Arguing about what science and engineering is all fine and dandy, far be it from me to tell people what to discuss, but I would highlight the actual point of the piece, which is the suggestion that we are overinvesting in science in certain areas where we should be investing in engineering.
I find myself thinking back to an article earlier today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986640 , about the virus that could improve lithium battery's capacity by up to 10 times... from scientists at the University of Maryland. As some people say in the comments, they're tired of hearing about these advances that never make it to market. Perhaps this is part of the reason why? If nobody takes this to engineers or funds engineers, this was, if not entirely a waste of time, certainly a suboptimal use of time.
(Certainly part of the reason why is some of these ideas simply don't pan out in practice; batteries with 10 times the capacity but at 100x the cost may have such a limited market as to be effectively no market. But it seems like some of these things ought to be happening. The various promised-but-never-materializing advances in the field of solar energy particularly come to mind.)
I think that's a rather shortsighted view of science. There are many discoveries that, for reasons of funding or just exposure, are reported by the media as groundbreaking or revolutionary... and never make it to market.
There are many reasons for this - maybe there are issues that are non-solvable using today's technology/knowledge. Maybe it's not economical, or maybe it's just waiting for the proliferation of something else before becoming feasible.
The knowledge is not wasted - there are many instances where things discovered (and had no real applications) decades ago become of incredible relevance later.
There's a mantra I heard of while in school - math drives science 50 years in the future. Science drives engineering 50 years in the future.
I think you may have accidentally read a frequently-expressed idea into my message, that "science is worthless when it is not practical", that I did not actually say, nor do I believe. The point of the article is I believe more accurately phrased as: If we actually want to solve our energy problems, then we should expect to need to invest in engineering, not just science. The discussion was framed not as an abstract consideration of the virtues of science, but, given that we have important problems that need solving, are we approaching the solution in the best manner? Or, by conflating "science" and "engineering", are we accidentally satisfying ourselves that we are making progress when in fact we are investing too much in science and not enough in engineering, a mistake we might not make if we did not freely conflate the two so frequently?
In the specific context of solving real world problems, this question has meaning, and it's not the generic "useless science is useless" argument, it's actually grounded in very real considerations.
This is part of the reason I posted in the first place, as people are getting drawn to the strange attractor of the generic science vs. engineering question I felt people were missing out on the more interesting and more subtle question brought up by the article itself. (And personally I think "science vs. engineering" is just a boring and irrelevant definition debate when it comes down to it, everybody citing their personal definitions at each other and arguing which definition is "real" as if that actually matters. This article raises an actually interesting question with teeth in it, and works perfectly well with rather standard definitions of the two terms.)
I think one could also argue that a lot of science research needs to improve it's engineering methodology.
One obvious problem in a lot of even hard-science research is that the end-product is a piece of paper with some formulas and graphs. In this era of computer-use, often a lot of software went into it's construction and that software is generally not released.
Just much, a lot of science uses Matlab, which pretty much inherently makes the results closed to further use. This has been argued here and I'm well aware a lot of results can be too preliminary for general use. But it's worth improving this.
After all, the degree of mathematical sophistication of physicists and biologists has increased over the years. It seems reasonable to ask that their software engineering sophistication improve also (not that software engineering is as exact as science of course).
(The following is based around a United States perspective, would be interested in more international views)
In the US, as I see it, there seems to be a view of engineering is a capitalistic endeavor powered by private investment, where science is an academic endeavor powered by primarily government investment. (Exceptions seem to be defense contractors and medical research. The first is normally the government buying a service, the second is typically the transition from academic to commercial prospects.)
I find myself thinking back to an article earlier today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986640 , about the virus that could improve lithium battery's capacity by up to 10 times... from scientists at the University of Maryland. As some people say in the comments, they're tired of hearing about these advances that never make it to market. Perhaps this is part of the reason why? If nobody takes this to engineers or funds engineers, this was, if not entirely a waste of time, certainly a suboptimal use of time.
(Certainly part of the reason why is some of these ideas simply don't pan out in practice; batteries with 10 times the capacity but at 100x the cost may have such a limited market as to be effectively no market. But it seems like some of these things ought to be happening. The various promised-but-never-materializing advances in the field of solar energy particularly come to mind.)