Engineering is based principally on physics, chemistry, and mathematics, and their extensions into materials science, solid and fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, transfer and rate processes, and systems analysis.
Engineering as a profession involves different tasks. It can refer specifically to the manufacture or assembly of engines, machine tools and machine parts. It is also used more generally to describe the creative application of scientific principles to design, develop, construct and forecast the behaviour of structures, apparatus, machines, manufacturing processes and works.
The function of scientists is to know, while that of engineers is to do: they must solve specific problems.