The Glade 4.0

I don't think that's a point in engineers' favor...

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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.

He was smart enough to steal from Nikola Tesla.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I think a lot of this comes down to trying to stereotype such large fields as "science" and "engineering".

As to



Most of what I do is practical, useful applications. Granted, there are a lot of my colleagues that work mostly on how things work and don't really care about the applications, but lots of groups (like mine) are of the opinion that if there isn't a direct application and you aren't working towards it, you need to re-think your project.

We do a good bit of fundamental research, but all in the mind with some application as the end goal- if I want to design novel DNA switches or conducting wires, I need to do a good bit of fundamental research involving structure-function relationships, etc... But as the end goal, I want a conducting wire or stimulus responsive DNA switch that can go directly into use.

And most of the scientists I know do lots in the way of getting patents- so you can't really make a patentable/non-patentable distinction either.

I think Arathain's distinction works as a broad generality, but there are lots of cases on either side that fall outside of it.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

lets be clear, not-a-science does not make something less of a valid field of study. It does not make it less rigorous, it does not make it less difficult, it does not make it less honorable. I posted the quote for humor.

A Doctor is not a scientist. I doctor is a mechanic. Some people go to Medical School and then go into research --these are scientists. Some people go into medical school and then practice medicine. They are clinicians, and not (generally) scientists unless they are also engaged in research.

Neither one is 'better' than the other.

But, people engaged in research, who operate by experimentation to generate and (dis)prove hypothoses, who advance human understanding through the proper application of scientific method, are indeed called scientists. This intellectual snobbery is patently silly.


For the record, you'd get a lot farther arguing that Astrophysics is not a science, in that it nearly always is dependent on obersvation, NOT experimentation. Even our crashing of probes into comets, etc. are still forms of observation, not experimentation. I frankly think Astronomy gets a pass on this one though as it a) produces results b) the obersvation & study of the stars & planets is one of the oldest forms of study known to man. But you'd have far more luck arguing that astronomy is not a science, than trying to claim psychology is not.

Astrophysics helped bring us satellites. That's an example of experimentation.

You know, this kind of speaks back to your most recent advice-seeking thread, TheRiov; where I did not respond because you really don't want advice. Nevertheless, I'll post it here ...

If you want to be an Astrophysicist, then get an Undergraduate Degree in Mathematics. Also, get a Masters Degree in Mathematics. After that, go and find yourself a really good university with a department of Applied Mathematics and get a Ph.D.

Which, sort of speaks to this thread ...

How far removed from a purely mathematical pursuit is your discipline? The further away one gets, the less likely it is to be a science.

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As far as that goes, I work right by the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS). Their working groups are just neat:
http://www.nimbios.org/workinggroups/

Unfortunately I can't ever take anything seriously, and I'm prone to seeing those guys in the morning on my way to work and thinking things like (in movie-trailer-guy-voice) "meanwhile, in the bowels of NIMBioS, a renegade band of mathematicians works to..."
/random_weirdness_derail

wait... so math is the only 'pure' science?

good lord, look up science in the dictionary. We're arguing word definitions now, you'll find that psychology fits both the connotations and denotations of a science.

No matter how much you want to pare off that section and redefine it in Khross/Lex-world, the reality is that you're just plain incorrect in this instance.

I'd say this is fairly true, but there's some exceptions to this. Macro-biology, ecology, etc. are definitely science, but are fairly removed from mathematics.

You're chosing to redefine science with the definition of "hard science"

Social Sciences are still science, if not hard sciences.

So, it must be true.

The other important distinction in the sciences lies in the "Observational vs. Experimental Science" section.

Most of psychology, ecology, evolutionary biology, astrophysics are all observational.

At the other end of the spectrum, mathematics is probably the least observational (most experimental) field.

The soft sciences, by and large, are those that require little math and are primarily observational. Hence, molecular biology (doesn't require much math but is highly experimental) is more of a hard science than evolutionary biology or ecology (don't require much math, primarily observational).

At least that's what I've put together from talking to people.

We have what we call "Graduate Speakeasy's" where we get graduate students from all different disciplines together to speak on their research. It's quite interesting to hear the methods and discussion following these informal presentations.

Also note that saying something isn't a science doesn't make the research less difficult or important, it just makes it a different kind of research. Linguistics isn't science, but is a very rigorous discipline, from everything that I've seen.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

That kind of depends, but for the most part I agree. I'd put in caveats for computational and quantitative linguistics though.

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Congratulations! This thread just won the internet. Pull the plugs on the routers guys and wrap up the fiber-optics cause we're done here!

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I don't even know how you guys can have so many pages of caring about it at this point.

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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

Riov, no offence but you really need to understand more of how medicines in general work. (not talking about bioengineered meds).

Most meds target a system in the body. Meds are not there to ‘cure’ an ailment, they are to either reduce a symptom, control your immune system in some way, increase or decrease path ways, to release something your body can not self produce due to deficiency, etc, etc, etc. Messing with the body is always risky, simply because of the perfectly balanced (most of the time) system that we are.

There are of course exceptions being the anti-microbial/anti-fungal, which targets the organism. (won’t get into it, too long, not enough coffee yet)

The question asked when developing a new drug IS “Does the X drug do Y in every case”. In a lab control environment, it is often yes. It is until you have live animals trials and human trials that this question falls into %.

Reason being there are other complex systems in the mix in humans, sometime’s people are allergic, sometimes they have other ailments which interfere, sometimes they have a genetic deviation, or sometimes they simply don’t dose according to the instructions. That’s not to say the drug doesn’t work, the chemical reaction doesn’t change, there are just some things which might derail the reaction.

The creation of the medicine is a science with lots of fun multi-paged reports to read, and trust me when I say there is enough validation and verification data to crush a horse. Distributing it to the general public… not so much. BUT in other good news, this is also why the drug industry is looking into bioengineered drugs, personally designed and ensured to work every time because it takes that variable out of equation. So ya, don’t hate the drug, hate the taker =P

forgive me for simplifying a process for the purposes of the example. I didn't set out to define it.

Yes, perhaps I should have been more specific, this is the portion of drug testing I was referring to.

That's not drug testing, that's clinical evidence used to justify supplying on the market. That's no longer science, it's about registration of the product for future profit.

Let me expand on that a little. In a dossier for drugs, the design, manufacturing, validation and verification, stability are all taken in as facts. Hard, cold science.

Clinical evidence requires the resume of the signatory, simply because it is no longer hard, cold science, but based on the bias of the conductor. So clinical is where it stops being science, and starts being marketing.

In Many cases you still have to prove it has an effect over a placebo.

Lex, the definition of scientist is not "People Lex wants to be scientists", and you're doing yourself no favors bringing up reason after reason why engineers should be scientists because you want them to be, but not farmers or sociologists because they don't.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Which again feeds into the marketing/registration/safety testing aspect, and isn't science.

Most of that stuff isn't done in a lab, and most is done by clinicians, not science. See Lydia's previous points, they are quite well written and accurately explain the difference between the science of drug design and the business of drug manufacture and registration.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

I honestly don't know how you get what it seems you got out of what I said.

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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