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From scratch..

By: Qwaider

On:Wednesday, July 25, 2007 7:44:07 AM
In:Thoughts
Viewed: (4707) times

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"If you want to create an apple pie from scratch, first you have to create the universe"

-Carl Sagan

Do you realize how out of the box, out of the norm, out of the minute details of our lives that statement is? Did you notice how deep and particular that vision is?

There are two types of people. Scientists, and Engineers. While scientists obsess about getting to the real final finite answer of an infinite problem. Engineers build in an approximation, add tolerance and make it work! Practicality is the key talent of an engineer.

So for an engineer, creating an Apple pie -from scratch- means getting the main ingredients from the sources available, preparing it according to plan, on budget, and in time. making sure it's cooked at an appropriate degree and presented to the customer with 10% variation in taste, flavour, temperature and Unknown. "Unknown, is an acceptable quantification of a state, or matter"

If a scientist wanted to do the same pie, from scratch (and be honest and true to his profession), he will start with the big bang, wait 8 billion years for the universe to cool enough to allow earth to exist (there is no guarantee that earth itself wasn't part of an earlier star or a formation) then wait for it 4 billion years to develop life, create apple trees, wheat, cinnamon and the rest of the ingredients. 20 thousand more years for humans to learn how to harvest these ingredients, 10 thousand more years to discover fire, 5000 more years to know how to create metal pots (or just use pottery but that would be cheating) and only then he can produce the apple pie!

Remember that it has to be the exact replica of the original apple pie, resolved to EXACTLY the same number of variables. There are no unknowns, and the 29 thousand variables plus 70 thousand cosmological constants on the left and right are balanced and 100% accurate. Or he might stumble across an elegant formula for Pie = Sugar(constant)x Apple x Cinnamon² however unlikely.

Now not all scientists are like that, many cheat (and follow engineering techniques) of numerical computation, approximation and adding tolerance. But the elegant buffs will just refuse that junk! (although its practical and works!)

Anyway, I think I diverged from my original thought. Creating things from scratch. How loosely are we using that term in our life. Does someone realize how many generations of machinery has the car industry gone through to be able to produce what we ride today? Just imagine what the computer industry went through, and in few decades...

Next time someone says, I did everything on my own ... remember these words :)

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