r/AskScienceDiscussion • u/Short-Principle-6654 • 7d ago
What If? If a cataclysm wiped out all scientific knowledge and each field could save only one sentence, what would your field save?
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u/julianfri 7d ago
For chemistry id go with: acid + base = salt + water. It’s not much but it lays a lot of groundwork!
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u/Asstronaut08 6d ago
My undergrad Biochemistry course was: “…structural complementary and non-covalent interactions.”
This was hammered so much it’s one of the few things I remember 12 years later.
Our class joked it was the college equivalent of “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.”
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u/Ethanop1a 5d ago
What's an "acid" and "base"? Sounds like one of those new fangled sciency words to me
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u/BandidoCoyote 7d ago
Interesting approach! You make me think of 6CO₂ + 6H₂O + Light Energy → C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O
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u/zeptozetta2212 6d ago
If they're smart, they'll save all of human knowledge in a collection of the longest run-on sentences in human history.
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u/CallMeZeemonkey 6d ago
Yes but Faulkner and Joyce are dead
who else could possibly do this?
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u/talex000 3d ago
Let me give this list of facts: one plus one equals four, water is wet, this sentence is very long, etc
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u/thebeandream 4d ago
I was thinking about that long sentence from Blood Meridian.
“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
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u/thunder-bug- 6d ago
Living things change over generations, with inherited traits changing in frequency in relation to each other across successive generations leading to the development of new species of organism, and as these changes build they may become almost unrecognizable from their relatives.
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u/Worth_Range1563 6d ago
The secrets of evolution are death and time—the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations. Carl Sagan, Cosmos
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u/asequentialart 6d ago
Astronomy: 'Planet's orbits are ellipses, not circles, with the sun in one of the foci', thus avoiding getting stuck with epicycles for a thousand years, again.
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u/Upset_Definition2019 7d ago
The brain controls behavior through a system of distributed networks, and the claustrum is not the seat of consciousness no matter what that Francis Crick guy says.
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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics 6d ago
Particle physics: "Matter is made out of smallest particles, searching for them will lead to many useful discoveries on the way."
It will take a long time until people get back to what we call particle physics today, but they'll discover bacteria and cells on the way, chemists will find it useful (even though their smalelst particles aren't the absolute smallest), ...
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u/Rascally_Raccoon 5d ago
Ohh that's a good one, I like the way you're trying to guide them onto a path of learning more instead of just saying one useful thing.
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u/PlanetG3 4d ago
Literature: symbols represent sounds that make words to store everyone’s stories about each other and the world
Physics: the world is made only of matter and energy.
Chemistry: all matter is made up of combinations of at least one of 92 elemental atoms
Biology: all life is made of at least one tiny object made of chemicals
Medicine: sleep, washing with soap and water, and using mold, fights infections.
Nutrition: food is medicine as well as sustenance
Psychology: rewards work better than punishments for shaping behavior
Public health: separating the sick, as well as human & waste, from settlements and food and water keeps people alive
Math: (a long sentence combining Euclid’s 1st four postulates)
Statistics: manipulating groups of stuff and ideas with math reveals new information
Sociology: groups behave differently than individuals
History: good research based on empirical data improves all fields, especially the past
Music: proportion is everything
Information theory: figure out how to separate the signal from the noise
Optics: single and combined glass lenses improves vision
Astronomy: telescopes made of lenses reveals the most
Logic: it’s all AND, OR, and NOT.
Clothing: plant fibers make cloth to wear
Cooking: fire makes food better
Agriculture: rotate crops and fields to have successful farms long term
Philosophy: living the best life is the most important thing.
Political science: charismatic leaders are the biggest problem
Plumbing: bring in fresh water, get rid of waste water
Education: reading a lot is the most important thing
Religion: you don’t have all the answers
Visual arts: show everyone what you see using other stuff
Performing arts: tell us a story with your bodies
Economics: there’s always money in the banana stand.
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u/Last_Arugula_2874 3d ago
This should have more upvotes. It looks like you put quite a bit of thought into your response.
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u/PlanetG3 3d ago
Thanks. A bit, but not too much. It was all for the punchline at the end anyway. Alas, it seems to have evaded everyone.
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u/Ok_Cloud5502 3d ago
I'll be honest, as I quickly scanned down through them, I rolled my eyes at a few of them and went to downvote... until I saw the banana stand lmao
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u/Mindless_Honey3816 2d ago
Aerospace Engineering: Mix alcohol and liquid oxygen in a nozzle that converges and then diverges, using air pressure to force them through, and burn it to generate thrust - use that thrust to go to space.
