On Mar 29, 8:36 pm, Steven D'Aprano <steve +comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
> The Romans had perfectly functioning concrete without any abstract > understanding of chemistry. If I ever stumbled upon a technology that proved how useless abstract thinking was, do you know what I would call it? "Concrete." Damn, those clever Romans beat me to it by a couple millennia! And they had AQUEDUCTS!!! > [...] Medicine and pharmaceuticals continue to be > discovered even when we can't predict the properties of molecules. I know this is really, really far out, and I should probably come back down to earth, but I can envision some sort of 25th century utopia where scientists measure the weights and charges and atoms, and arrange them into some kind of chart, and just BASED ON THE CHART ALONE, these 25th century scientists might be able to predict behaviors that have never been observed, just BASED ON ABSTRACT REASONING. Whoa! That's really far out stuff. Give me some oxygen! (preferably of the 1s2 2s2 2p4 variety) (Yep, I get it, the periodic table is about atoms, and medicine/ pharmaceuticals are about molecules, so your point is not invalid. It's still alchemy, though.) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
