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I made the big mistake of taking some philosophy of science courses in college. Big mistake! Hugh!

Anyhoo, Aristotle's physics hung around for thousands of years because it appeals to common sense and the senses. Things fall because they 'belong' on the ground, things stop moving because you stop pushing them. His physics breaks down logically very early on, but it requires a level of abstract thought to prove that most folks don't want to put the effort into thinking about it. You can't *see* friction, after all, and as long as your car works why worry about it?

Right, the same thinking kept medicine back for centuries because nobody thought to check whether Galen's ideas made any sense at all. Try Galileo's famous experiment with any child and see how he'll refuse to believe it.

Chem is useful, I guess; I have no reservations about someday managing to impart a first-year-college-level chem class to my poor unfortunate offspring. But physics are cool. I feel much safer on airplanes, for example, because I have a basic understanding of the physics that keep them up.

And I feel stupid writing shell scripts too, but that's just cux *nix frustrates me.

Yeah, in this guys case it was almost the reverse problem. When a chain of cause/effect lead to a force it is not very accurate to point to the first force and say 'see? that is the real cause'. The child is in-fact 100% accurate about the reason the toy stopped moving. Intimate understanding of friction can be blinding if we get confused as to momentum and then refused to believe anyone was pushing the toy in the first place. It fits my mind set as a 'systems' thinker to always step back and say, 'but where did that input come from?' Many times I have used generality to characterize a problem only to have a more 'narrow' minded (I mean that literally) engineer tell me I am wrong because he is focusing on the specifics still. My best example was when I told someone that turbo props and high bypass turbo fans are conceptually the same. Focused on the many engineering differences he refused to see my point. They have many design and performance differences but both are built to increase the thrust and efficiency of a given gas turbine engine by using it to drive a bigger set of blades. One just uses constant rpm and variable pitch while the other uses constant pitch and variable rpm. This sort of thing is one reason why many science types get all bent out of shape over intelligent design. They are to busy looking at the particulars of life and, not finding anything supernatural, concluding there is none. When stepping back and looking at the mass conplextity pure chance does not seem a compelling argument. Getting 'caught up in the details' is a trap that most scientists and engineers fall into.

Oh my, don't pay any attention to that rambling. I should not get tro rambling before my second dose of caffeine.