That’s how it is in almost every field, isn’t it? The ones who designed the space shuttle were not the same ones turning wrenches and welding on the actual vehicle.
Put another way, everyone in science and technololgy stands on the backs of giants.
Well, I should’ve said “build or design,” maybe.
But yes, this should be obvious when you think about it, because it’s just how things work. Still, in our culture, we regularly refer to physicists as the people who made the atomic bomb happen. Kaiser writes about this too, and the influence it had on McCarthyists, who regularly panicked that physicists were secretly communists because they associated physicists with building the atomic bomb.
It had other weird influences on culture too. For a couple decades after the Manhattan project, being a physicist was considered mainstream cool. Social magazines ran articles with pieces about how no hip dinner party is complete without a physicist.
The whole thing is a super interesting cultural phenomenon and I highly recommend anything he’s ever written.
Yeah, I thought it was well known that Scientists discover new things, engineers do things with what’s discovered
