El jueves, 5 de enero de 2017, 20:55:00 (UTC), Bill escribió:
> What you mean, then, is that you don't think about stuff
> because you believe you already have the answers. This is the
> kind of intellectual conservatism that made the industrial
> revolution impossible for earlier generations.
>
> Bill
the industrial revolution was not the result of some theoretical
thinking cooked in Cambridge. The industrial revolution come out
when the British (or rather the English) were getting problems to
make charcoal. Forest had been exterminated slowly, and in some
moment to make charcoal has a prohibited price. As coal was already
known they experimented using coal instead of charcoal. But coal had
to much oil and impurities. So, someone decided to cook coal in a
similar manners as the firewood was cooked to make charcoal. Then,
this was not result of some theoretical thinking cooked in Cambridge.
The worries of those academics were a several light-years distance
of making cheaper iron.
Once they learn to make cheaper iron, a lot of things came after. But
the main reason for these technological novelties was the cheaper iron
for the thinking capabilities of the Cambridge luminaries were at a great
distance from the crude realities of life and economy.
Once the iron become cheaper, it was possible to invent steam machines
and make works cheaper than using human power. Commerce was behind the
need to improve machines, and also the need to win wars. For the iron
(steel) was an important basic material instrument to win wars. The main
driver of industrialization were thus wars. The wars were pushed forward
by the economic crisis of capitalism. All this was at a great distance
from the thinking of the academics of Cambridge.
My argument that theories were far off the mark of materialism is easy
to see, if we read the great problems the educated people have to
understand energy and work. The previous arguments of philosophy were
like impassable barriers to understand the concept of energy. It took nearly
a century and some sort of blacksmith like James Watt to start developing
the idea of power taking as reference the power of a horse. A horse was
pulling some wight in a well, how fast could be raise some weight to some
hight per second. This sort of theoretical questions were out of the reach
of the academics of Cambridge.
You only can think about the story of marine chronometer.
The wiki says on this,
In 1714, the British government offered a longitude prize for a method of
determining longitude at sea, with the awards ranging from £10,000 to £20,000
(£2 million to £4 million in 2017 terms) depending on accuracy. John Harrison,
a Yorkshire carpenter, submitted a project in 1730, and in 1735 completed a
clock based on a pair of counter-oscillating weighted beams connected by
springs whose motion was not influenced by gravity or the motion of a ship.
In other part the wikipedia says,
John Harrison (3 April [O.S. 24 March] 1693 – 24 March 1776) was a self-
educated English carpenter and clockmaker who invented the marine chronometer, a long-sought after device for solving the "longitude problem".
Then, academics of Cambridge could not make the damn chronometer, but a modest
carpenter of a village was able to do it. This is the reason I have to scorn
the academic ways of thinking. They are too religious, too attached to dogmas.
To cryogenic ways of thinking.
Then, it is not the official theoretical thinking that makes the science go
forward, but some modest people working that confront a strong opposition
to new ideas.
eri