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 pick a side, you inherit its particular way of going wrong.
People say that science begins with a question, with curiosity, and that engineering begins with a problem. It is fine to take this as a plain description, but it is dangerous to take it as one's research identity, because it becomes a way of excusing yourself from half the work. Rather than taking a 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 are not the same type of failure, and neither one is worse than the other. They are what each side looks like when it stops listening to the other.
When I meet someone who leans hard to one side and insists that only their side is right, I think of John 9:25 (though I am not a religious person). Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know: once I was blind, but now I can see. What the verse says is pretty clear. Whether that man is right or wrong, I do not know. What I know is only the one thing I experienced myself. The certainty that one side is correct is a kind of certainty no one is in a position to possess.
We humans are small and fragile. We take hold of what lies within reach of our knowing, and we think about it, and think about it again, and dig 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 where it leads cannot be reached. That, I think, is the only truth I have.