Re: Slate: The Legend of the Scope Trial

In article <20050912.1239.105025snz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, David G. Bell <dbell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes 
I'm going to suggest an anology here.

Compare the traditions of Japanese swordmaking with the science of
metallurgy.

The alchemist and the traditional swordmaker knew a great deal about
getting from start to finish of a process, and ending up with something
useful.

Well, no. Alchemy was magic, involving incantations and rituals combined with the mixing and compounding of elements (in the old Greek sense of the word -- Fire, Air, Water and Earth). It never produced anything tangible. The most famous aim of alchemy was the Philosopher's Stone that could turn base metal into gold. Many fraudsters and charlatans claimed to have succeeded, bilking their rich backers for as long as the con went on and then legging it when found out.

There were others, practical men and women who compounded mixtures for more earthly reasons -- regia aqua to dissolve gold for purification and jewelry work, working iron to make wrought iron, steel and later case-hardened steel, bronze casting for cannon, plant extracts for drugs etc. The knowledge was acquired by pray and try, with the results a closely-held secret within a family or a guild as it was worth a lot of money to them to make a good product reliably and prevent their competitors finding out how they did it. The knowledge might or might not have been written down -- the secrets of the Old Sword period in Japan were never systematically recorded and it was left to a group of mad recreationists in the early 20th century to bring the old techniques back to life (with great difficulty and much failed experimentation, which they recorded scientifically).

Nowadays, metallurgy is more and more an exact science to the point where intensive computer simulation at the atomic level is yielding very interesting results in producing designer steels which knock the spots off existing recipes for hardness, ductility, strength, flexibility and corrosion resistance. Now *that's* magic.
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Robert Sneddon
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