I am not, and will never be, a scientist.
Thanks to Isabelle I've been reading Good Calories, Bad Calories for one day now. (well for a couple of hours really as I do have to work, sleep and take my car to the mechanics) I will post about some of the interesting food science and public health policy implications of the book another time as I am excited by what I am reading so far. For now though, I just want to acknowledge that numerous books have shown me that I am no scientist.
I work in a field full of scientists, full of people who want to know why something happens, perform an experiment, collate results and then set about interpreting them. I stop at when.
To me, once something is repeatable I don't really care about the mechanisms anymore. I certainly find them fascinating, and the knowledge of why something occurs is undoubtedly powerful. However, once I've constructed a system/process/device that works I don't want to gather a deeper understanding, I want to move on to the next challenge.
I wonder if this is a quality of professional engineers (what about engineering academics?). I wonder if I will develop my scientific drive later in life, or if I have already outgrown it.
Any thoughts from the chorus?
I think you need to make a distinction between levels of detail when you're talking about 'why'. For example, I assume that if you had a non-working circuit design and were to add an inductor to correct it, you understand that it's probably the change in impedence that has effected the correction, and you can (and should) check for that. In my mind that's a satisfactory level of whying. In your post you seem to be talking about a level of 'why' one step further - why does a coil of conductive material have these properties? Why does it conduct? What /are/ electrons anyway? I can see how that kind of deeper understanding might be more attractive/scientifically rigorous, but it has to be balanced against the probable realisation that you'd be covering old ground, and the pragmatic one that you aren't, as far as I know, employed to ask 'why' all the way down to the last elephant.
ReplyDeleteI have definitely pondered over this myself.
ReplyDeleteI believe it comes down to different people for different jobs. A lot of people like to draw the line between scientist and engineer, but I rather like to think of it as an practical/academic spectrum, just as there is a spectrum of jobs from production engineer or technician, where when something isn't working it costs money, to R&D, where in some cases a concrete output isn't even required (as is the place I work now lol).
As a practicing engineer, I believe both aspects are important, as one extreme results in hax jobs, and the other extreme results in low productivity, or over engineered solutions.
and yeh. what ben said :P
Oh and by the way, I counter your big bang theory clip with another one, sans laugh track. The shots where the characters look around allowing the laughs to finish are totally surreal without them. They look like they've just woken up and don't know where they are.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_iEY9pSHT0
That clip is horrible Ben. Although, from what I can find on the net it is filmed in front of a live audience, so calling it a laugh track is not really fair. It's more like theatre, they have to respond to the crowd.
ReplyDeleteIt reminds me of The Extras when the crowd roll in for Andy's show's first filming and they're wearing "I'm a lady" tshirts.
On to the engineering. With the inductance example perhaps the closest level to my thinking would be to ask "why this amount of inductance?". The would lead to further studies on how much you actually needed, theories on why that particular amount was necessary etc. Now changing the inductance on a circuit isn't difficult so most people could answer that question quickly. What if changing the inductance took a full day? What if it took two days? There are people who, after realising the practical realities means that they can't answer these questions, feel that they have failed. On the other hand, I would feel quite content saying "I don't know how much inductance we need, but 2.7μH worked". How would you two feel?
If I had the time available to look into it, I'd figure it out. A system or circuit or whatever doesn't feel reliable to me if I have constructed it with random properties that happen to work.
ReplyDeleteA lot of the work I go over in my head when thinking about this is software based (due to my job), which tends to be complex in a different way to more traditional engineering (I'd say /actual/ engineering, but that argument is for another day). Just today I was having horrible performance doing a conversion on a few hundred thousand database rows and after looking into it, I found that by locking the tables, the database could stop stressing out about who was doing what, and just let me hammer it. In software I think the what and the why are often linked - in my example you can almost guess why locking access to a table to a single thread would improve performance.
Contrast that with a lot of 'real engineering' examples where the components of a system aren't descriptive and don't speak for themselves; I can see how in my experience, going after the why is easier, and how it's therefore easier for me to say I'd do it.
Disclaimer; of course, opposing examples exist in either sphere.
Big Bang Theory is filmed in front of an audience, but I believe it is standard to mix the audience laugh track with pre-canned laugh tracks (imagine the fifth take of a scene. Nobody is laughing at the same jokes any more). I don't see the authenticity of an audience over a fake track given that they seed the audience with people paid to laugh and thereby encourage everybody else. The 'real audience' counters to me and the anti-laugh-track crowd are a bit off track (haha) anyway - I'm more offended by the assumption that I need cues to find something funny. That said, I don't care if the show I'm watching has a laugh track, but if we're going to discuss it, those are my arguments.
Moser said...
ReplyDeleteA Scientist tries to further the understanding of some field and an engineer applies the understanding to a particular problem.
An example would be a civil engineer will applying mathematics to build a bridge while pure mathematicians come up with those ideas and formulas, become math teachers or sell out and become accountants.
I'm not saying once person cant be both, or that the two don't blend together.
What about the personal qualities of these people?
ReplyDeleteI don't imagine a 'scientist' wakes up in the morning and says "today I plan to further the understanding of my field". Similarly, I don't intend to implement scientific research in the real world. I just go to work and find myself less inclined to characterise problems (I could simply say study problems) than to solve them and move on.
Is this just a Person A vs Person B characteristic; regardless of qualifications and environment there are people who prefer to do one over the other. In other words did my original post get it wrong? I wonder if people who prefer to study problems are actually drawn to science?
On a side note this also makes me think that Melbourne Uni's new common year as a starting point is a positive idea. If there is a real difference between the kinds of people exiting science and engineering courses then providing some exposure to both early on would allow for some self selection. I can honestly say that as an 17 year old I had even less of an idea than I do now.
Ben, your comment about software problems being somewhat more easily investigated is really important. I work in an environment where after 5 years I know lots of tricks but don't always have a clear idea of why certain things work. For instance, in my experience, baking a polymer almost always improves the effectiveness of the next step in a process. However, baking it can actually result in drying, annealing, softening, aging... To determine what's happening (as I'm not a materials scientist) I could learn more about the crystalline structure of the polymer in question, I could read relevant literature or... I could not and just say "baking for 24hrs solved the problem".
Does that make me a hack?
Well my home computer ate my post, but I was pretty much pushing the "scientists study things whereas engineers design things" idea.
ReplyDeleteI think scientists do wake up and say to themselves "I want to further understanding". An example would be that the majority of mathematicians working on fermat's last theorem wouldn't have been really motivated by money.
The only famous engineers I can think of are also scientists and sometimes also entrepreneurs (Tesla, Edison and Nobel for example). I think it gets blurry at the cutting edge, if you design something as an engineer that somehow explains a problem in a new way then its called science, even if you didn't do on purpose or didn't repeat it 100 times.