"I think that they have a great deal of natural math talent, given the nature of their language and the need to navigate both real- and gate-space," Alaric replies while composing a response to the moth, indicating that play may be possible once they are safely back through the rift. "Still, that doesn't necessarily translate into conceptual knowledge. A human can throw a rock without understanding calculus. To me, the fact that it has knowledge of chemistry is more indicative of some sort of education that the math. Deriving math principles based on problems can be done intellectually, given sufficient talent and a good memory, but knowing chemical structures requires either prior experimentation or an outside source of knowledge."
Re: On the Care and Feeding of Mothlings
Date: 2018-08-16 02:00 am (UTC)