Applied science deals in things that might or could exist, and then based on that premise, tries to make it a reality. You can call on the pure scientists to deal with what is, but it is the applied scientists who deal with what might or can be.
For example, the Hadron Collider; The
Large Hadron Collider (
LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy
particle collider.
[1][2] It was built by the
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories across more than 100 countries.
[3] It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the
France–Switzerland border near
Geneva.
The LHC did not always exist, since these do not grow on trees nor can they be mined from the mountains. It began as a need and a challenge, like finding God; ethereal. It required people from all walks of science, engineering, materials, mining and construction to work as a team. It was a huge project since the goal was never done to that scale before, and all new engineering and material challenges appeared.
One doing pure science, tends to limit themselves to something tangible in reality to examine or postulated to be be tangible in reality like a new species. They can try to postulate how LHC suddenly came to be, but they will fall short, unless they have all the meeting R&D and construction documentation. But few tangible artifact found; fossils, come with an owners manual. Without that they may have to assume, it was not due to logic and planning, but some random natural processes.
Unlike applied scientists who build it from the ground floor up, and can see the stages logically stacking and evolving, like building a house. The pure scientists starts after the fact with the final product; completed house in whole or deteriorated, and then tries to reveres engineer. If you did this with LHC, that can become overwhelming by reverse engineering logic, so they will use casino math. The empirical concept will like the first replicators suddenly appear, or in this case the LHC suddenly goes on line, and this t=0 for the first empirical experiments. LHC would be placed in the black box, since reverse engineering to know the logic of such a complex machine is out of the question.
Say we assembled a team of applied scientists to build a machine to confirm God. God does not exist in the sense of pure science but is more in line with what might or can be, which is the lans of applied science . We may need the team to include Theologians, Philosopher, Parapsychologist, Physicists, Engineers, Geologists, Construction Specialists, Materials Specialists, Electricians, etc, since God is more complex, by definition, than even the Hadron Collider.
We may even need new physics, such as separated space and separated time, so we can go in the realm of infinite possibilities, so you can find a phenomena with similar attributes. It will not happen with a one pure scientists in a lab. You need applied people, who have a vision that can satisfy a need, that can be developed from scratch. Once set up, then the pure scientists can take data and correlate.
