> Engineering is not "the study of heat transfer and classical mechanics," engineering is "the application of physics (or whatever other science is helpful) to

> Engineering is not "the study of heat transfer and classical mechanics," engineering is "the application of physics (or whatever other science is helpful) to practical design problems." I basically agree, but there's an important human-institutional aspect to this: An alternate useful definition of physicist (engineer) is "a person who work in a physics department/lab (engineering department/shops)". And despite common misconceptions, the sort of thing that binds departments together is not the goal of the work (learning basic laws vs. building useful things) but rather the collection of techniques/tools/ideas that people learn and apply in those places. In other words, even though the goals of "materials physics" have for decades been much closer to engineering and design, there is a reason people continue to call it physics: because, at least for the time being, the sort of training you go through to become a materials physicist is mostly done in a physics department, and the methods by which materials physicist evaluate each other is closer to physics than to engineering.