Re:In 1562 Map-Makers Thought America Was Full of Mermaids, ...
by Retric on Thursday December 15, 2016 @09:29PM
(#13190606)
Nobody really understands transistors. We can build them and priding how they react, but our explanations are all based on other things we don't actually understand. Granted, this is not a great way of looking at the world as everything has the same limitation, but it's also completely accurate.
TLDR; We can model and predict things, but that does not mean we understand them.
Re:In 1562 Map-Makers Thought America Was Full of Mermaids, ...
by skummetmaelk on Friday December 16, 2016 @05:27AM
(#13192288)
>We can build them and priding how they react, but our explanations are all based on other things we don't actually understand.
You can say this about anything. This is science; making models and evaluating their predictive power. The models don't have to capture the underlying "truth", if it even exists.
The details of this are not that fascinating to me; I'm frankly far more interested to study the economic and political forces that brought such technology to bear and might (or might not) save the biosphere which we are in the process of wrecking. It's not like I don't know what science and technology are good for of what they've achieved.
You know what fascinates me? Magnets. Now that you can 3d print them I'm considering designing a desktop-size particle accelerator to see what happens if you put a source of charged particles next to it. I'm also fascinated by geometry, number theory, and the topology of higher-dimensional manifolds - basic things that work unreasonably well (apart from the manifolds which I've only experienced in imagination) and are rather hard to fathom. Why, for example, does Phi keep showing up in nature, and why do books on it amount to little more than stamp collecting? What governs the distribution of prime numbers? These things are far more interesting to me than technological conveniences.