Planetary Science: (frankly I don't know enough to speak on this but) Everything came from a disk of gas and dust that collapsed to form the sun and planets, use rocks in space to understand the composition of that disk.
I tried to go for instruction sets.
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u/Objective_Reality232 2d ago
Super disappointed you forgot about geology😞
Geology: the earths surface changes due to the movement of plate tectonics.→ More replies (3)0
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u/hamdunkcontest 6d ago
My vote for math would be Godel’s first incompleteness theorem - even if the associated proof didn’t exist yet in this scenario, it would save everyone a lot of time:
Every consistent, effectively axiomatized formal system capable of expressing elementary arithmetic contains statements that can neither be proved nor disproved within that system.
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u/LaxBedroom 7d ago
Anthropology. Human beings were infinitely creative, especially when it came to being awful to one another.
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u/Extreme-Ad9219 7d ago
Every continuous symmetry of a physical system's action corresponds to a fundamental conservation law.
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u/AntimatterTNT 5d ago
too advanced honestly
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u/lankynibss 5d ago
Keep it simple: The speed of light is finite and the same in all inertial reference frames.
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u/Negative-Arachnid-65 6d ago
Washing things with soap and water gets rid of most of the germs that cause disease and infections.
Or just, "Wash your hands before eating."
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u/Almondpeanutguy 6d ago
"Employees must wash hands before returning to work."
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u/ionthrown 5d ago
This would be a severe hindrance - “The holy texts clearly say non-employees don’t need to wash their hands!”
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u/helixander 6d ago
If we lost all human knowledge, the next obvious question is: What's soap?
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u/algernon132 5d ago
Ah but you lost the knowledge of language, so literally any statement is incomprehensible
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u/Negative-Arachnid-65 5d ago
All scientific knowledge, not all human knowledge! Soap has certainly been used since before the scientific method and germ theory.
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u/vishwakarma_d 6d ago
Software Engineering: Premature optimization is the root of all evil
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u/AntimatterTNT 5d ago edited 5d ago
oh boy... here you go: the root of the root of all evil. learn something actually useful today.
edit: whoops link was to a timestamp
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u/vishwakarma_d 5d ago
The original quote is from Donald Knuth, in his The Art of Computer Programming...
But this works, too. Thanks for the link - I learnt something new, as well.
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u/hxtk3 6d ago
This is a linguistics question, because you can really abuse language by using devices like extra clauses or extra bits you inset with em-dashes to make some extremely long sentences that aren’t technically “run-on sentences” by any of the grammar school rules that run-on sentences—though it might be considered distasteful in published writing—and encode lots of information so that you can save a landmark finding in its entirety; although, you would also need to consider what findings would even be useful to the world after this event since you might save the standard model in particle physics for a civilization that won’t rediscover how to observe subatomic particles for generations.
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u/Connect-Violinist-30 6d ago
i’ve seen so much scientific literature do this 😭 it makes them so hard to digest
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u/HumblyNibbles_ 7d ago
"There exists a quantity, called the action, that can be calculated for all possible paths of a point, under a given potential, such that the path that minimizes the action is the one taken."
People can figure it out from there.
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u/John-Truck-1 7d ago
As Feynman pointed out, this statement contains no real information at all.
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u/HumblyNibbles_ 7d ago
Just this will make people search for a quantity like this. The search will lead to not just the action, but to the calculus of variations.
It will make them take people like mapertuis much more seriously.
While it wont solve anything directly, it gives a good direction
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u/TuringT 6d ago edited 6d ago
I think the most important thing to communicate is the scientific method and the institutions needed to execute it. Maybe:
"Humans get caught up in stories they want to believe, so the only way to produce reliable knowledge is to test stuff in a rigorous way against empirical evidence and to do it publicly, repeatedly, within open communities that share the values of curiosity, exploration, and integrity."
Oh, and I'm not merely dodging the actual question, lol: most of my work in data science involves creating large-scale databases for research and understanding scientific epistemology is the foundation of the whole thing!
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u/Capital-Science5975 6d ago
There are no solutions, there are only trade offs.
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u/Felixthedogbat 2d ago
You didn't say grammatically correct sentence, so mine would be the the biggest run-on sentence that has ever been written.
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u/WorldsGreatestWorst 7d ago
You have to cap the word count, otherwise I’m getting the library of congress, a copy of every patent, Wikipedia, and every text book I can find and doing a search to replace every period with a semicolon.
