adamwest

these are all well thought out and articulated answers. I brought up the topic to my boss this afternoon (whom btw is a phd in chem). In his mind, a person cannot be classified as either. You must be willing to be practical in your quest to design and fabricate the ideal test environment and willing to accept that a certain amount of error will result from any real world environment. Quantifying expected error and understanding what is an acceptable tolerance is an engineering concept. But the knowledge gained through experimentation and data interpretation is all science. one hand washes the other

Thanks for the input guys. Kaeroll: That it actually very much still a problem. We use many centrifuges. The larger, pint volume centrifuges, are very safe. I have never heard of anything going wrong. They usually spin at lower RPM and are great for solvent washing. Ultracentrifuges however are still very much dangerous. The guy who operates ours uses a flak jacket when using it. Essentially, if the rack isnt balanced to within a few mg in each centrifuge tube (think short test tube) the whole thing will flail wildly off tilt. As far as I know we havnt had a single real accident, but Ive been warned to stay the heck away from it.

Hi all. I recently graduated from college with a degree in engineering. After six months of unemployment I got hired by a science company as a ‘research associate’. It was what was available, that was paying acceptably. My roles vary, it is a small company, but essentially I am responsible for physically evaluating materials in a scientific manor. I have to rig up test setups all the time, so I’m not sure whether to call myself an engineer or a scientist. That type of engineer is even called ‘material science’. I know how to program, I’ve automated the whole data analysis portion of the work which has cut down the analysis times dramatically. I guess what I take from this is that science and engineering overlap extensively. The groups probably only differ in their motivation for experimentation. The methods of observation, application of theory and formulas, and the general common sense approach to problem solving are essential attributes to both fields. Im some ways its symbiotic. An engineer provides the tangible assets(programming, physical construction) while the scientists attempts to explain your results in a way that correlates with our previous body of knowledge about the domain. Any thoughts about what makes scientists different from engineers?