Brilliant question!

A scientist works to try to understand how the universe works – their job is to look at something and find out what happens if you poke it _just so_… By learning about how things work, they can come up with ideas about how to make amazing technologies! Scientists discovered how electrons move in metals and in other substances – without which there’s be no computers! Scientists looked at the way the planets move and worked out how gravity works – without which we’d never have landed on the moon! Scientists worked out how time and even space get squashed and stretched and misshapen by gravity and speed, without which GPS wouldn’t function!

Engineers, though – they take those ideas from the scientists and make them actually work in the real world! Engineers worked out HOW to make a doped N-P junction into a transistor and turn them into computers. Engineers design and build the telescopes that scientists use to look at the sky…then they design and build the rockets that get us out of the atmosphere! Engineers work out how to fit clocks that are so accurate that you could leave them running for a billion years and they would only be a second out inside satellites to make GPS function.

So – scientists have the big, outlandish, future-forming ideas and engineers take those ideas and make them into a future-shaped reality!