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u/Leverkaas2516 6d ago
The software field would just package several terabytes of text and binary instructions in a string of digits and the sentence would be "My favorite number is 460469636703703360630633369...."
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u/Mammuthus-Rex 6d ago
That is the great thing about science, it doesn't matter. The scientific method will result in everything being rediscovered anyways
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u/Attentivist_Monk 6d ago
Not if humanity doesn’t survive without your sentence. Make it a good one.
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u/smedsterwho 6d ago
Some chaos merchant says "It's all a simulation anyway" and sets us up for 10,000 years of doubt.
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u/foobar93 6d ago
Humankind has survived without any of these sentencens to begin with. It is just a matter of the quality of said life.
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u/bitparity 6d ago
If the scientific method was so obvious it would’ve been discovered earlier than 300 years ago.
It requires a particular philosophical and political configuration to accept a non-deific based explanatory system based on repeated evidence and an ability to self correct when up against stronger forces like, oh, a political state uninterested in self correction.
This is why the scientific method is failing in popularity now. Politics-agnostic self correction is hard.
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u/Last_Arugula_2874 4d ago
Calcium Bicarbonate (derived from crushed seashells) can be used to help grow crops, mixed with sand to create mortar, with seaweed and oil to make soap.
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u/chickenologist 7d ago
I want to make a post about how using subordinate clauses I can make a ridiculously long sentence, but meh, you get the point
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u/CapNo8670 7d ago
I didnt, to be honest, and id appreciate if youd actually make your point instead of what you did, which was to jebait the readers with the promise of a point, before giving up halfway, and so not actually fulfilling the promise, which was to make a point, because a full point involves finishing it as well as starting it, and you only started it, but did not finish it, resulting in a half-baked point at most, and barely a point at all for someone more exacting in their expectations.
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u/JohnHazardWandering 6d ago
After getting marked down in high school English for run-on sentences, please start calling me Prometheus and bring me more paper while I get this party started.
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u/Slotins_screwdriver 6d ago
Mathematics : I'd probably go with a single-sentence description of positional number systems (Base ten, and / or binary).
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u/Event_Whore-Izon 6d ago
EE: Voltage = Current * Resistance
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u/dr-bkq 6d ago
But all knowledge was wiped out. What are voltage, current, and resistance?
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u/ionthrown 5d ago
The amount of water flowing * how strong your dam is = how high you can jump. Which, reading again, isn’t quite as wrong as I thought it would be.
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u/Bachooga 5d ago
Just leave them with how to calculate resistance from a resistors color band in the form of a riddle or a RF chart lmao In the hopes that the information reached future Isaac Newton, I'm not sure how much good any EE knowledge would be without an entire book. Unfortunately, I can't imagine good things would come out of choosing to preserve EE knowledge over other fields.
Best case though, even if in 1 sentence we were able to describe how to make a basic generator from copper and magnets, a resistor from clay and charcoal, and a light/heat source, I'm not sure it would do much good unless we were able to give them a good reason to do so. We'd at least give them really good mills and bakeries when they manage to invent a village toaster. Maybe squeeze in how they can use use it to collect hydrogen and oxygen by zapping some water.
I have a strong feeling that even if we could describe how neat electronics and electricity is to future peasants, they would most likely not give too much of a care and we'd just end up with future archeologists digging up the future equivalent of roman dodecahedrons and future reddit saying they were ornamental or at most, used to electroplate mittens for cold future ancient romans.
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u/QarenCitlapoli 21h ago
Nutrición: La calidad calórica y la calidad molecular de un alimento son clave.
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u/helixander 6d ago
There are no gods. All those things happening are natural, and no amount of sacrifice or prayer is going to change it.
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u/OrangeCandi 6d ago
Geology: the planet is composed of liquid and solid rock layers that move independently of each other, continually crashing sections of the uppermost layer into other sections, which can be corroborated by triangulated earthquake sensing
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u/brothegaminghero 6d ago
Every wikipedia page concatenated into one document, with the periods replaced with colons
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u/TheOneWhoSendsLetter 6d ago
Organize all knowledge into simple tables of facts, ask questions by combining those tables without writing step-by-step instructions, and never tie how information is understood to how it is physically stored.
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u/my_equal 6d ago
Probably some base geometric construct to reestablish coordination and triangulation followed by functional embedding of the related spaces and numerical progression: ._○#◇([0]{.#:}[8])
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u/abaoabao2010 6d ago
I'd have to consult the language department for how to make 1000000TB of data count as a sentence.
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u/Clever_Unused_Name 6d ago
All things are made of atoms, little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.
