Engineer vs. Scientist

Figure 1. Fake Physics?

There are a number of definitions for an engineer.  The one I like the best is this:¹ 

Engineer:

noun:  a person who designs, builds or maintains engines, machines, or public works.

synonyms: Originator, designer, inventor, developer, creator.

verb:  Design and build (a machine or structure)

I always thought of an engineer as an applied scientist. The term “design” is typically conflated with “build and test. They are two separate phases of an engineering project to an engineer.  Design involves creating the concepts and documenting them such that a prototype can be built.  The building includes constructing a prototype, testing, and making design changes until the device performs its function as planned.

Similarly, a scientist is defined as:²

Scientist:

noun:  a person who is studying or has expert knowledge of one or more of the natural or physical sciences.

The difference between an engineer and a scientist is that an engineer has to make something work.  To work, the object designed has to follow the laws of physics and chemistry; not theory, or possibilities.  Often, thinking purely in theoretical terms blinds one to common sense and/or other theory that is overlooked.³  The scientist deals with possibilities; the engineer must deal with the impossibilities.  

When Steve played the video at his book release party, I really didn’t know what to expect as I thought that secret chemical reactions that make life function would be revealed.

What I saw instead was tasks being performed by molecular machines. Impossible!  How could such complexity exist?  Inside a cell, impossible squared! I spent my life designing and building much simpler systems. I knew that the video was a vastly simplified representation. The complexity of all the process control details that must exist is staggering.

In a very real sense, what I was witnessing was magic. To this day, I do not believe those in the field of biology realize the complexity of what must exist in the cell.  Process control requires sensor, signal processing (think computer) functionality and actuators. It has to acquire the energy and matter required.  It has to get rid of the waste.  And reproduction???   ?

I truly believe that only engineers who have been involved with complex process control systems can appreciated the complexity that must exist in the cell, One does not realize the level of detail, the number of overlooked, or misunderstood issues, the wrong science or calculation that will cause failure.

Engineer vs. Scientist

Figure 1. Fake Physics?

There are a number of definitions for an engineer.  The one I like the best is this:¹ 

Engineer:

noun:  a person who designs, builds or maintains engines, machines, or public works.

synonyms: Originator, designer, inventor, developer, creator.

verb:  Design and build (a machine or structure)

I always thought of an engineer as an applied scientist. The term “design” is typically conflated with “build and test. They are two separate phases of an engineering project to an engineer.  Design involves creating the concepts and documenting them such that a prototype can be built.  The building includes constructing a prototype, testing, and making design changes until the device performs its function as planned.

Similarly, a scientist is defined as:²

Scientist:

noun:  a person who is studying or has expert knowledge of one or more of the natural or physical sciences.

The difference between an engineer and a scientist is that an engineer has to make something work.  To work, the object designed has to follow the laws of physics and chemistry; not theory, or possibilities.  Often, thinking purely in theoretical terms blinds one to common sense and/or other theory that is overlooked.³  The scientist deals with possibilities; the engineer must deal with the impossibilities.  

When Steve played the video at his book release party, I really didn’t know what to expect as I thought that secret chemical reactions that make life function would be revealed.

What I saw instead was tasks being performed by molecular machines. Impossible!  How could such complexity exist?  Inside a cell, impossible squared! I spent my life designing and building much simpler systems. I knew that the video was a vastly simplified representation. The complexity of all the process control details that must exist is staggering.

In a very real sense, what I was witnessing was magic. To this day, I do not believe those in the field of biology realize the complexity of what must exist in the cell.  Process control requires sensor, signal processing (think computer) functionality and actuators. It has to acquire the energy and matter required.  It has to get rid of the waste.  And reproduction???   ?

I truly believe that only engineers who have been involved with complex process control systems can appreciated the complexity that must exist in the cell, One does not realize the level of detail, the number of overlooked, or misunderstood issues, the wrong science or calculation that will cause failure.

© 2016 Mike Van Schoiack

The Nature of Processes

A process is defined as a series of actions that achieve an end.  Petroleum processing plants probably comes to mind for most people because the term “process” is normally associated with the phrase.  However, just about any task is a process.  Each has a beginning and an end.  Fortunately, the human Life Process has not ended yet!

A petroleum processing plant is running a specified, intelligent process.  But there is another type of process: natural.  Weather, for example, uses the forces of nature to accomplish ends that are not intelligently directed. We usually do not distinguish between the two but should when discussing the differences.

