this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] WastedJobe@feddit.de 51 points 1 year ago (7 children)

My engineering friends and me propose that physicists should be referred to as theoretical engineers.

[–] KevonLooney@lemm.ee 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I propose engineers not be allowed to name things. Not everything needs to be an "engineer"

[–] Doombot1@lemmy.one 39 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What are you, an engineer engineer?

[–] circuitfarmer 4 points 1 year ago

Now hiring for an Engineer². Don't apply if you dont have 20+ years experience with LLMs

[–] captainlezbian 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

We aren’t the ones who did that. You need to have taken statics and thermo otherwise you’re just a sparkling tradesperson

What if I took statics but swapped thermo for emag theory? I feel like that's pretty even.

[–] lightnegative 1 points 1 year ago

Hey, don't knock the Sandwich Engineers at Subway. They do the Lord's work

[–] Steve@startrek.website 20 points 1 year ago

Most mad scientists are actually mad engineers.

[–] NielsBohron 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As someone with an engineering degree and a science degree, scientists are absolutely nothing like engineers.

[–] Gork@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They've got some things in common.

Technical aptitude. Complete unawareness, or purposeful neglect, of social norms. Science related dad jokes.

[–] NielsBohron 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

True, but I mainly mean in terms of their attitude towards research and their level of skepticism and critical thinking when presented with new information.

Engineers are always thinking in terms of "how can I make this work?" and scientists are trained to think in terms of "where does this theory/method break?"

This means that in general, engineers are far more likely to assume one positive result is significant, whereas scientists are far more likely to be looking at and poking holes in experiment methodology. This is a generalization, but in my experience, engineers are far more likely to fall for pseudoscience BS. Granted, my experience is mostly in chemistry and chemical engineering, but this idea in general has been a topic of discussion and research in peer-reviewed literature for years.

[–] Literati 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Similarly, from an engineer's perspective, scientists are a great addition to the working group when you need to find the flaws in the system, but awful when you actually just need something to go into the real world and work 80% of the time ;)

Especially when you're time constrained.

[–] NielsBohron 2 points 1 year ago

Definitely. Lots of scientists fall into the trap of letting "perfect" be the enemy of "good"

[–] PrimeMinisterKeyes 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Doing research, I used to work with mathematicians, engineers AND physicists on a daily basis for years. Physicists were the least fun. Most of them seemed to think of themselves as a sort of Jesuits of Science. As in: "I just figured this out, and already it's set in stone, why do you even argue with me?" Mathematicians and engineers were a lot humbler, more down-to-earth. Also, some of them were astonishingly edgy in a very positive way.

[–] Droggelbecher 7 points 1 year ago

I've heard applied mathematics used for us physicists but that one's new, nice

[–] oce@jlai.lu 4 points 1 year ago

There are different kinds of physics researchers and it doesn't look like what physics lessons show in university, which is mostly theory. Most are not theoricians, they work on experiments and analyze results, they design and build instruments similarly to engineers. It seems the main difference is the kind of question they want to answer to: scientific question vs client need.

What of experimental physicists?

[–] marcos 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Theory engineers" would be precise and correct.

Not at all. People (engineers?) seem to forget that experimental physicists exist