>>12598132I will respond to your reaction in parts
>A ton of labs would love to have an experienced engineer come into their physics labs and help with research if they could afford them.This is absolutey true for large projects like CERN, ILC, DESSY, ELI is running without enginneers whose job is stuff like design of vacuum systems, control systems, beam transport, etc. This is all highly technical and you're dealing with shit like CAD, Teamviewer, Z-max or whatever all the time. Working on this is the role of the engineer and there are usually whole teams dedicated to stuff like this, in university scale labs the situation is completely oposite. There is no budget for engineers and all the work is done by faculty members, post-docs and students, and they all learn the skill set which often includes doing engineerish stuff like signal analysis, working out their own control systems and so on. Back to the large projects example. Apart from these engineering teams, there are dedicated research programs, whose members are doing many different things. There are purely theoretical teams that only do stuff like analytical and numerical research, having no clue how to even realize an experimental setup, but there are also experimental teams, which do pretty much everything, they're part of the works, including shit like CAD design, that engineers do and they're also part of the physical research, doing sometimes both theory and experiment, usualy these people if they're good eventually become the facility directors or managers of whole research programmes, etc. Anyway, after the technical design and assembly of the facility is done, that's when actual physicists come in. These are the people that studied for years the processes that are involved in the actual experiment. These are the people that know how to setup the diagnostics, how to properly look for data, how to calibrate the setup, etc. Then the data is collected and analysed, (cont.)
