After all, we all know scientific progress can literally be distilled down into various colored liquid and poured into an erlenmeyer flask for easy consumption.

Factorio science packs kind of make sense though. E.g. military science packs are made of bullets, grenades and walls, and you spend them to get better bullets and grenades and such. It's like an abstraction of spending some capacity to experiment on improving designs.

… or Kerbal Space Program