"An inventor," said Artie, quoting his favorite self-coined aphorism, "must never think like a scientist!"
"But"—I said, more to stem the tide I expected than to really make a coherent objection.
"An inventor," he went dreamily onward, "is essentially a dreamer; a scientist is an observer. An inventor tries to make a result he wants happen; a scientist tries to tell the inventor that the result cannot be achieved."
"Please. Artie. Don't tell me about the bee again."
But Artie told me about the bumblebee, and how there were still some scientists who insisted, according to the principles of aerodynamics, that it was not constructed properly to enable it to fly. And about how men of this short-sighted ilk were still scoffing at the ancient alchemist's talk of the Philosopher's Stone for transmuting metals, even though transmutation of metals was being done every day in atomic piles. And how he'd theorized that there was once a genuine Philosopher's Stone, probably a hunk of pure U-235, that someone had managed to make, which might explain why so many alchemists (lacking, unfortunately, any knowledge of heavy radiations or Geiger counters) sort of died off in their quest for the stone.
It was nearly lunchtime when he finished his spiel, and I was kicking myself in my short-memoried brain for having let him get onto the subject, when abruptly the joyous glow behind his eyes damped its sparkle a bit.
"There is one little hitch—"
"I thought it looked too easy," I sighed, waiting for the clinker. "Don't tell me it has to be made out of pure Gallium, which has the regrettable tendency to liquiefy at about thirty degrees centigrade? Or perhaps of the most elusive of its eleven isotopes?"
"No, no, nothing like that," he murmured almost distractedly. "It's the force-per-gram part that's weak."