Yeah, I learned awhile ago that us engineers are just pond scum to physicists. As an Aeronautical Engineering sophomore at MIT - I interviewed for a summer job in the physics department. After a lengthy explanation as to the experiment they were working on to make helium into a superfluid, I committed the cardinal sin and asked the great professor "Well...what can you DO with it?"
I was a physics major through sophomore year, and that was my problem with working on the measurement of cosmic rays.