Maybe I’m joking, but: our society is just a vehicle for economics at this point, our economy is built around science, our science has mostly been turned into observations about engineering, some time ago we changed all of engineering into differential equations, and differential equations can be solved by discretizing them and doing linear algebra, and most of linear algebra can be done with matrix multiplications (triangular solves and orthonormalizations if you are fancy). All you need is matmul.
> our science has mostly been turned into observations about engineering
You may be joking but that in particular seems pretty astute.
Superficially it seems accurate, and reasonably ascribable to economic forces, fewer concentrations of capital in people (aristocrats) spending it on a hobby interest or academic pursuit of their own - today's equivalents mostly prefer philanthropy (Musk is, I suppose, for whatever else you might think of him, a notable exception - preferring to explore space, AI, etc. not really it seems for personal monetary gain). But I wonder if that is fair, to modern scientists, or is it just that 'all the low-hanging stuff's been done'?
For life sciences need grad students / postdocs to do the grunt work of pipetting, dissected, plating etc. And whatever the equivalent is in chemistry (titration/GC/mass transfer I guess)?
But those tools created by engineers are pretty darn important, and allow plenty of experiments/observations to be performed that were previously out of reach.
