It’s both. I think the distinction can be reasonably clean—science aims at understanding via explicitly modeling the process (not necessarily mathematically but often) and then testing the model. The process of building the LHC was engineering, the experiments themselves are part of science.
Would you label the LHC “science” or “engineering”?
I think the science/engineering-distinction used by Douglas Knight and Lumifer provides no good model, so you have to ask them.
It’s both. I think the distinction can be reasonably clean—science aims at understanding via explicitly modeling the process (not necessarily mathematically but often) and then testing the model. The process of building the LHC was engineering, the experiments themselves are part of science.
The LHC is multiple things
a set of theoretical results describing what might happen under what physical circumstances
an application of said theory to a certain realizable sub-set of technological reality and the prediction of what happens then
an engineering effort to build a complex experimental apparatus
(and also a social process driving the people to do all this)