Suppose a caveman is eating his first meal. The man finds the meal to be remarkably satisfying, and he wants to replicate it. Meticulously, the caveman replicates the meals, recreating every intricacy of the dish. The caveman notices that his mouth emits a watery substance — what we know as saliva. Advancing in his thought process, the caveman decides to milk his saliva, add it into the meal, and present the meal to his friend, all the while declaring that the meal is the best meal he’s ever had (though it is, in fact, only his first). The second caveman finds the meal disgusting (because, of course, of the saliva).
I thought of this while eating my Chinese take out. It’s one day old and cold, and I think I like it that way.
Note: I wrote this nearly two years ago, and I didn’t leave any notes for me to expand on. What I think I was trying to ask was, “How far do we go to preserve or add procedures in order to attain a desirable or perfect outcome? I think I was thinking of the scientific procedure (PHEOC, haha). I guess it’s common sense, but it’s like someone studying the life cycle of different cells. We record and control the temperature and agar that the cells find themselves in, but what if handling them a certain way induced something that we would have never observed? It’s a stretch, even by scientific standards (even if that standard does allow for this extreme scrutiny), but it’s something I always think about when I’m learning science. What if Ernest Rutherford’s gold plates had caught themselves on his wool sleeve, and what if that had induced a certain characteristic that allowed for the deduction of his atomic theory? It’s clearly a stretch, and is probably a negligible detail, but I am fascinated by the possibility. Who’d have thought Chinese food would lead me to think of science?
continuu 