Science vs. technology

I had always wanted to study theoretical physics in college, but my parents thought that a more practical field, such as accounting, would provide a better return on their tuition investment. We compromised, and I studied electrical engineering.

Of course, there needn’t be a sharp divide between pure science and applications-oriented engineering. The relationship between the two was addressed by Joseph H. Taylor, the 1993 Nobel Laureate in Physics, in a keynote speech at the IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium on June 17 in Atlanta.

During his talk, titled “Symbiotic Relationships in Technology and Basic Science,” Taylor invited the attendees to think about the relationship between technology and the fundamental laws of nature. Technologists, he said, need to understand how the materials they use interact, and they need mathematical descriptions of nature’s laws to form extrapolations to predict how materials will respond in real-world applications. “It’s a two-way street,” he said. “Science enables technology, and technology enables science to get done.”

Taylor commented that it’s only been for the last couple of hundred years, commencing with Michael Faraday’s experiments and continuing with Joseph Henry’s work on mutual- and self-inductance, that we’ve had any idea of the relationship of magnetism and electricity. He said that researchers like Faraday and Henry were not engineers, but rather scientists doing research just to acquire understanding.

Indicating the tension that can exist between scientists and engineers, Taylor said that Henry, the first head of the Smithsonian Institution, built the first telegraph, but as a professor, he didn’t get the credit—that went to Samuel F.B. Morse.

Taylor noted that James Clerk Maxwell put into a mathematical framework the experimental observations of others. Maxwell’s equations, he said, predict a radiative form of electromagnetic energy, which Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was later able to generate and detect. It wasn’t long, Taylor said, until practical radios came into use.

Taylor described his work with the large radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, recounting the 1974 discovery of a binary pulsar and the observations on that pulsar that confirm Albert Einstein’s prediction that objects accelerated in a strong gravitational field emit gravitational waves. The pulsar’s relativistic velocities of one tenth the speed of light, Taylor said, afforded an opportunity to test predictions that the pulsar’s orbit should shrink by 1 mm per orbit.

“It was the ultimate in scientific chutzpah,” Taylor said, “to think that we could make that measurement from 25,000 light-years away.” But he added that very-high-bandwidth, low-noise receiver front ends developed by engineers helped make the feat possible. Such discoveries, he concluded, would not have been possible without healthy and continual interaction between scientists and engineers.

I would agree with that. My only quibble might be in Taylor’s drawing of such a sharp line between pure science and applied engineering. Samuel F.B. Morse was not an engineer; he was a painter who had a serendipitous encounter with the experimenter Charles Thomas Jackson that led to a practical telegraph. And Taylor did acknowledge that there is crossover in which scientists may turn to engineering, and vice versa. The important thing, he said, is to find a position for which you can’t wait to get up in the morning and get to work.