It is dangerous to attempt to separate science and engineering, to rank them or treat one as subordinate to the other. Not because the distinction is meaningless, but because the moment you stand fully on one side, you inherit its particular way of going wrong.
People often say that science begins with a question and with curiosity, and that engineering begins with a problem. This is not wrong, but it is dangerous for a researcher to take it as one's research identity. It can become a way of excusing yourself from half the work. Rather than taking one side, I think what matters far more is holding both at once and making the directions they point converge into one.
For research that began as simple curiosity to carry real weight, it has to reach people, eventually, in some form of usefulness. It does not have to return value immediately, or in the form the researcher first imagined. But the obligation never expires just because the timeline is long. Curiosity earns its keep by arriving somewhere, for someone.
When we are motivated to solve a problem, we should ask the same kind of question in reverse. What changes if this is solved? What does it do to people? Did this need solving at all? What was my own motive in starting it? Did it have to be this problem, of all the problems out there? That interior intent is what matters, and it is the part nobody answers for you.
Science that never reaches usefulness stays unfinished on its own terms. Engineering that offers no meaning is easily corrupted. These two fail in different ways, and neither failure is better or worse than the other. They are simply what each side becomes when it stops respecting or considering the value of the other.
When I meet someone who leans hard to one side and insists that only their side is right, I find myself thinking of John 9:25 (though I am not a religious person). I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know: whereas once I was blind, now I can see. What the verse says is pretty clear: 1) Whether that man is right or wrong, that truth is not something I can know. 2) What I know is only the one thing I lived through myself. The certainty that one side is unconditionally right is not a kind of certainty humans can possess.
We humans are small and fragile. Taking hold of what lies within reach of our knowing, thinking about it and thinking about it again, digging deeper. The idea that doing so will someday bring us to the truth is probably an illusion. And yet not stopping that illusion, and believing that science and engineering are not two different things. Continuing to keep faith with it while knowing it cannot be reached. That, I think, is the only truth I possess.