Interesting but confusing subject
. An engineer applies his scientific knowledge to solve practical problems from my experience and seldomly relies on theories developed by Theoretical Mathematicians or Physicists. Karl's argument is valid and not valid at the same time.For example, we know we need to travel 2 million light years to travel to Andromeda and we know the mathematical/physical science behind that(or we think we do ...) but we can't physically make that happen yet as in creating a machine that travels at the speed of light prooving that we lack the technology to do it which takes us back to Engineering so maybe this is were we need to be spending our money(The problem might even be that we are spending money on the wrong science...).But on the other hand, if engineers don't have enough knowledge(that comes from theoretical science) to use, we won't be going anywhere anytime soon.
Hope the above makes sense. In my mind, it's like we are all working on one HUGE project and one team (theoretical science) and another team (Engineering) work together on the same task and contribute to each other's task equally