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Comment by richardjordan | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that Elon Musk, a physicist by education, is indeed an engineer and was very hands on in the engineering processes at SpaceX, so I'd assume he wasn't out of the technical loop that led to design decisions at Tesla.

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Maybe a little OT but:

Can you be considered an "ist" by having just a BS degree. That is, physicist, computer scientist, etc...

If no, what is the requirement? Masters or PhD?

I did a BSc in Physics. I consider myself a Physicist by education, just as I consider Musk to be. You are trained to be a Physicist whether you pursue a career in that field or not. As I mentioned on a post recently talking about research projects, my final year project in 1995, without going into too much detail, was modeling the expansion of the universe assuming a non-zero cosmological constant and tracing the paths of light through such an expanding/contracting/whatever universe, depending on assumed values, and studying the likely distribution of hydrogen absorption lines as it passed through a posited foam-like structure of walls and filaments of matter. This was a relatively off the wall topic at the time, but for anyone studying Physics today you'll know a lot of these things now represent the state of thinking in many ways. People might pursue these topics to a much deeper level in order to get a Masters or PhD but you still need to be a Physicist at any level to dive into such a project and produce a result.

At least that's my 2c - it's all just semantics, and as such there are many possible answers here :-)

If no, what is the requirement? Masters or PhD

Launching payloads to the ISS is good enough for me.

That was done by Musks company, not Musk alone.

There aren't many achievements that are truly solo efforts - there is usually someone keeping the home fires burning at the very least.

Maybe a little OT but:

By law, no one can practise as a "professional engineer" in Canada or the United States without a licence. The BS is just one part of becoming a professional engineer.

You don't even need formal qualifications for those, just the actual skill, and then it's up to people to asses if you have them.

Right. A bit like an artist. You don't need an advanced degree in art to be an accomplished artist. Plus the idea of formalized education with narrowly focused advanced degrees is fairly recent, and for most of the history of the discipline Physicists have not been so qualified.

Go look up Ed Fredkin or Amory Lovins.

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