When Engineers and Technicians Collide

Ed Brown

Whenever I worked along with technicians, I had a feeling that there was a tension, sometimes subtle, and sometimes way more than subtle, in how we worked together.

The first time I noticed it was when an experienced tech and I were talking about inductors. Being a recent EE graduate, I gave him a little outline of the theoretical way I was taught to think about them. He listened patiently and then said something like: “Who cares about all that, I know what an inductor is and what it does — and by the way, what kind of fancy name is inductor — it’s a choke.” It got me remembering when I was in High School fiddling around with electronics. I “knew” what a choke was and didn’t bother to think about how it worked, I just knew what it was there for. He had a point — as long as you know what it does, why do you have to know the theory of it?

Fast forward a couple of decades: A tech and I went out to a customer to set up the equipment we had delivered. One of the meters on the panel was clearly not reading correctly. While I was standing there thinking about it, my technician friend was busy switching out some components. It didn’t work. Meanwhile, I had taken out my calculator and realized that all it needed was to add a certain size resistor. The technician insisted I had to be wrong, and I insisted he try it — I was right.

It wasn’t that I was smarter than him, it was that I approached the problem differently. I used the theory I had learned in school, and he went by his experience.

Through the years, sometimes it went well with the technicians and me and at other times, not so well. It worked when we respected each other’s strengths and would listen to each other creatively. I would come up with an idea from theory and they would raise an example from their experience that didn’t fit. We were an effective team if we took each other seriously and tried to figure out why there was a difference between us. Sometimes they were wrong, and sometimes I was, and in the best times, when we grappled with our differences, we discovered something that we had both overlooked.

The Physics of Everything

In my current job as an editor, I subscribe to news sources from university and government labs and came across this story  and the delightful video  below that got me thinking about my relationships with technicians — and more broadly, about the relationships between theory and practice.

The story is about a theoretical physicist, Kathryn Zurek, and an experimental physicist, Rana Adhikari, who plan on working together to understand the century-old puzzle of how gravity relates to the other forces in the universe, such as electromagnetism.

Zurek: “The work of a theorist is very nonlinear. It involves having ideas, tinkering with the ideas, trying to understand how they fit together, whether it's consistent with everything that we already know theoretically — then most of the time discarding the ones that don’t work. I spend months or years working it out.”

“At the end, if it hangs together theoretically, I come to an experimentalist like Rana and say, ‘I have this idea; I think you might be able to measure this.’ Maybe the first time, I say something like, ‘I think the effects of quantum gravity might be much bigger than we thought,’ and he says, ‘Oh, that's interesting, but that seems impossible.’

“Then I go back and spend another year or two thinking about it, get feedback from the theory community, and come back to Rana: ‘I did all these other calculations, and it's still there. It's not going away.’”

Adhikari: “When I hear about these new ideas, it's always exciting. But first, you try to come up with reasons why something can't be true. It starts to get more interesting when you determine there really is no evidence to contradict the new theory, so it could be true. Now the only way we could contradict it is by building the experiment.”

What’s interesting to me about this exchange is that Zurek came up with a theory she was certain of, but Adhikari, not so much. So instead of arguing, Zurek spent over a year re-thinking her work and consulting with other theorists and still came to the same conclusion. So, Adhikari’s pushing back helped Zurek bring even more clarity and certainty to her ideas. And that added certainty convinced Adhikari that it would be worth spending the next 10 years of his life trying to experimentally verify Zurek’s theory.

My Takeaway

When the technicians, with their practical point of view, and the engineers, with their theoretical point of view, listen to each other open-mindedly and with respect, they can reinforce each other and achieve a better outcome than either working alone.

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