Science, engineering and technology

The distinction between science, engineering and technology is not always clear. Science, a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe, is the reasoned investigation, or having the capacity for consciously making sense of things for establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information; or the study of phenomena, aimed at discovering enduring principles among elements of the phenomenal world, or those observable occurrence, by employing formal (utterances, conceptually similar to a ritual although typically secular and less involved) techniques such as the scientific method, a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge.

Technologies, on the other hand, are not usually exclusively products of science, because they have to satisfy requirements such as: utility, which in economics, is a representation of preferences over some set of goods and services; usability, the ease of use and learnability of  a human-made object; and safety, the state of being “safe,” the condition of being protected against physical, social, spiritual, financial, political, occupational, psychological, educational or other types or consequences of failure, damage, error, accidents, harm or any other event which could be considered non-desirable.

Lastly, engineering is the goal-oriented (GO) process of designing and making tools and systems to exploit natural phenomena for practical human means, often (but not always) using results and techniques from science; describing variability in dispositional or situational goal preferences that no individual implicitly sets for him/herself in achievement situations. The development of technology may draw upon many fields of knowledge, including scientific, engineering, mathematical (the abstract study of topics encompassing quantity, structure, space, change, and other properties; it had no generally accepted definition), linguistic (“language” is the human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, and “a language” is any specific example of such system), and historical knowledge (an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about these events), to achieve some practical result.

Technology is often a consequence of science and engineering--although technology as a human activity precedes the two fields. For example, science might study the flow of electrons, subatomic particles with a negative elementary electric charge, in electrical conductors, a material which contains moving electric charges in physics, by using already-existing tools and knowledge. This new-found knowledge may then be used by engineers to create new tools and machines, such as semiconductors, electrical conductivity intermediate to that of a conductor and an insulator; computers, a general purpose device that can be programmed to carry out a finite set of arithmetic or logical operations; and other forms of advanced technology. In this sense, scientists and engineers may both be considered technologists; the three fields are often considered as one for the purposes of research and references.

The exact relations between science and technology, a term of art used to encompass the relationship between science and technology, in particular have been debated scientists, historians and policymakers in the late 20th century, in part because the debate can inform the funding of basic and applied science. In the immediate wake of World War II (“Second World War,” “WWII,” “WW2”), a global war that was underway by 1939 and ended in 1945, for example, in the United States it was widely considered that technology was simply “applied science” and that to fund basic science was to reap technological results in due time. An articulation of this philosophy could be found explicitly in “Science--The Endless Frontier,” a treatise on postwar science policy by Vannevar Bush, an American engineer, inventor and science administrator known for his work in analog computers, for his role an initiator and administrator of the Manhattan Project, for founding Raytheon, and for the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of the World Wide Web: “New products, new industries, and more jobs require continuous additions to knowledge of the laws of nature... This essential new knowledge can be obtained only through basic scientific research.” In the late-1960s, however, this view came under attack, leading towards initiatives to fund science for specific tasks (initiatives resisted by the scientific community). The issue remains contentious--though most analysis resist the model that technology simply is a result of scientific research.

See: Fathers of the Modern Medical Science