Engineering and Science: Engineering is not scientific

Engineering and Science

Systems engineering thinking and activity - how can we describe them ?! After all, you cannot touch them, you cannot clearly demonstrate them. If you try to observe what an engineer is doing, he sits quietly in a chair and clicks the mouse buttons from time to time. Or he stands calmly and looks at devices of complex installation, sometimes turns some knobs and presses some buttons. And at the same time, it is clear that his thinking and activity are different from the thinking and activity of a pianist, who also sits calmly on a chair and clicks the buttons of the piano from time to time.

Our book is about ways of thinking and ways of acting. First, we need to find ways in which we will describe thinking and action.

Engineering is changing reality - moving mountains, creating matches and lighters, building Mars rovers and Da Vinci's medical robots. The space-time of the physical world was arranged in one way, engineers came, space-time was arranged differently.

Science is engaged in the production of compact descriptions of reality - it comes up with Feynman diagrams, theories of thinking, the concept of system and activity. Space-time was thought to be arranged in one way, scientists came, space-time now think that it is arranged in a different way.

Teaching science is teaching how to build compact and understandable descriptions of how the world works. For example, 4 Maxwell's equations describe all the electromagnetic phenomena in the world, and the Schrödinger equation describes the wave functions of elementary particles. Whether it is possible to “learn to be a scientist” is a separate question, we will not consider it here.

Engineering is not scientific

The difference between engineers and scientists Engineers and scientists

should not be confused. Scientists are exactly the opposite of engineers: if engineers do real material things based on thought, then scientists make thoughts out of reality - they get compact, understandable and formal descriptions of reality. Of course, engineering and research are closely related:

● when an engineer receives an engineering object, the behavior of which does not correspond to his design, he investigates the problem: he tries to find the most compact description of the operation of this engineering system, from which it would be clear where he was mistaken in the design and its incarnation. Then he corrects the error: changes the system.

● when a scientist comes up with a new way of describing, more compact and better explaining the world than the previous methods, he conducts experiments. Not all experiments are "mental". Some of them require the creation of very, very complex engineering objects (for example, accelerators are one of the most complex engineering objects on Earth). When an experiment is done, scientists adjust their theories based on the results of the experiment.

Thus, engineering and research activities are linked in a cycle, and each research or engineering project usually has to repeat the cycle many times: what is IT

The main thing here is the goal of the encompassing activity, and not the actual work of “research” or “development” (“science” or “engineering”): the goal is either the emergence of some material system that benefits users, or the emergence of some kind of compact description / explanations of how the world works. In any case, either engineering is hidden in research, or research is hidden in engineering.

This confusion, reflecting the connection between engineering and science, is quite common:

● In most cartoons, a “scientist” in a white coat is least of all a scientist, it is an “engineer-inventor”. These supposedly "scientists" do not set up experiments: they come up with some systems necessary for their purposes, and embody these systems in reality. These are "Edison laboratories".

● “Applied science” (applied research) is also the least science, despite the word “research”. It is not necessary to expect any "theories" from this science, and the results of R&D (scientific and experimental-design developments), as a rule, are quite engineering objects, and not methods of description. Their only difference with the results of classical engineering development is that the result is a prototype or prototype, and not a consumer product (between a “working prototype” and a “released product” there can be years and years of development, development - and the result is not “Inventions”, and “innovations”, defined as inventions successfully brought to the market).

● Very often, applied research and classical development are not separated at all, hence the steady decline in R&D (research and development). Is there a difference? There is: "Edison's laboratory" (Bell Labs laboratory, IBM laboratory, etc.) still differ significantly in the organization of work and the work carried out in them from the classical engineering development. But they don't differ fundamentally! Technology and innovation management deals with R&D management.

Real science is "basic research" that is done in "Einstein's laboratories." The output is not “prototypes” (inventions, “inventions”, prototypes of systems and ideas for these prototypes), but theories - compact and formal descriptions of nature. Unlike R&D, management and funding of science occurs in a completely different way, often they occur outside the framework of enterprises altogether.

Systems engineering is also engineering, not science. Systems engineering may well include R&D, inventions, prototyping.

Another connection between science and engineering is the design of experimental installations, to some extent the creation of engineering prototypes can be attributed to scientific research (although this may not be about confirming a scientific theory, but confirming some kind of guess or noticed heuristic).

If we want to create a formal, compact description of systems engineering itself, then it is a science, “engineering science”.