This is from another newsgroup:

SolomonW <SolomonW@citi.com> wrote:
> Here is a science fiction story which I read many years ago.
> It is of an alien race that knew all science. They built a supercomputer
> and programmed it so that anyone that had a science question
could ask this
> supercomputer a question on science and it would give the answer.
Soon after the alien race disappeared.
> Long after some humans went to the supercomputer to ask it
some science
> questions, they asked the questions, and the supercomputer answered.
The computer made it clear that their problems made no sense or
sometimes its
> answers made no sense. The humans tried again to ask more questions, and
> again, the answers made no sense.
> Finally, the humans decided that the problem was that to understand the
> answer, you needed to know much of the answer already. So they left in
> frustration none the wiser.
> I have often wondered if I was magically teleported 2500 years back
and was
> in either the academy of Athens or Jerusalem and tried to answer their
> questions on science would I be faced with a similar situation?
>
> Any thoughts.

I have had thoughts along parallel lines. Way back in the 1970s I
bought one of the first HP25 programmable calculators. I found it a
wonderful device for speeding up moderately complicated calculations
and it occurred to me that the outcome of the second world war might
have been different had Nazi Germany been given the technology back in
the 1930s. But then it further occurred to me they would not have been
able to learn anything much from it. For a start they didn't have the
technology to detect the trace elements which make transistors work.
They wouldnt even have thought of looking for such minute quantities
of trace elements. But even if they had found them, they lacked the
technology to make suitable silicon crystals or create the masks
required to etch the circuitry required to make it work.

So much of our knowledge in any particular field depends on quite
different knowledge in an apparently unconnected field with the result
that science and technology advances over a wave front rather than
dashes from point to point.

I see that now computing devices are on the verge of advancing into 5
nanometer technology. Twenty years ago this would have been a science
fiction pipe dream. I wonder what is coming next?