<p>Would it really negatively affect the country? Or would the country continue to go on, as if nothing ever happened? I imagine most of the practical research done in physics can be carried out by engineers, while the truly theoretical topics would be completely scrapped. Engineers would also take over when it comes to high school math and physics education, as you don’t need to know quantum mechanics or real analysis to teach simple differential calculus. In college, engineering professors or post-docs would teach most of the math and physics classes from a practical perspective rather than all theory. This wouldn’t affect industry much, since the vast majority of physicists do not work in industry and most technical companies wouldn’t touch most physicists with a ten foot pole. I know quite a few physicists that work in manual labor and retail because they couldn’t find any form of employment, while most engineers often have among the best job prospects of college graduates. </p>
<p>Engineers are needed in just about every society, and closing down every engineering department would be a complete disaster. Nut just how much are physicists and mathematicians important to our country? Would our society come to a complete stop if every physics and math department in the country were closed down? What are your thoughts on the matter?</p>
<p>In any case, engineering often makes use of new discoveries in math and physics in order to do something better or less expensively, or do something previously not possible. For example, cryptography these days depends a lot on advanced mathematics like number theory.</p>
<p>^ Schools are biased to skew data in order to attract people to their departments. Have any official statistics that do not suffer from any possible biases and are completely objective? Because, a physics graduate working at Mcdonalds is considered to be “employed” by these statistics.</p>
<p>Mathematicians invented computer science in the 20th century… as far as I know, nobody else was close. Physicists discovered relativity, which makes GPS possible. Who knows what mathematicians and physicists will do this century? Alternative energy? Fixing economies? Climate change? Quantum computing?</p>
<p>And what about Chemists, Biologists, Computer Scientists, Statisticians, etc.? Even the ones who do theoretical stuff have a lot of potential to change the world in big ways. Maybe I’m a little biased, but I don’t think that having Engineers do Scientists’ work would be very efficient or achieve similarly good results as the current system… probably similar results to getting rid of engineering and having physicists/mathematicians do the work of engineers. Realistically, there’s a lot of engineering that most anybody in STEM could learn to do sufficiently.</p>
<p>First, who would teach engineers Math and Physics?
Second, engineers are not even close to being competent in the advanced type of work that leading physicits and mathematicians do. Name one engineer that was on an intellectual level with Einstein, Hilbert, Lemaitre, Schrodinger and Bohr. Engineering would not exist if it were not for the brilliance of pure physicists and mathematicians who discovered the scientific and mathematical principles that make Engineering possible.</p>
<p>Considering that there are massive gluts of people in both fields, it would take literally years in order for the private sector employers to appropriately clear the backlogs. But once the backlog of qualified, but unemployed previous graduates was cleared, and integrated into the workforce – I expect that we’d see a significant economic recovery. </p>
<p>Throwing out the H-1B / OPT / F-1 guest workers/immigrants would also go a long ways towards reducing/eliminating the glut, and restoring pricing power to professionals in math and physics, among other subjects. </p>
<p>5 million STEM positions in the USA, 15 million qualified STEM workers. Millions of people are suffering unemployment or unemployment because of the glut. America doesn’t need more scientists; America needs jobs for the scientists it already possesses.</p>
There’s a reason why most employers in the tech and manufacturing/development industries do not hire physicists and mathematicians. If they are so much more bright than engineers, then why aren’t they getting those jobs? There’s clearly a reason for that. Since the times of physicists such as Newton, Maxwell, and Faraday, much of physics has very little application. The other poster only posted one application of special relativity (GPS) and it is a small tweak (the fact that clocks in orbit are slightly faster than those here on the ground) which any engineer can learn. How useful has Schroedinger’s cat been to developing technology? Lol. How many useful applications can you name of quantum theory that have had a strong impact on our lives? Quantum entanglement and event horizons are fun to think about, but at the end of the day, knowledge of it can’t make a company money (unless writing a book) nor does it solve fundamental engineering problems.</p>
<p>There are many engineering professors at my school who’s research involves a strong knowledge of a few advanced mathematical topics such as topology, differential geometry, complex analysis, functional analysis/advanced linear algebra, etc. Topics they had to teach themselves and not spend an entire undergraduate class learning. If they can teach themselves topology to do their research, then they most certainly can teach most math that is required by engineers.</p>
What private sector jobs are they even qualified to do other than doing research in theoretical fields with little to no ROI? Most employers even in a very strong economy wouldn’t touch a physicist or a mathematician with a ten foot pole, and with good reason. Why hire a person who is theoretical but not practical when you can hire a practical person like an engineer? </p>
<p>The only place physicists and mathematicians belong in is in academia, IMO. Once you take that away, they are effectively unemployable and need to retrain in another field.</p>
<p>Being able to learn a subject well enough to explain and use it is a little different from learning it well enough to advance it. You also ignored by other examples; what about computer science? What about the future? I, for one, am not ready for a future of incremental advances in engineering. I hope the world has a lot farther to go than this!</p>
<p>Your argument basically boils down to this: all useful physics/math is already known, and the only real improvements will be in getting more significant digits. Lord Kelvin was wrong when he said it, and I don’t see any reason why it should be more true now than it was then.</p>
<p>This is sort of skirting an issue that hasn’t been brought up: not everything needs to be (immediately, or even at all) useful to be justified. Science is as much a part of our culture as art, literature, and religion, and there’s inherent value in knowledge that doesn’t depend on how it’s used. Science is valuable per se; and so is engineering, provided that you don’t fall into the trap of seeing it as a means to an end.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t say that quantum mechanics is a useless science. I’ll list a couple of applications of quantum mechanics off the top of my head:</p>
<p>1) Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a pretty important technology, with revenues in the billions, and is based on maybe one of the most quantum mechanical things there is, the spin of a proton.</p>
