How is your description of English as a compression format different from the idea of the detached lever, where one puts the characters a p p l e into a computer and hopes it will have crunchy, juicy properties?
I believe I speak Modern English, and could probably look for wavy hands on sticks penicillin mold or coil wires around magnets, but how does “atoms can be split” help me reproduce a major scientific/engineering discovery? It’s not a compressed instruction, it’s a teachers password I can say to other people who know that atoms can be split so we can be comfortably “scientific” in each other’s presence. I don’t know what it means in terms of equations, machinery, or testable predictions—and more to the point, - I still don’t know what it means after reading the t-shirt.
I could probably grope about in a corpse and find a heart or a lung, but how do I tell when I have a pancreas instead of a phlogistondix? And which bit of it is the pancreatic duct? And how do I tell if the fluid that comes out of the unknown lump of creature that I have is insulin? Or after injection, how to tell if it’s working?
The only constrained anticipation I have for ‘insulin’ is that it helps diabetic people—although I now note that I have no real idea what ‘diabetic people’ means in medical terms or how, if I were thrust back in time, I would be able to reliably identify them.
I suggest that t-shirt is not a compressed guide, it’s a memory aid for people who already know the details behind it and who could, if their memory was entirely under their command, manage exactly the same without it.
Hi