<p>
It was very clearly meant to be a witty response. Plus your analogous hypothetical situation does not illustrate any coherent point that you were trying to make.</p>
<p>Anyone here who hasn’t gone through an engineering book, attended/viewed some lectures, or looked at some problem sets shouldn’t be saying that engineering is just a trade. The colloquial definition of ‘trade’ runs along the lines of mechanics, plumbers, carpenters, that sort of thing. The common thing between these occupations is that generally the problems faced while doing these jobs don’t differ much. Also, there is almost never any purely theoretical or mathematical basis for how they solve their problems. Engineering, however, takes a lot of justification in the mathematics, and researchers in engineering do lots of theoretical and computational work, which is almost no different than what a physicist does except that they are applying their skills to create machinery/structures/computers/whatever. Engineers working in industry also have to apply their skills in physics and mathematics to solve varying types of problems all the time.</p>
<p>If you’re going to say that engineering is a trade, you must also include medicine, law, and whatever other occupation that doesn’t involve research. You can make a case for liberal arts majors who write philosophy or works, but the thing about the arts is that they are relatively subjective and the ideas that come from the artist may be brilliant or may be hogwash, and it all depends on who’s listening. Of course, writing is also a trade in some respect because you are continuously dealing with the human mind on macroscopic scale (usually) to change or introduce ideas. You could argue that there exists a limited number of designs for air conditioning units, refrigerators, automobiles, and septic systems, but there also exists (to a good approximation) a limited number of ways you can reach out to an audience with your ideas.</p>
<p>Also, this argument is completely useless. It’s just semantical nonsense.</p>