The Tension Between Science and Engineering Design

Abstract

Engineering design is an essential part of the process of constructing and maintaining modern complex systems as airplanes, power plants, and urban areas. As such engineering design must be based on scientific knowledge. But whereas it is the task of engineering design to assist in the realization of complex systems in their concrete real life context, it is the task of science and mathematics to find and justify new knowledge about the universal working of nature. In a science as physics mathematical structures and formalisms are developed and applied as means to identify and describe the form and nature of laws that govern the behavior of processes of very different scales in nature. This work requires comprehensive abstraction and idealization, and, as a consequence of that, advanced mathematical and physical theories are only valid in highly abstract and isolated systems. Consequently, these theories are far away from the concrete contexts that engineering design is about. In this paper we shall identify and discuss some of the epistemological problems that this tension between scientific idealization and engineering concretization may lead to.