Technology without Science?

I've heard it said modern technology depends on knowledge of atomic physics.

It makes me wonder: if transistor, frex, had been invented before physics had advanced far enough to explain how they worked, would that have slowed development of newer models or follow-on projects? That is, if you don't understand how it works, but have to improve strictly by observation (trial & error), does it slow technical advancement?

Any thoughts? (Leave off how you delay the science...tho if you have suggestions on how to make technical advances sooner, I'd love to hear them.)
 

Tovarich

Banned
I think that's one of the major underpinnings of @Thande's 'Look To The West' Magnum Opus, with Phlogiston Theory being accepted as proven.

Although he himself may be in any second now to tell me I'm wrong!
 

Thande

Donor
I think that's one of the major underpinnings of @Thande's 'Look To The West' Magnum Opus, with Phlogiston Theory being accepted as proven.

Although he himself may be in any second now to tell me I'm wrong!
Not quite, it was a Kuhnian-style illustration of an argument about how whether a scientific theory is 'proved right, then refined' or 'proved wrong, so superseded' is more arbitrary than people like Popper claim it is. For example in OTL historiography saying (say) "Darwin Was Wrong" would be perceived as being hugely challenging and controversial, even though modern views of natural selection have relatively little in common with Darwin's original ideas (as, of course, he could not know about the molecular means of transferring genetic information), whereas we say that Phlogiston Was Wrong and was replaced with Lavoisier et al's oxygen theory--when it is possible to just redefine what 'phlogiston' is until one produces a theory which is mathematically equivalent to the oxygen theory, but is presented as being a 'refinement' rather than a disproval of the phlogiston theory.
 
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