Engineering vs. Science

In his book "The God Equation", Michio Kaku writes:

Each time scientists have unraveled a new force, it has changed the course of civilization and altered the destiny of humanity.
I doubt that this happened often. I believe that most of the time, engineers have been fortunate to implement their ideas without knowing the theoretical basis that would be needed to scientifically explain why these implementations worked. Only afterwards have scientists come up with the theoretical frameworks.

I'm unable to back up my claim with any sort of proof, but it would be in accordance with my experiences as a software engineer. Software engineers often come up with solutions to problems without theorists (e.g. research scientists working in algorithmics) having laid a sound foundation yet. Also, in medicine, it often happens that new drugs are simply tested with patients and the effects are statistically evaluated before anyone makes a serious attempt at guessing the mechanism of action of the drug.

Kommentare

Kommentar veröffentlichen

Beliebte Posts aus diesem Blog

The Demoscene

I have recently written a short resume in which I explained that computer games have been an essential part of my life ever since I discovered them and that creating my own games was what I longed for the most in my youth. Sometimes I question if editing a magazine about the demoscene was the right thing to do. I once read that demosceners are people who in their youth were more fascinated by the crack intros than the actual games. I am definitely an atypical scener as demos never interested me. I was only into diskmags. The actual reason why I focused on the demoscene was that I had a penpal who was of the opinion that the coders of the demoscene were the best programmers in the world. I could have stopped dealing with the demoscene when I was 14 and won first place in a size-coding competition organized by demoscene magazine Pain. After all this achievement showed that my programming skills were on par with the ones of leading demo coders. But there was no game development community
Read more »

Digital Art Natives

The wonderful German-language book "Digital Art Natives: Praktiken, Artefakte und Strukturen der Computer-Demoszene" by Dr. Doreen Hartmann is now available at Amazon and other online book stores. It mentions Hugi several times, e.g. on page 111: Drei der wichtigsten Diskmags sind: ZINE, das von 1989 bis 1991 als Amiga-Diskmag und erneut 2007 und 2008 für Windows und als Online-Magazin herausgegeben wurde ( http://zine.bitfellas.org ) sowie PAiN, das von 1994 bis 2007 produziert wurde ( http://pain.scene.org ) und Hugi, ein PC-Magazin, das seit 1996 herausgegeben wird und mittlerweile 38-mal veröffentlicht wurde ( http://hugi.scene.org ). (Three of the most important diskmags are: ZINE, which was published from 1989 to 1991 as an Amiga diskmag and again 2007 and 2008 for Windows and as an online magazine, PAiN, which was produced from 1994 to 2007, and Hugi, a PC magazine that has been released 38 times since 1996.) On page 125: Bis heute fehlen in den Publikationen
Read more »

Autobiographical Sketch

I was born on October 8th, 1983, in Vienna, Austria, Europe to a middle-class family, my mother working as an elementary school teacher and my father as an electrical engineer. Both of my parents were well-educated and had also studied pedagogics and psychology at university. I became acquainted with the philosophy of my late compatriot Sir Karl R. Popper at early age, and I was myself inclined to pondering over metaphysical and epistemological issues already as a child. I also invented my own private religion in the course of these ponderings. School was easy for me. I was already an avid reader before enrolling at elementary school, and my father taught me mathematics at senior high school level before I even entered junior high school. I recall mastering calculus at the age of eight, for instance. The only subjects I was not so good at were handicraft and sports. Also, I found it difficult to memorize texts in detail, but this was only required in biology class. All in all tuition w
Read more »