Difference Between a Scientist and Engineer
If you’re a first year engineering student or a senior in high school, you have probably asked yourself this question; “What is the difference between a scientist and an engineer?”
It’s a valid question.
I mean, don’t all engineers use physics, math and other sciences to figure things out?
Don’t all scientists do the same thing, use physics, math and other sciences to figure things out?
The answer is yes to both, but the reason why they do it is completely different. Let’s dive deeper and answer this question right now.
Main Points
- Difference Between Scientist and Engineer
- Why Engineers Need to Know Science and Math
- Why Scientist Need to Know Science and Math
Difference Between Scientist and Engineer
A scientist seeks to discover why the universe is, the way it is.
An engineer seeks to make things that can be used.
A good tip to remember the difference is that scientists ask “What is..” and engineers ask “How can…”.
Scientist:
“What are clouds made out of?”
“What is light?”
“What is electricity?”
“What really happens to the food when we eat it?”
“What is dark matter?”
“What happened at the beginning of the universe?”
Engineer:
“How can we make circuits smaller?”
“How can we make a facial recognition system?”
“How can I spin this wheel without touching it?”
“How can we make a car driverless?”
“How can we make energy from wind?”
Why Engineers Need to Know Science and Math
In order for an engineer to get an answer to their “how” questions they must first understand physics, math, and other sciences.
How can you figure out how to get energy from wind if you don’t know what energy is?
How can you figure out how to make circuits smaller if you don’t know what physics phenomenon is limiting you from doing it?
How can you make sure a driverless car doesn’t crash into a pedestrian if you don’t know how to calculate how much force needs to be applied to brakes based on the car’s speed and other factors?
The answer is… you can’t. If engineers don’t know a single thing about physics, math, science their progress to building anything that will work will be slow one.
Yeah there are tools out there that engineers use to reduce the time to building things. Tools that already take physics, math and other sciences into account. But let me tell you this as a fellow engineer….
When the project hits the fan and no one has a single clue as to why something is not working… The answer to the problem is usually in physics and math.
The following dialog happened to me when building an autonomous car back in community college.
Me — “Yo touch this chip. It’s mad hot.”
Teammate — “WOAH that things burning!”
Me — “Why is it getting hot? We hooked everything up correctly right?”
*double-checks the wiring*
Teammate — “Is the wiring good?”
Me — “Yea this all correct. Hmmmmm? How much current are we pulling?”
*Does basic circuit calculation. Measures current going through the chip*
Me — “Uhhhh yeah I found the problem guys.”
Teammates — “What is it?”
Me — “We’re pulling 1.8 Amps. The chip is rated for a max current of 2 Amps.”
You can probably figure out what happens if the current gets up to 2 amps.
So in this case if we had no clue of physics or math that project would have been up in flames.
But, notice how we were not discovering anything new. We were not figuring out what electricity is. We were using math, science and physics to figure out HOW to make an autonomous car.
Engineers will make things using a knowledge of math, physics, and science, that have first been discovered by a scientist.
Why Scientist Need to Know Science and Math
Now scientists do something very different than engineers. They try to explain to the rest of the world, what something is. They make discoveries to understand, and to help people in some instances.
A scientist does this by proving their theories.
They must prove their theories through evidence found from experiments. This evidence from the experiment must hold true every single time the experiment is reproduced without exception.
Well, how does a scientist discover new things? How do they figure out what something is?
Scientists use the scientific method to make new discoveries. They come up with a hypothesis, do some research on what science literature on their topics is currently out there, make an experiment with measurable results, then come to a conclusion based on those results.
Once a conclusion has been made they will either need to form a new hypothesis and redo an experiment or if they’re lucky, they validate their hypothesis on the first go, and BOOM they got a discovery.
We mentioned at the beginning of this post that scientists need to know math as well. The question is why? If all a scientist needs to do is prove their theories with evidence by going through the scientific method…where does math fit in? Math is the language used to describe their theories and results.
Human speech is not the best way to communicate factual information. We have all been in a situation where we have communicated information to someone and they interpreted what we were saying in a TOTALLY different way then what we meant.
To avoid those common fallacies scientists use math to explain a lot of things. For example, the equation of a straight line can’t be misinterpreted by anyone once you know what it is.
Now, after a scientist makes a discovery that is it. They typically don’t go and build the next generation of innovation after their discoveries (some might if they choose too).
They may however be advising and helping out a team that will be building things off of their research and discoveries.
Conclusion
The language of physics, math, and science is common to both scientists and engineers. They generally have the same background but different reasons as to what they use their skills for.
Engineers think of how they can make cool things. They don’t really spend their time making new discoveries for the sake of new discoveries. They spend their time using the laws of science and math to make things that can be used.
Scientists make new discoveries because they want to know what something is. They do it for the sake of knowing, not necessarily to build cool things with that knowledge. They spend their time diving DEEP into a specific question, trying to find evidence in the tiniest of places.
I hope you guys found this post helpful! Keep on building!
“Always have a map and a destination. Or else you will just wander the seas. — Tyler George