Specified (or Intelligent) Processes Require Means to Sense, Process, and Act: Accomplished by Machines

To run a process, there must be a means to sense conditions and intelligently process the information to determine the action required. The instructions to do the required work are relayed to the actuators. The system must have a raised free energy ¹ power source capable of being controlled with the correct form and amount to accomplish the specified intelligent work, information acquisition, transfer, and processing. Continous power is required because the sensors and processing must be active when the process is running. This power that is not recovered, is increasing the entropy of the universe. Natural causes have no analog to this functionality and the raised free energy power source. In either case, the change in the system’s entropy and the relationship to the energy expended do follow the laws of physics when all actions are accounted for. Machines perform these functions.

Natural work and resulting outcomes occur due to initial conditions, free energy availability, and the laws of physics. Intelligent work and resulting outcomes result from initial conditions and machinery that follows the laws of physics. These are different paradigms. Intelligent work requires additional energy to power the intelligent functionality.

Our Brain Shields Us From the Complexity of Processes

Think of the process of cooking a meal.  Your first planning level is to design a menu, gather the food, cook, set the table, and serve the meal.  The second level is to write out the menu, listing each ingredient, the amount, the steps of preparation before cooking, the method, temperature and time, and so on.

If you had to write a program for a robot to do this work, you would eventually get to a detail level that provides instructions such as position both arms, shoulder angle 180 degrees y-z plane, 5 degrees x-z plane, and elbow joint 90 degrees, palm up.  Move from coördinates: x₁, y₁, facing θ₁ to coördinates: x₂, y₂, facing θ₂ , etc.

And it gets worse.  At an even lower level, commands must be supplied to the actuators that perform the work required in a form that the actuator “understands,” e.g., relax interior shoulder actuator, extend exterior shoulder actuator to position 22.2, relax exterior elbow actuator, retract interior elbow to position 13.4, with similar instructions for legs and all finger joints.  Each such instruction is a process step. There are probably thousands of individual carefully orchestrated process steps that must be executed by the robot to fix breakfast.

The reason for going through this exercise is to emphasize we are unaware of the individual actions required by a complex machine such as ourselves to accomplish even the simplest tasks as they are being executed unconsciously.

An engineer designing process control systems quickly aware of the minute detail step that must be executed.  Doing intelligent work is far more complex and involved than an outsider realizes.  Think of all the computations required to determine how hard to squeeze, which direction to turn, how big of a step to take, then convert this into commands to each muscle, etc.  One cannot appreciate the gap between perception and reality of complexity of doing intelligent work. Here are a few videos of engineered robots that now exist and involve hundreds of man-years of development time.

DNA appears to be the database for the parts (proteins & RNA), and it, in conjunction with proteins, must also act as the “operating system.”  From it, RNA and proteins, are constructed, and apparently, these parts end up being the control processor, sensors and actuators that do the physical work.  The proteins/RNA involved with some functions have been identified, very little is understood².  Very likely the ratio of “learned” to “to be learned” is probably about equal to “protein expression DNA” to “non-protein expression DNA”.  Upon learning the “what and how” of the rest of the DNA will most probably be surprises; technology we have not discovered analogous to the discovery of neural networks in the body.  Until the detail functionality, both of the cell and organisms is reverse-engineered, for the most part, we will be in the dark.

Specified (Intelligent) Processes Cannot be the Result of Natural Causes.

Processes (exclusive of natural processes) require intelligent choices.  The simplest example is a binary input that is processed to provide two output choices, 0 or 1, X or Y, Yes or No.  This means that someplace in the process system, there has to be matter that can be set to one state or another based on some external condition.

Natural causes have only one input state, its environment, and one output, the state of highest entropy of the system (or the most stable equilibrium point, lowest potential energy).  A logically driven system must have the ability to hold matter away from the environmentally driven equilibrium in order to carry the logical information. Therefore, natural causes cannot conduct an intelligent process. 

© 2016 Mike Van Schoiack

The Concept of Realms, and Levels Within

Table 1. Hierarchy of Realms

This engineer thinks of physics and philosophy as two different realms.  And within these realms are different levels within the realm.  As an example, in the realm of space (physics), there are the levels of position, velocity and acceleration.  It seems to this engineer that there is a similar hierarchy of intelligence (philosophy) that would be information, logic and abstraction.  The lowest level of each is similar insofar as a point really isn’t space and information really isn’t intelligence, but both are related to the realm they are in, and a product of their realm.

This engineer believes that it is proper to define another realm, actualization (process)¹, as actualization is a combination of physics (matter, energy, space and time) and philosophy (intelligence).  Similarly, tools, logically intelligent machines and abstract intelligent machines are levels of the actualization realm.

© 2016 Mike Van Schoiack