engineer vs. scientist

[adamwest]

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?

[cameron marical]

i kind of consider myself both. im only 15. so im not reputably one{for you guys}, but really, i love to build things{engineer}, and i also love to think and try to come up with theorys for, well, anything of scientific need and interest{scientist}. so i just say im both. i think theyre really alot like two different versions of the same thing.

[CaptainPanic]

According to wikipedia (always a good start):

Science:

"Science (from the Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge" or "knowing") is the effort to discover and increase human understanding of how physical reality works."

Engineering:

Engineering is the discipline and profession of applying technical and scientific knowledge and utilizing natural laws and physical resources in order to design and implement materials, structures, machines, devices, systems, and processes that safely realize a desired objective and meet specified criteria.)

 

Please also check out these threads (about the same topic: engineer vs. scientist).

 

Thread 34829

Thread 38232 specifically on the topic of chemistry and chemical engineering.

 

Personally, I believe that engineering is a branch of science... So, this means that engineers are scientists, but scientists are not necessarily engineers. I explained why I think so in this, thread (thread 38471) post #25.

[Kaeroll]

When engineers build things, they work. I think that's the main difference...

[insane_alien]

When engineers build things, they work. I think that's the main difference...

 

more like when they don't work a lot more damage gets done. unless of course the objective was to do damage.

[Kaeroll]

more like when they don't work a lot more damage gets done.

Heh, or that.

 

Off-topic for a moment: heard an interesting anecdote the other day from a lecturer. Apparently he used to work with ultracentrifuges which were known to break, sending a hunk of metal (previous spinning at 100krpm in a vacuum) hurtling across the room. Thankfully it never happened to him. I'm guessing an engineer had a hand in that design then.

[Sisyphus]

so i just say im both.

 

And how do actual scientists and engineers feel about that?

[adamwest]

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.

[CharonY]

We had a UZ rotor ending up in a concrete wall. In the concrete wall of the adjoining room that is (though the wall dividing the room was not made of concrete).

 

Regarding engineers, I think there are different flavours of engineers (and no, I have not licked them). I would not necessarily characterize someone that "only" apply knowledge to do or build something a scientist (somewhat following the reasoning why technical staff are often not characterized as scientists).

 

Yet in many engineering projects problems have to be overcome and during that course new information may be generated. In that case it would be fall under the domain of science. Or joint projects between scientists and engineers. E.g. biologist and physicist that unravel how e.g. insects walk and engineers that build a functional model out of that, that in turn may be used to improve predictive models and so on.

Edited March 18, 2009 by CharonY

[Mokele]

I've actually got degrees in both science and engineering, and IMHO, there's definitely differences in mindset and methods.

 

Engineers tend to be more focused on finding a particular solution to a particular problem, based on known information. Scientists, on the other hand, tend to work in the reverse, observing a phenomenon and investigating it's properties and how it works.

 

In methods, I've noticed that engineers tend to be more 'try it and see' (obviously based on calculations), while scientists (at least good ones), tend to be much more rigidly hypothesis-driven (in that there are explicit criteria for falsification, etc.).

 

I also think engineers tend to think more in terms of 'knowns', and tend to regard many things as 'settled', in part because a lot of these things *are* pretty much settled. However, this means they are usually quite unprepared to know *how* the challenge established theory, and thus wind up doing it badly (see Every Perpetual Motion Claim Ever). On the flip side, scientists can be ridiculously impractical and will obsess over refining minor details of established theory which offer on marginal improvements.

 

E.g. biologist and physicist that unravel how e.g. insects walk and engineers that build a functional model out of that, that in turn may be used to improve predictive models and so on.

 

Rather off topic, but you'd be surprised how *little* physicists are interested in collaborating on those sorts of questions, possibly because they see working in a Newtonian world as boring. And most of the engineering applications have just 'taken the next steps' from biological work rather than involving collaboration, with only a few exceptions.

[CharonY]

Rather off topic, but you'd be surprised how *little* physicists are interested in collaborating on those sorts of questions, possibly because they see working in a Newtonian world as boring.

You are probably right for the given example. In fact that was a collaboration between engineers and biologists. Biophysicists are more interested in the small things, though (molecule interactions, for instance).

[east]

scientist, but the word defintion is one who deals with knowledge. engineer, by the same token, is one who deals with a problem.

 

when you try and solve a problem which is associated to knowledge, you are a scientist. when you try to solve a problem associated with existing knowledge, you are an engineer.

 

thus as you can see, it is a rather vague line, but if you go out to seek new knowledge, you are more of a scientist than an engineer. and when a scientist uses established formulaes or methodologies to solve a problem, it is more of engineering.

 

science is said to be the father of engineering, for without science, there can be no engineering. ( without knowlegde how can one solve problems ? )

 

so there is no versus really, only very different roles. perhaps the classic story is when two radio engineers were given the nobel prize for discovering background radiation from the past. they were engineers, set out to solve a real engineering problem, which is to make microwave receivers without noise, and found they just could not eliminate the noise. they do not know what they have found because they were not scientists in that capacity. but when scientists heard about it, they then realised it must be the radiation from big bang. no equipment will be able to eliminate that source of noise !

 

one needs another, anyone can discover anything, but no matter what, the science has to be there. if not, you would have to test several thousand materials before you get light.

 

my 2 cents.

[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

[pioneer]

The scientist characterizes something. The engineer is involved in scaling that up, usually into production. As an example, the scientists develops a new coating for iron. He has to understand all the chemistry and run all the experiments to make this a sure thing. Once that science is in place, the engineer has to understand it and use this knowledge for scale up. Scale up creates a bunch of extra concerns.

 

For example, to be cost effective, marketing decides it can't cost more than X dollars per gallon to produce. Even if it is the best iron coating, anywhere, if it costs 2X, we may not sell enough. So we need to make it at X dollars or else that excellent science might end up on the shelf. It might still be used to help science because of its unique qualities. But, if this invention is part of a company's R&D, that innovative science may never reach mainstream science since won't be published.

 

From the development engineering point of view, pilot testing, will create new problems compared to the beaker. One can run into problems with heat generation, hot spots, slow diffusion or mass transfer, etc., that can impact reaction kinetics leading to impurities or slower reaction rates compared to the lab. That is not good for cost if we have to build bigger or add another clean up step. A good engineering will solve the problem right there.

 

So it is important for the scientist and development engineer to work as a team. The scientist knows the molecule and has had experience with these by-products, through his experiments. He can identify what might be the cause. The engineer may have to tweak the process design to reduce the variable. Once the pilot study works, and we are on the target cost, now comes scale-up into production. This might require our scientist engineer team interface with a design team. If all goes well, next, comes construction and then, start-up. This is usually where the engineer separates from the scientist. Our scientist is back in the lab, coming up with the next invention which will be pilot tested.