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Vaniver comments on How minimal is our intelligence? - Less Wrong
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Breakthroughs do cluster, but that's because of the tendency for a group to be working on a lot of related problems at once, and a breakthrough in any one area might resolve a key issue in any number of other areas.
For example, the motor/generator is a moderate breakthrough in the field of mechanics that solves several larger issues in electrical distribution. The relay, created for electrical distribution, led to the vacuum tube and then the transistor.
In a purer sense, better smelting practices provided more consistent steel, which allowed the polishing of more precise lenses, developing better telescopes which provided more information about the crystalline structure of metals yielding better metallurgy. The cycle doesn't recurse infinitely because we virtually never have some project that is just waiting on a development that is two steps ahead of current understanding.
That doesn't sound like the history of solid state physics / materials engineering that I know; what do you have in mind here?
Sorry- the need of optics to have metals with certain properties is part of any history of optics, and in order to understand metallurgy one needs to see metals as crystalline, which requires optics superior to those which have been created without applied metallurgy.
There's a certain advantage in that much of materials science can be cheated by experimentation without understanding, such that it is possible to work steel without knowing what steel is.
I was under the impression that the discovery that metals were crystalline was due to Bragg in 1912, and the wide angles involved don't require significant lens quality.
Metals do have microstructure that's very metallurgically relevant, which can be seen under a microscope (and there lens quality is rather relevant). While understanding the underlying crystalline structure helps the analysis, as you point out the experimentalists were able to find useful alloys and cooling recipes without knowing about the crystalline structure, with some help from knowing the microstructure.
I think the word "crystalline" was what was throwing me off from your description, though it is unclear to me how much advances in optics helped experimental metallurgists.
Most of the alloying and cooling was developed without even looking at what you call the microstructure. Current-generation optical microscopes are easily capable of observing individual surface crystals under elastic and inelastic deformation.
The effects of a given heat treatment on a given object is fairly simple to measure, but to predict the effect of an untested combination requires deeper understanding. Trial and error can create isolated useful developments, but understanding the next level allows accurate prediction of interesting developments. For example, the effects of alloying agents in iron remain experimentally determined, rather than predicted.