Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zaak | Hacker News Reader

I was under the impression that gravitational wave detection had more to do with engineering advances than science per se.

View on HN

The most HackerNews of all comments.

"Well it was the engineers who did most of the work..."

Who do you think came up with some of those engineering advances? No need to play semantic scientist vs. engineer arguments. Some of the advances came from scientists and some came from engineers.

I was at Caltech when LIGO was being built. Kip Thorne gave a great lecture in the engineering school about how they went about knowing what to try to engineer in the first place. I'm not an expert on LIGO, but based on the seminars I attended it sounded like there was a lot of science that went into figuring out what the engineering team needed to do.

I may have gone to a similar talk when Kip was at my school, what a coincidence!

To add to this, engineers can use the scientific method.

Engineering uses results from science to do it's magic. No transistors without understanding electricity and semiconductors.

But gravitational wave detection wasn't "just" engineering; there's a lot of theory to be done to figure out what signals to look for, how to interpret them etc.

To clarify my comment, I wasn't intending to slight the science behind LIGO, nor the scientists working on the project. Rather, I was trying to mean that the main challenge to detecting gravitational waves was "merely" building a detector sensitive enough to detect signals as faint as gravitational waves were predicted to be.

The original post here is talking about reproducible results and p-values and publishing. Is LIGO a particularly good example of that part of science being done well? I don't know either way.

I was under the impression that many advances in science took this form e.g. invent a microscope or telescope and then spend the next few decades pointing it at things and writing down what you find. Make it better, point it at smaller or further away things. And repeat.

Thank you. I hate that "science" takes credit for a ton of things that are actually discovered / perfected by engineers.

Often things reported in the press as "new science" appear to be engineering. But then I'm sure there's a deal of engineering in science labs and vice-versa.

FWIW I'm much closer to being a scientist than an engineer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com