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Surely engineering is just about building stuff that works, or "meets requirements". Is there any kind of engineering for which that is basically not the case?
by smegel 11y ago
Surely engineering is just about building stuff that works, or "meets requirements".
Is there any kind of engineering for which that is basically not the case?
Science is about understanding the natural world by building and testing hypothesis.
I can think of some grey areas. For example, in the 20th century it was discovered that the harmonic modes of oscillation of large structures, like bridges, was rather important to their structural stability. Once this was well understood, clearly it was the engineers who built better and stronger structures with inbuilt dampening and so forth. But who actually sat down and figured out the math behind structural harmonic response, and showed how it could lead to disaster? A scientist or an engineer? It seems both very sciency and engineery.
- aylons 11y agoThere's a grey area, but I find your example (or the way you posed it) a bad one. Creating a mental model is science, even if it was done to be applied in a engineering context. First, even the math and science behind the structural harmonic response was made by an engineer, it was a science advance after all. They allowed people to better understand the world, creating models of phenomena that are observable. Of course, engineers can do science, as anybody else can, and that does not transform science endeavours into engineering endeavours. However, it must be noted that there is a lot of science in engineering: people can approach engineering problems and subjects with a science mindset so they can advance engineering. A new DSP algorithm is basically math, even if it is math with some constraints set by engineering realities, and may be analysed as such - more often than not, by people with engineering degrees, who are doing science. Both engineering and science are less about fields of knowledge and more about process: if you are trying to understand something, and to observe things that exist in a methodical way, aiming to create a model that can reproduce and predict events, you are doing science. If you are trying to design something that help you efficiently achieve some practical goal, you are doing engineering.
- shas3 11y agoI think the areas of signal processing, machine learning, information theory, communications, numerical techniques, etc. straddle the science-engineering border on both sides.