Experimentation in applied science courses … 1 Available to Purchase

Applied physics and engineering are essentially experimental philosophies, and so an appreciation of techniques is fundamental to their understanding. However, academic tradition is biased so heavily in favour of pure thought that the experimentalist is usually regarded as intellectually inferior to, rather than complementary with, the theoretician. Even some engineering teachers contribute to this snobbery by pretending that they are pure scientists (so alleges Thring 1965). However, there is the converse opinion: frequently the required knowledge does not exist when the technologist has to make a decision, and so in some respects he feels superior to the pure scientist.