The early steampunks did not have statistical mechanics in their toolbox. They built their machines first. The science came afterward. The earliest steam engines were extremely inefficient compared to the earliest atomic bombs because they were developed mostly through trial-and-error instead of computing the optimal design mathematically from first principles.
Of course they didn’t have statistical mechanics in their toolbox! Gears-level models are capital investments, and you should only invest in things that might be valuable. You don’t know that steam engines have value until you see them doing useful things, like pumping water out of coal mines. You don’t know that streamlining steam engines has value until Matthew Boulton works out that it does. Only then do you do the legwork of iterated experimentation and modeling. The original steam engine was invented in the classical era, and it went nowhere because people used it solely as a party trick.
From Antifragile by Taleb:
One can make a list of medications that came Black Swan–style from serendipity and compare it to the list of medications that came from design. I was about to embark on such a list until I realized that the notable exceptions, that is, drugs that were discovered in a teleological manner, are too few—mostly AZT, AIDS drugs.
Practice precedes theory, with rare exceptions like the Manhattan Project. In an internship, I was semirandomly tinkering with my project, and found that applying [REDACTED] to the [REDACTED] led to a significant reduction in loss. In my written report and PowerPoint, I drew analogies between my methods and the human [REDACTED], implying that I was inspired by my theoretical knowledge of biology, instead of just happening upon [REDACTED] by chance. That was one of the few times I’ve done Actual Technological Innovation, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if most tech progress worked the same way: trial-and-error, then theoretical explanation.
Of course they didn’t have statistical mechanics in their toolbox! Gears-level models are capital investments, and you should only invest in things that might be valuable. You don’t know that steam engines have value until you see them doing useful things, like pumping water out of coal mines. You don’t know that streamlining steam engines has value until Matthew Boulton works out that it does. Only then do you do the legwork of iterated experimentation and modeling. The original steam engine was invented in the classical era, and it went nowhere because people used it solely as a party trick.
From Antifragile by Taleb:
Practice precedes theory, with rare exceptions like the Manhattan Project. In an internship, I was semirandomly tinkering with my project, and found that applying [REDACTED] to the [REDACTED] led to a significant reduction in loss. In my written report and PowerPoint, I drew analogies between my methods and the human [REDACTED], implying that I was inspired by my theoretical knowledge of biology, instead of just happening upon [REDACTED] by chance. That was one of the few times I’ve done Actual Technological Innovation, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if most tech progress worked the same way: trial-and-error, then theoretical explanation.