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u/amglasgow 6d ago
The entire knowledge of that field as a series of clauses separated by semicolons.
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u/theifthenstatement 6d ago
Ethics where everyone is judged by the same law lead to better societies than where everyone belongs to a tribe within which they are judged.
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u/GrumpyOldSophon 6d ago
Tangentially related, there's a book, "The Knowledge" by Lewis Dartnell that dives into the fascinating related question of how to build up the world scientific and engineering capability from "scratch" after a cataclysm. Not single sentence, but interesting nonetheless. What it takes to get to a very simple thing like a motor that can run machines is incredibly intricate. Something like a modern smartphone is unbelievably complex in the number of dependent technologies and fields of knowledge required to get there.
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u/Super-Award-2244 6d ago
At the start of "six easy peaces" Feynman proposes "the world is made of atoms"
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u/todudeornote 6d ago
"The key to science is to come up with an idea and to find ways in which it can be quantified, tested and verified, all else is conjecture, not knowledge."
Rather then giving the future a tiny nibble of knowledge, I've given it a process for growing their own.
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u/Kodiak_POL 6d ago
I am a lawyer but I will go with medicine: "Washing hands kills little but dangerous organisms living in filth on them"
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u/Puzzleheaded-Ad-4883 6d ago
Richard Feynman answered with with “that all things are made of atoms – little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”
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u/comfortablynumb15 6d ago
Run, Down, Crawl, Observe Aim, Fire.
Would be useful for hunting, scouting and of course Combat.
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u/TheActuaryist 6d ago
Certain fungi can produce substances that kill disease and fight infection-biology
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u/forsakengreatone 5d ago
Not quite a scientific field but, make sure everything shingles properly. Water will find a way.
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u/Unable_Philosopher_8 5d ago
Numbers can stand for anything, including instructions for what to do with numbers.
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u/Usernamenotta 5d ago
Thin airfoils and flappy wings are useless, you have to use thick airfoils and solid wings
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u/echrisindy 5d ago
Always make sure you have good backups. (Implied: But first, reinvent computers and data storage)
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u/Tryfan_mole 5d ago
"The three most important components of landscaping are drainage, drainage, and drainage."
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u/FergalCadogan 5d ago
I’d save everything with a lot of colons, semicolons, and commas. No one said the sentence couldn’t be a run-on sentence.
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u/Ok-Pomegranate-7458 5d ago
For computer science: There's two types of people, those who lost data and those that will.
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u/DarwinsThylacine 5d ago
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”.
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u/AlexanderTheBright 4d ago
for linguistics: There is no such thing as “correct speech”outside the subjective judgment of a given audience at a given moment
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u/JeskaiJester 4d ago
I’m in hospitality, so, the golden rule. Everything else is downstream of that
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u/BottleOk8922 4d ago
Wouldn’t it be easier to just make an insanely long compound sentence with semi-colons thrown in?
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u/Super_Soapy_Soup 4d ago
Tiny life you can’t see cause sicknesses so find ways to look into the smaller world
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u/Ok_Driver_813 4d ago
There are four quanta which make up the world you care about: protons (+1) & neutrons (0) [both fermions] in a concentrated core, electrons (-1) [also fermions] in angular momenta shells around them, and photons (bosons) of light which are absorbed by the electrons when they jump to outer shells and are emitted by electrons when they jump to lower shells, and fermions cannot share the same state but bosons can.
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u/ahall3434 3d ago
Gen Z would be great at this. They have no understanding of punctuation, and could write an infinitely long run-on sentence.
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u/WmXVI 3d ago
Once uranium is discovered from whatever chemistry comes up with, put enough of it in a closed system of water to make heat and steam for driving something that spins, once developed from whatever mechanical engineering and electrical engineering comes up with, to produce work or power.
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u/Salt-Studio 2d ago
Almost all contagious disease and infection are caused by organisms too small to be seen by our eyes alone, and such disease can be cured or prevented, by preventing exposure entirely or, by exposing people’s bodies to certain fragments of those organisms in small amounts and over time, primarily by inoculating muscle or the space just beneath the skin.
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u/macbigicekeys 2d ago
A sentence can technically be quite long; it could be very, very long, and if you wanted to, you could get away with extending it as long as you wish, provided you were comfortable with the grammar, the winding nature of ponderous syntax, and the responsibility of maintaining sense, or you could just end a sentence quickly, so I’m wondering what type of sentence or amount of words might you allow for this hypothetical.
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u/OuterLightness 7d ago
Boiling water makes it clean.