The Glade 4.0

^^^ What he said cause I was away at lunch... *hugs Nephry*

Well that didnt work as well as intended >.<

Hehe. My wife did Psych/Chem undergrads, and is working on her PhD in Neuroscience, so I get a bit of an inside perspective.

I'm taking a seminar class at the med school with about 10 other students, and a varying mix of instructors- most are senior-ish graduate students, and we're nicely spread over MD/PhD, Pharmacology, Microbiology, Molecular Biology and Biomedical Engineering.

Really interesting to see how others tackle problems.

I'm also working on an overarching grant with 3 or 4 other research groups (Chemical Eng. Biomed Eng. Virology, Immunology & Infectious Disease), and the dynamics are interesting. Really fits together well in the end with each group having distinct parts to play in the overall drug design process.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

When individuals follow the scientific method and a series of the same experiment produce even one result that is not consistent with the hypothesis the hypothesis is replaced or the series is conducted again in case of error.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Yes this is what is usually done or else your products fail and you lose money. If you are a psychologist of course, there is no incentive to actually use the scientific method.

Not true. Drug trials for example. You don't throw out a drug because it only cures 95% of the people

No, the FDA does. And then they relegate it to more trials. For 10 years. Which drives the cost of that drug up, and then big pharma rapes the patient to get that money back.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Drug testing isn't theory. Theory would be why did the drug fail in these individuals, as in a hypothesis of what biochemical interactions were at play.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I know you didn't mean that to sound condescending or mean, but... Seriously... F you too, man.


So when I troubleshoot things I can shout "Back off, I'm doing SCIENCE!"

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I'm an engineer with a heavy science background, and I work with scientists frequently. There's a lot of ribbing between the engineers, planners, and scientists.

This cartoon is on my office wall. It amuses the scientists. One pointed to it the other day and said "Hey, man - leave that to the professionals."

What cartoon?

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XKCD Did I miss his reference?

Which, in turn, was inspired by:

(Spoilered for size, not content)

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I really don't see a large difference between an engineer and a scientist. Both work to solve new problems in whatever fields they're in.

So do sociologists, and, more literally, farmers. That's not the definition of scientist.

Sociologists don't try to profit from their products, and they don't get patents.

As an applied field, engineering usually doesn't involve solving truly new problems, but there some odd exceptions occasionally. But many times you could say that it involves solving unique combinations/arrangements of known problems, at least some of the time. It depends on the field.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Same with scientists. All innovation builds up from something previous. It's very rare for people to come up with something totally new. The bow and arrow took millions of years to invent.

I think engineering solves truly new problems all the time. Space program, weaponry, biomedical, "green" energy and tech, etc.

The approach to these problems are based on known science and built upon previous engineering knowledge.

The big difference between engineering and science is the practical, useful application. Scientists figure out how it works, engineers apply that.

Drug testing is standard scientific method. The only difference is the hypothosis being tested is not one of absolutes. It is not "does X drug do Y in Every case"
It IS "Does X drug do Y in some portion of the population, and do the benfits outweigh the risks"

It may be that a certain drug only affects people with a certain chromosome or certain types of cancer. That in no way invalidates the science and the nature of the process that was used to achieve it.

By the same token, Psychology, Sociology, Economics, and a number of other sciences do not seek to achieve solutions that apply to every individual, but instead seek to find theories that model certain situations, provide testable thories, and suggest the variant classic "IF A, B & C exist, then by doing X and Y, the result is more often Z than not z" You don't have to prove that it happens EVERY time. Just that there is a statistical cause and effect.


In classical physics, we have the luxury of dealing with such massive amounts of individual particles and such vast distances (compared to that the uncertainty of an individual particle's behavior) that such things can be ignored. That doesnt' invalidate classical physics just because it doesn't describe the behavior of particles on the quantum scale--it means that theory must be refined, new theories must be developed, and the science advanced. But that doesn't mean that classical physics was any less a science.

Everything you've just said shows that engineers and scientists do the same thing.

Especially the part where I talk about the difference between them.

Thomas Edison was an engineer.

So much scientific misinformation in this thread, I can't even correct it all. I actually agree largely with Arathain's perspective. Engineering does involve a lot of novel research, but it does so in search of an application for that novel research. Scientists want to understand how processes work and thus conduct research in pursuit of that. Sometimes scientists apply this research though, in pursuit of a new drug, for example. The stereotype that scientists do the research and engineers apply it is myth, partially reinforced by shows such as The Big Bang Theory.