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There have been times in the past when usable technology surpassed our scientific understanding, and instead of being depressing it provided a map for scientifi
by divbzero 2y ago
There have been times in the past when usable technology surpassed our scientific understanding, and instead of being depressing it provided a map for scientific exploration. For example, the steam engine was developed by engineers in the 1600s/1700s (Savery, Newcomen, and others) but thermodynamics wasn’t developed by scientists until the 1800s (Carnot, Rankine, and others).
- jprete 2y agoI think the various contributors to the invention of the steam engine had a good idea of what they were trying to do and how their idea would physically work. Wikipedia lists the prerequisites as the concepts of a vacuum and pressure, methods for creating a vacuum and generating steam, and the piston and cylinder.
- exe34 2y agoThat's not too different from the alpha fold people knowing that there's a sequence to sequence translation, that an enormous number of cross-talk happens between the parts of the molecule, that if you get the potential fields just right, it'll fold in the way nature intended. They're not just blindly fiddling with a bunch of levers. What they don't know is the individual detailed interactions going on and how to approximate them with analytical equations.