What's the point of having a pissing match between engineers and scientists? You need both to push technology forward. Science can lead to better engineering,

What's the point of having a pissing match between engineers and scientists? You need both to push technology forward. Science can lead to better engineering, but better engineering can also lead to better science as well. You don't get very far in astronomy unless your engineers can build telescopes. You don't get very far in computational biology without engineers to create microchips, write software, etc. What was the use of spending all that effort to get to the moon? There wasn't much interesting up there, scientifically. And the ballistics used would have been familiar to Isaac Newton. But it turns out that going to the moon pushed forward a lot of fields, like materials science, aerodynamics, and so forth. If you have only disdain for practical things, you end up like the ancient Greeks-- smart guys who were unwilling to get their hands dirty by actually doing an experiment or building a device. So, for example, they philosophized about what must be inside the human body, rather than actually looking. They discovered the steam engine but dismissed it as a toy. If theoretical CS hasn't advanced that much in the last 30 years, maybe it's because there isn't that much left to discover there. And that would be fine. There's more than ever going on in computational biology, material science, chemistry, and so forth. Who knows. Maybe some grubby engineers will come up with a quantum computer, and then theoretical CS people will have something to do again. All we know for sure is that keeping an open mind and a reasonable-sized ego is the best way to approach the problem.