Science, not engineering

Where do you think engineers get their equations?

For the science part of it: >100 years old scientific literature

Possibly this was sarcasm, but I’ll bite just in case. There is quite a lot of scientific research that informs modern aerospace engineering: https://phys.org/tags/aerospace+engineering/

You’ll find similar physics research for example in nuclear power, optics, quantum computers, telecommunications, engines.. all kinds of engineering really. Chemistry is also quite relevant and there are new, stronger materials being engineered all the time based on research.

It’s definitely not all just 1900s physics driving everything, even if you say that for some reason anything researched then doesn’t fall under the 80% of science that doesn’t work (which GP didn’t).

Where do you think scientists get their data?

Much of what you think of as science came from engineers.

Is rocket science possible sans science? Can you be more specific what engineering without dependency on any science is? Like how do you even approach inventing gps as an engineer if 80% of physics calculations don’t actually work for example?

Almost all of what is called "rocket science" is firmly in the engineering wheelhouse.

GPS relies very little on 20th century science, beyond GR corrections.

The science behind orbital mechanics is just Newton's Laws, stuff thoroughly settled centuries ago.

That is Engineering.

Do you also consider stuff like physics and chemistry engineering and not science? Otherwise I’m not sure how you’d achieve anything as an engineer if 80% of your scientific understanding of how your materials work were wrong, for example.

Some is, some isn't. Much of what we call science was work done by engineers.

So going back to the original topic, 80% of science doesn’t work but actually a lot of science is done by engineers and that’s what the 20% that works is?

Got no grounds for opinion about physics or chemistry. Certainly some of it is good work, although I harbor doubts about the ultimate usefulness of string theory.

But your example of GPS, and others' of "rocket science", show that you have even shakier ground for opinion, along with insufficient respect for engineering. You are not alone in that: scientists get good publicity. They even get dedicated press offices at universities.

Engineering is great. I guess it just wasn’t clear to me that GP didn’t mean science older than 100 years or that physics and chemistry didn’t fully count as science when I replied to their blanket statement that 80% or 90% of science was wrong. If you define science to exclude anything that is in practical use by engineers and/or has become “settled” over time then the statement is less surprising (but also perhaps less provocative and interesting).

Science is about discovering models that account for observed nature.

Engineering is about making things that work. GPS is very firmly on the side of a thing that works. Likewise, rockets. People sometimes use those when doing science.

So your trotting GPS out as an example of correct science did not in any way illustrate what you imagined.

I mentioned GPS because it depends on general relativity (or at least I believe it does).

Are particle accelerators a better example for you, in that they wouldn’t actually work if 80-90% of science is wrong? Or is particle physics also actually engineering and nothing to do with science?

Anyway, my guess at this point is that we both agree on lots of the same technologies that actually work, just not on if general relativity or physics or chemistry are technically science or engineering, and therefore whether they would fall under the “90% of science doesn’t work” statement. Its hard for me to imagine engineering without a dependency on scientific knowledge, but it’s interesting that that’s a valid point of view out there.

GPS would, in fact, work totally fine if the effects of general relativity were exactly zero. The software does, however, need to apply adjustments to account for effects of GR, in order to produce precisely accurate results.

A particle accelerator is a tool used for conducting science experiments. That they work, for that purpose, is purely a product of engineering.

At issue is not "whether science works". It is, rather, what percentage of published papers in science journals are crap, and advance the field not at all. The people in the best position to know say they are appalled at how many are.

Would they all say 80%+? Obviously not. Do any? Absolutely.

The specific statement I was responding to was this:

> I can say I believe 80% of science wrong AND not reproducible, 10% being an outright fraud (10% being legit).

.. which I interpreted to be a statement on "whether science works."

If we instead constrain that to 80% of science that was posted recently in journals, and mainly not in hard sciences, then I could totally get behind that. But I don't think that's what they said, and I think that's why I've been confused by this whole thread.

Don't think GPS would be possible in this day and age, I mean, "inventing" it and "implementing" it from zero. It was possible to "invent" and "implement" it in the late '70s - the '80s because back then the "capitalist virus" hadn't entirely invaded the US MIC (and the scientists associated with it), it was all basically a socialist system. That is no longer the case, even when it comes to Government-sponsored work.

What about Starlink?

I don’t think it’s remotely accurate to describe GPS as “socialist”. It was a military project. There’s a long list of military projects with more funding than GPS that have been invented and implemented since then.

That’s what I was saying, the military used to be socialist, even in the capitalist US. It was definitely socialist during WW2. I think it started becoming real capitalist once the (first) Cold War ended, I think the contractors thing started becoming more and more important throughout the ‘90s and the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq were fought by a capitalist US military. It’s telling that these 20 years of war (2001 - 2021) didn’t bring us almost anything worthy when it comes to science funded by the military, unlike almost all the other wars in which the US had been involved.

Starlink is mostly a marketing thing, and is mostly based on science that had been funded during the Cold War.

I don't know what you mean. The military isn't an economic system, and it's definitely not socialist. It has a rigid authoritarian hierarchy, and it's funded by taxes, always has been.

The years you cite are when drone tech was developed and deployed in combat, and cryptography improved. The DoD funds all kinds of research through the university system that isn't public, you may have no idea what it brought us because it's too recent. The DoD is funding all kinds of projects today, despite our capitalist tendencies, for example: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/309821...

I don't know what you mean about Starlink being marketing. They've deployed more satellites than all other satellites to date combined. You said you thought a project this size wasn't doable today, yet there it is. It seems like you're arbitrarily judging what projects you believe are worthy of consideration in order to support a preconceived notion. Why do you believe GPS involved more invention or development than Starlink, drones, cryptography, machine learning, or anything else? GPS technology was also developed before the US Navstar project began, the science already existed and it wasn't some kind of lone independent invention.

> The military isn't an economic system,

The system of which the military is a major pillar is definitely also an economic system, and the fact that a major part of that system (the military "sub-system", in this instance) was run in a way that was antithetic to the stated ideology of that "all encompassing" system as a whole ("capitalism", in this instance) was quite interesting.

I'll give you drones, even though the drones that have had most of an impact in the present war are the consumer-oriented ones, which are not directly the work of any military system (I'm talking about the small drones that help with artillery targeting). The Bayraktars were quite rapidly neutralised by the Russians once they got the hang of it, and at this point they're merely a PR thing.

Cryptography is also a result of Cold War funding, in fact it's one of the quintessential results of that war when it comes to our industry.

> Why do you believe GPS involved more invention or development than Starlink, drones, cryptography, machine learning, or anything else?

Didn't say that, quite the contrary, most of those are the result of direct and sustained Government funding via the military, i.e. what I called socialism. Again, Starlink would have remained a pipe-dream without Reagan's 1980s Star Wars Program.

Anyway, I'm happy for the current status-quo, i.e. for the best and brightest in our industry golden hand-cuffed at FAANG companies, spending their best years worrying about their comps and about KPIs and OKRs, had they been part of a Manhattan-like or Apollo-like Government-run system then things would have been much, much, much worse (in terms of peace on this planet, that is).