Research: rigor v. results?

One of the comments that was made at my thesis committee meeting this past week was the notion that a lot of the research in chemical engineering is becoming very much qualitative. While the other members of my thesis committee (and I) took exception to that statement, I am beginning to see that the comment is very much accurate. In many parts of the field, "how much" and "why" isn't as important as "more" or "less."

There's a certain difference in the mindset of a computational scientist and an experimental scientist, I think. Although both need to show results that are "better"---either more accurate, or obtained more easily---the end-products are vastly different. Experimentalists have something to show for their work, some product or data. Computational scientists may not have a particularly interesting data set---it may do nothing more than reproduce already extant results in the literature. But, they may have a novel means of arriving at those results. Unfortunately, the tendency in ChemE seems to be that it is insufficient to show that new technology actually beats old ideas at what they do. Now, one has to solve *new* problems in the context of new technology---even when the algorithms and ideas are still very much in their developmental stages.

So, does this mean I'm out of luck as a chemical engineer? Perhaps, but that doesn't mean I'm completely screwed---it just means that in looking for jobs and faculty positions, I'll have to cast my net a little more widely than just traditional chemical engineering departments. . . .