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SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS

Read the following text and answer the questions below:

1) Is there any difference between an engineer and a scientist?

2) What is the way that connects engineering and science?
3) What is common about engineering and science?

4) When may an engineer become a scientist?
5) What is the main difference between engineering and science?

“Scientists study the world as it is;

engineers create the world that has never been.”

Theodore von Kármán

There exists a specific connection between the sciences and engineering practice. In engineering, people apply science. Both areas - science and engineering - rely on accurate observation of materials and phenomena. Both use mathematics and classification criteria to analyze and communicate observations.

Scientists must interpret their observations and make recommendations for practical action. Scientists may also have to complete engineering tasks, such as designing experimental apparatus or building prototypes. On the other hand, in the process of developing technology engineers sometimes explore new phenomena and become scientists themselves.

In the book What Engineers Know and How They Know It, Walter Vincenti says that engineering research differs from scientific research. First, it often deals with areas in which the basic physics and/or chemistry are well understood, but the problems themselves are too complex to solve in an exact manner. Examples are the use of numerical approximations to the Navier-Stokes equations to describe aerodynamic flow over an aircraft, or the use of Miner's rule to calculate fatigue damage. Second, engineering research employs many semi-empirical methods that are too far from pure scientific research, one example being the method of parameter variation.

As stated in the revision to the classic engineering text, Foundations of Solid Mechanics: "Engineering is quite different from science. Scientists try to understand nature. Engineers try to make things that do not exist in nature. Engineers stress invention. To embody an invention the engineer must put his idea in concrete terms, and design something that people can use. That something can be a device, a gadget, a material, a method, a computing program, an innovative experiment, a new solution to a problem, or an improvement on what is existing. Since a design has to be concrete, it must have its geometry, dimensions, and characteristic numbers. Almost all engineers working on new designs find that they do not have all the needed information. Most often, they are limited by insufficient scientific knowledge. Thus they study mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and mechanics. Often they have to add to the sciences relevant to their profession. Thus, engineering sciences are born."

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