this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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That's how it is in almost every field, isn't it? The ones who designed the space shuttle were not the same ones turning wrenches and welding on the actual vehicle.
Yeah, I thought it was well known that Scientists discover new things, engineers do things with what’s discovered
Sometimes even engineers and scientists need it put in an understandable perspective.
No, the real engineers design and supervise everything. High skilled technicians assemble everything through the engineers guidance
Put another way, everyone in science and technololgy stands on the backs of giants.
Not Aperture Science! They do all their science from scratch - no hand-holding.
Well, I should've said "build or design," maybe.
But yes, this should be obvious when you think about it, because it's just how things work. Still, in our culture, we regularly refer to physicists as the people who made the atomic bomb happen. Kaiser writes about this too, and the influence it had on McCarthyists, who regularly panicked that physicists were secretly communists because they associated physicists with building the atomic bomb.
It had other weird influences on culture too. For a couple decades after the Manhattan project, being a physicist was considered mainstream cool. Social magazines ran articles with pieces about how no hip dinner party is complete without a physicist.
The whole thing is a super interesting cultural phenomenon and I highly recommend anything he's ever written.