3 ms·

[deleted]

• cperciva 5y ago
  If an engineer designs a bridge and says "well, it seems to stay up, but I don't know why... go ask a scientist?" they'll lose their license pretty damn fast.
  • mlboss 5y ago
    I guess the first bridge builders never asked a scientist. Science of bridge building came much later then bridges.
  • webmaven 5y ago
    I think the point is that bridge building originated as a craft that was informed by a lot of examples that happened to survive (ie. survivorship bias) leading to rules of thumb and patterns that gradually yielded to scientific explanations (often driven by trying to understand failed bridges designed according to rules applied / patterns extended outside of the context where they were valid).
• TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > You have cause and effect exactly backwards. Not really. You just, correctly, described the relationship between science and engineering as a feedback loop. But that also means there is no first and last. A step in engineering reveals a problem that scientists can focus on. A scientific discovery makes new engineering possible. Progress of engineering enables building tools that make new kinds of observations possible, enabling scientific research that was previously not possible. Rinse, repeat. There's no separating one from another - they run in lockstep.
• alecst 5y ago
  What about general relativity.
• goatlover 5y ago
  Didn't Maxwell come before Tesla and Edison? The insights of Relativity and QM came before lasers, electron microscopes, quantum computing, etc.