never heard of O-rings before, was successfully misled in a cover-up and the public never found out that the failure was due to engineering negligence, a dimension error in the O-ring grooves, and not to low temperature.

One should no more call upon a scientist to explain why a machine does not work properly than to call upon an engineer to explain a nuclear phenomenon.

What's The Difference?

Engineering is neither better nor worse than science, but it is different.

The basic objective of science is to discover the composition and behavior of the physical world, the "laws of nature" (better described as the "facts of nature" - they are not the result of legislation.)

The basic objective of engineering is to design useful things.

Since useful things must "obey" the laws of nature, engineers study science. And since observing nature requires certain useful things - scientific instruments - experimental scientists do a good deal of engineering. In practice, the work of real-world scientists and real-world engineers overlap to some degree. Experimental scientists "do" engineering in designing the hardware of their experiments and some engineers "do" scientific experiments in developing new useful things. In some areas, such as semi-conductor research, scientists and engineers work together in an undistinguishable way; the boundaries between the two activities are blurred and unimportant.

"Theoretical" scientists and "theoretical" engineers do not perform experiments but think and calculate based on the data produced by experimental scientists and engineers. Some engineers and scientists do both.

The training of scientists and engineers are similar but different. Both learn basic science and the associated mathematics. (A "useful thing" must conform to the laws of nature or the thing will not be useful.)

Scientists learn more advanced science so they can further advance science. Most study until they achieve a Ph.D. so they are qualified to make further discoveries.

Engineers study subjects which are specifically useful in designing useful things but are, for the most part, not useful to scientists. Examples are the strength of beams and the performance of motors. Most engineers are qualified for useful work without reaching the Ph.D. in college but most scientists achieve the Ph.D.