Philosophy of Engineering

As a kid getting ready to go to engineering college, I am ashamed to say I barely knew the difference between science and technology (engineering) back then (they don’t ask such questions in the IIT-JEE exam). It took me a few years of being at work to finally get the difference.

Or so I thought. Well ok, I was right about the parts I knew but turns out there are other aspects as well.

I learnt all this after reading a few excerpts from the book, Radical Abundance, by Eric Drexler. First the part I already knew:

“Scientific inquiry expands the scope of human perception and understanding; engineering design expands the scope of human plans and results.”

Ok, that’s it: that’s all I knew. Drexler goes on to point out that in real life, the two fields often mix:

“Engineering new instruments enables inquiry, while scientific inquiry can enable design.”

and it is because of this intertwining of the two which can often “obscure how deeply they differ.”

So what is this deep difference between the two? The short answer is that when it comes to their orientation to the flow of information, science is bottom-up whereas engineering is top-down. A pic would make this clearer:

This difference becomes obvious when one looks at how the two deal with the unknown:

“Scientific inquiry faces toward the unknown, and this shapes the structure of scientific thought; although scientists apply established knowledge, the purpose of science demands that they look beyond it.

Engineering design, by contrast, shuns the unknown. In their work, engineers seek established knowledge and apply it in hopes of avoiding surprises. In engineering, the fewer experiments, the better.”

You’d think I’d be embarrassed to not know these things already. But you’d be wrong. So what’s my excuse? It’s what Drexler says about engineering:

“Engineers can design systems that are beyond their full comprehension.”

Not knowing is the mark of an engineer, so there!