Why do some traditional engineers not trust Data Science?

I had this conversation some time ago with an Engineer who came from a traditional background. By that I mean, he had been in the same industry (heavy engineering) for 30 years. Of these, he had been in the same company for 25 years (and this was his second job). In his world, to understand the behaviour of a phenomenon, you needed to carry out a physical experiment to model that phenomenon and only then could you predict it. So, as someone who teaches AI / machine learning at #universityofoxford – it made me think that this approach has some advantages to introducing people to AI/ML.