A Story They Didn’t Want You to Know | What is your true mythology?
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Thomas Newcomen worked around 1700. At the time metallurgy wasn't good enough to build boilers that could contain sufficient steam pressure for the now classic steam pressure pushes a piston kind of steam engine. So in 1712 he came up with a steam engine that worked with the steam circuit at atmospheric pressure.
James Watt. People just accepted that Thomas Newcomen's steam engine was so inefficient that it was on the edge of financial viability. Watt invented the separate condenser, which made it three times as efficient and changed every-thing
Issac Newton was disappointed by the chromatic aberration in his telescope. So he invented a new kind of telescope, reflecting not refracting.
James Clerk Maxwell invented colour photography. Actually, his system was basically just three cameras with coloured filters and didn't lead anywhere. But that didn't discourage him from practical matters. He turned his attention to "governors": gadgets that were supposed to control the speed of steam engines. Sometimes they worked. Sometimes they didn't; the speed would oscillate: fast, slow, fast, slow... He worked out why. That was the beginning of control theory
You probably recognise the names Newton and Maxwell, they are famous for other things. My point is that even people whose reputations rest on theories and equations had a practical side. Everyone was practical.
That is very different from Islam where everything is contingent on the will of Allah. It is also very different from Christianity, which used to emphasise that Jesus would be returning fairly soon to sort things out.
Is there a spiritual or religious dimension to advanced practicality? Maybe. Kind of. It implicitly claims that the world has many wonderful secrets that are not written in any book, nor accessible to scholarship, but which may be discovered with the right mix of tinkering and mathematics. That is a distinctive cosmology and one participates in it by making and by calculating. Perhaps also by studying the history to learn to continue and add to it. But not by rote memorisation of a creed, nor by worship.