Jason Crawford

It is sometimes called an ancient steam engine.

This, in my opinion, is inaccurate and misleading terminology.

It is not a steam engine.

Uh, for one, it's a turbine.

It doesn't, it doesn't have a piston, right?

It doesn't, it doesn't drive, um, uh, reciprocal motion in a, in a piston motion.

Um, it's really just, it's a boiler and it's got a couple of little arms that stick in opposite directions and steam goes out the arms and that makes it spin.

But it's basically a toy.

It's not useful for doing practical work because it does not generate a lot of torque.

And it was going to be a long time before we had steam turbines that actually generated useful work.

So, you know, so this is the difference between the concept of I'm going to make steam engine versus I understand, you know, I have vacuum.

I understand that vacuums can be created and I understand air pressure and so forth.

A dramatic example of the need for an epistemic base, I think, is the case of vaccines.

The very first vaccine was created in the 1700s by Edward Jenner, who created a vaccine for smallpox.

I can talk about this at length in the question period if you want, but very briefly, before vaccines were invented, there was a prior technique called inoculation, where you literally actually gave people a mild case of smallpox.

Jenner was the one who figured out that, indeed, we could do this with an even milder and safer disease, cowpox.

So we could substitute cowpox for smallpox, inoculate people with cowpox instead.

He called this vaccination.

And by giving them a mild case of cowpox, it was even safer and it would still confer some degree of immunity or immunity for some period of time against smallpox.

Now, this was great.