<p>2) The progress in integrated circuits (ICs) could not have been done without the earlier physics understanding of the electronic properties of semiconductors and metals. The theory does get quantum mechanical. The semiconductor industry is a business with revenues in the hundreds of billions. The IC and the technologies that followed it, the microprocessor and the personal computer, have had a huge impact on our lives.</p>
<p>I am sure that I am missing quite a few technologies, but even if the only fruitful technology that came out of knowledge of quantum mechanics was the integrated circuit, I would say that quantum mechanics was pretty important technologically.</p>
<p>I am an engineer, and I work with a number of physicists and mathematicians in my company - my boss in particular has a PhD in physics. My particular area involves some research and a fair amount of application, and while we delve into funadamental science we are primarily focused on producing an actual product. Each specialty has uselful advantages and problematic disadvantages, and hard scientists, mathematicians, and engineers work best (in my experience) when supporting each other.</p>
<p>This has been my experience at every company I’ve worked - regardless of the job title, it is quite common for high-tech companies to have scientists and engineers working side by side.</p>
<p>Also, be careful - Google was started by a couple of matheticians/computer scientists, and they might not like you badmouthing their profession…</p>
<p>Ummm, the training isn’t that much different, and physicists and mathematicians build lots of things, if given the chance.</p>
<p>Physicists and mathematicians, at the very least, are usually shoe-ins for jobs in the software industry, although the guest workers (ie: H-1B’s) have created enormous levels of salary suppression. It is almost impossible to graduate from even a Bachelors in either physics or mathematics without being being reasonably competent at computer programming.</p>
<p>Physicists, IMHO, could probably handle most stuff an EE could as well, almost straight out of the box, without a lot of training. With training and a few years of experience, the undergrad background is probably indistinguishable.</p>
<p>As a physicist myself, I’m going to have to agree with projectile. Outside of academia, physicists are considered to be useless and a liability for most companies. I’ve been unemployed for more than 2 years now, despite the fact I’ve been sending out resumes almost everyday. My best friend and roommate is a theoretical physicist. Know what he does for a living? He cleans toilets. Graduated the same time I did except he gave up after 1 year of searching and became a janitor.</p>
<p>Not every physics department should close down, only 3 or 4 of the best in the country should remain open and only students who were prodigies as children should be accepted into the program. After all, these are the people that will end up becoming tenured professors and making groundbreaking discoveries, while those who weren’t bright enough to become tenured still have the potential to become the best of the best in most other fields, such as engineering.</p>
<p>This thread was good for a chuckle… until I realized the OP was serious. Science drives the advancement of civilization. Physicists, mathematicians and engineers have a symbiotic relationship. Without one, the other two are hurt.</p>
<p>If the OP’s suggestions were to occur, we probably wouldn’t notice much in the short term because the advancements made by physicists and mathematicians often don’t find their way onto the market until years later after engineers turn it into a product. The problem is, after a while the lack of physicists means there are fewer new ideas for the long term and in the long run it hurts. It also means the seat of scientific knowledge shifts overseas to Europe and Asia. I really don’t like that idea.</p>
Are they in engineering physics and computational mathematics? After all, what could the average physicist or mathematician offer to most companies? An extensive knowledge of functional analysis or prior antimatter research brings no value to a company. Perhaps, they have been working with the company since the 60’s and 70’s? There are some very old physicists who still work as engineers because they got those jobs back in the 60’s, but with HR departments popping up everywhere and the minimum requirement to even make it past the first screening being an engineering degree for most technical jobs in the private sector these days, I would be surprised if physicists are hired any more. </p>
<p>I’ve talked to quite a few physicists at my school (post-doctor fellows) who have realized they will never get tenure. I’ve asked why they don’t take their skills to the private sector, and all the physicists I’ve asked have told me they believe they have a much better chance of getting tenure than finding a job in industry. </p>
<p>Perhaps, your company is one of the only exceptions to the rule? There a lot of physicists working dead-end jobs in academia who would love an industry job, but most employers wouldn’t touch them with a 10 foot pole.</p>
Really? Then how come they are never hired as EE’s these days? In fact, I’ve been told that applying to an engineering job with a physics degree is worse than just applying with a high school degree. According to the few HR people I’ve talked to, employers would rather train a high school graduate and teach them all of the requisite knowledge than hire a physicist. It’s because they believe physicists very impractical, unfocused and liabilities to their companies, not to mention lacking most of the critical skills needed for the technical jobs in engineering. Again, this is quoting the HR people who are involved in hiring engineers and going through thousands of resumes everyday.</p>
<p>If one is not hired to do a job, that does not mean said individual is incapable of doing the job, or learning how to do it. Physicists are, generally speaking, intelligent, educated (and educable!) persons, capable of doing things when they are given a fair chance to do them.</p>
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<p>Interesting that we have HR people who claim the ability to determine the capabilities of engineering candidates. What are their engineering backgrounds? Could they do the jobs they claim these physicists are unable to do?</p>
<p>Anyway, if anyone’s looking for a reason why someone might want to go into i-banking or consulting rather than STEM, this is one. There’s this outcry in the US for STEM workers, including physicists, and yet, physicists are not allowed to work in jobs they can educate themselves to do. Instead, high school students are sought. Depressing.</p>
<p>As silence_kit already pointed out, the archetypal application would be the transistor/integrated-circuit/microprocessor, which is the basic building block of all of microelectronics/computerization/telecom today. Could you imagine the world today without the Internet, cellphone, or the personal computer?</p>
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<p>Also the laser: ubiquitous in medicine (i.e. laser eye surgery), data storage (i.e. CD’s/DVD’s), and telecom (laser diodes and fiber optics), or even technologies as mundane as the bar-code scanner, the laser printer, or laser hair removal.</p>