It is quite literally the opsopoiia (”fancy cooking” such as making delicate pastries or other cookery, i.e., aimed at flattering the senses and directed by empeiria (”experience”, or a kind of knack)), rather than techne (”art” or “craft”, the root of technology, i.e., a rational enterprise aimed at some end enacted by a skilled practitioner), that was skewered (as “collateral damage”, so to speak) by Plato’s Socrates in the Gorgias dialogue.

At least as written (who knows? maybe Poco Dolce has a GC/MS in the back room), it appears that there is no underlying theory of mechanism, no Popperian falsifiable hypotheses, etc. characteristic of science. Instead, it is just a somewhat blind “fiddling around” until some arbitrary aesthetic criteria is reached. (Actually, the same thing originally bugged me about the post on the gold nanoparticles—stained glass, but I couldn’t put my finger on it precisely). While these kinds of efforts certainly increase man’s material comforts, and perhaps serve as a “raw material” for scientific discovery, the end is not to answer/raise any question. For example, one could not use these results to hypothesize the conditions for roasting hazelnuts instead of almonds, other than “try the same thing, and maybe it will still work (or be close)”. At best this is the kind of low level “engineering” practised before the development of classical mechanics, where you build bridges, cathedrals, aquaducts similar to known examples that didn’t fall down (and hope that yours doesn’t fall down either).

http://www.vpostrel.com/tsos/