The distribution between science, engineering, and technology is not always clear. Science is systematic knowlegde of the physical or material world gained through onservation and experimentation. Technologies are not usually exclusively products of science, because they have to satisfy requirements such as utility usability, and safety.
Engineering is the goal-oriented process of designing and making tools and systems to exploit natural phenomena for practical human means, often (but not always) using results and techniques from science. The development of technology may draw upon many fields of knowledge, including scientific, engineering, mathematical, linguistic, and historical knowledge to achieve some practicla result.
Technology is often a consequence of science and engineering, althroug technology as a human activity precedes the two fields. For example, science might study the flow of electrons in electrical conductors by using already-existing tools and knwoledge. This mew-found knowledge may then be used by engineers to create new tools and machines such as semiconductors, computers, and other forms of advanced technology. In this sense, scientist and engineers may both be considered technologist; the three fields are often considered as one for the purpose of research and refernce.
The exact relations between science and technology in particular have been debated by scientist, historians, and policymakers in the late 20th century, in part because the debate can inform the funding of basic and applied science. In the immediate wake of world war II, for example, it was widely considered in the United states the technology was simply ''applied science'' and that to fund basic science was to reap technological results i due time. An articulation of this philosophy could be found explicity in Vannevar Bush's treatise on postwar science policy, Science The Endless Frontier: ''New products, new industries, and more jobs require continuous additions to knowledge of the law of nature... This essential new knowledge can be obtained only through basic scientific research in the late-1960s, however, this view came under direct attack, leading toward initiatives to found science for specific task (initiatives resisted by the scientific community). The issue remains contentions, though most analysts resist the model that technology simply is a result of scientific research.
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