3 ms·
> We still don’t know its full effects, but thanks to understanding its chemical composition, we have a better idea of what we’re dealing with. That's the smal
by c7b 4y ago
> We still don’t know its full effects, but thanks to understanding its chemical composition, we have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.
That's the small grudge I have with chemistry, especially organic - yes, it's the basis of life, but the discipline seems more like a catalogue of observations than a theory that would allow us to make deductions.
- dotancohen 4y ago> the discipline seems more like a catalogue of observations than a theory That is exactly what it is. Just like e.g. Ohm's law is based on observation and not theory, and archeology, and psychology, and medicine, and physics, and almost every other field outside mathematics. Some of those fields have developed theories to explain the observations, yet even those theories are constantly being refined. This is why CS was a branch of mathematics for so long.
- c7b 4y agoElectromagnetism, to take your example, is very much a theory that we can use to make predictions about a new system once we can write down its description. Yes, we sometimes make new discoveries and we have to develop new theories for those (like when we discovered that electricity and magnetism are governed by the same force), but that doesn't mean that for every new circuit layout we have start afresh by collecting data. We can apply the theory to the description and get a reasonable prediction. And that's what feels different about organic compounds. We already have the formula, but we still can't deduce much from it.