Engineers Make, Scientists Discover

About a quarter of a century ago, I wrote a little essay about the difference between being a scientist and being an engineer. Here is an updated version.

Engineers engineer engineering.

The above sentence is grammatically correct and meaningful. It is so because "engineer" is both a noun and verb. In contrast, the following sentence is pure nonsense.

Scientists science science.

Science is not a verb -- only a noun. It is a thing, not an activity. To make an equivalent defining sentence for scientists as we have done for engineers, we should write this:

Scientists discover science.

That engineer is a verb and science is a noun is at the core of the difference between being an engineer (one who is engaged in engineering or has been trained for engineering) and a scientist (who is engaged in discovery or elucidation of science).

Engineering is about conceiving, designing, planning, building and making. Science is knowledge. Scientists perform observation, investigation, hypothesis, test, proof, and explanation. Certainly there is overlap. Engineers must study and test materials and designs. Scientists must construct novel instruments and other devices. However the vocational thrusts are as stated: engineers make, scientists discover.

To be an engineer, a person must, in these modern times, meet certain legal criteria before he or she can work professionally (get paid) as an engineer. These criteria can include obtaining an accredited degree in engineering from a recognized school (not just any degree, but an accredited degree), or passing an examination held by the state government. Only licensed professional engineers have the legal authority to use an engineering title without restriction, and can offer engineering services. Only with that license can you say you have a "practice of engineering".

There is an exemption to the above legal criteria. A corporate employee may hold the title of "engineer" provided the given employee performs engineering tasks only for the given employer, limited to the employer's products, within the employer's facilities.

However this internal designation should not be confused with the legally licensed engineer, who is allowed to offer engineering services to the World at large, e.g. be self-employed, be a consultant, be a contractor, and so forth. To put the title on your personal business card, you must satisfy whatever requirements the State puts before you, to have obtained the accredited degree, or to have passed the requisite exams, or possibly both.

Engineer is not the only profession where the title is under such restrictions. For example, you can pass medical school at the top of your class, perform your internship with distinction, and hold a Doctorate of Medicine, but you are not a licensed medical doctor until you pass the medical board exams. You will renew that license periodically in your career, to be allowed to continue your practice of medicine.

Under State laws, "licensure" (sometimes called "registration") is required for activities that might be dangerous, or might be a threat to other persons or the general public, or for which a certain level of expertise, learning, and skill is expected. The State may specify that a private board certify individuals wishing to be licensed in a given field, for example medicine.

The type of licensed fields is quite broad: in addition to engineering and medicine, other licensed fields include  Architecture, Interior design, Landscape architecture, Surveying, Teachers, paramedicals,  nurses, lawyers, detectives, psychologists, geologists, social workers, Earth Science, and certified public accountants.

In contrast, the label of scientist is somewhat loose. There are social expectations. If someone is a scientist, generally society expects at least that person will have an undergraduate degree, or will have published in a peer journal, or will be employed by a research or development or analysis organization. Going a bit tighter, I believe that a sizable fraction of the population will expect that a person labelled as "scientist" will have a doctoral degree, regardless of other criteria.  But that is not a legal requirement. Quite unlike the title of engineer, the title of scientist is self applied. In the legal sense, there is no accredited practice of science.

So a physicist is someone who says he or she is a physicist, with similar standing for a chemist, a biologist, and through the other fields. There are exams and licenses for some types of geologist, because of the overlap into earth engineering, but on the whole if you are working in a pure science, society does not care what you call yourself.

There is another social expectation that the scientist is somehow separate from commerce. That is, a scientist is a lifelong member of a sacred order of learned persons, who are supposed to avoid the taint of self-interest and monetary enrichment. If the scientist happens to make some money while at it, that is nice, but not a criteria for membership in the order.

In fact, for the pure hard sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy, mathematics), a case can be made that the physicist, chemist, biologist, geologist, astronomer, or mathematician are seldom directly employed  as such. Instead, you can be a academic professor, or a school teacher, or an analyst, or a programmer, an engineer, a marketeer, a "quant", CIO, CTO, and CEO, to name a few occupations. The reason for this seemingly disconnection of employment from science, is that someone has to pay for the scientist's employment. Apart from a few altruistic  organizations, pure scientific research does not justify that employment. Major exceptions are places like CERN. But even big science projects, while employing a lot of people (engineers, technicians, administrators, accountants, etc.), do not employ comparatively  many pure scientists.

This raises an interesting consequence, that will enrage many in its statement, to wit: Science is not a profession. Perhaps it is a "calling", but not a profession. Why? Because the scientist is being paid for being something ancillary to their scientific training and philosophy. I do know that for physicists, computer programmer seems to be very popular, along with the related financial market analyst. Another popular employment for physicists seems to be failure analysis. I also know of lobbyist think-tanks that employ a few.

An engineer has a good firm idea of how he or she will be employed. For a scientist, the employment becomes nebulous, but that also means flexible.

In society, engineers are expected to be "practical", task driven, business-like. Scientists are expected to be "learned", yet naive and eccentric.

As a final remark, scientists are of course far rarer than engineers, perhaps just because of the practical aspect of being an engineer. Good census data is hard to find. I do have some old census figures for physicists: 80,000 Worldwide, half of which are in the United States (though not necessarily US citizens). Roughly that is one physicist for every 10,000 citizens in the USA. For engineers, the number is twenty times larger.