This kind of reminds me of something, I have done water treatment for boilers for many years, as a boiler man, I never had a chemistry lesson, picked it up in the working environment and leaned it pretty much on my own, most people who done this work didn't really understand chemically what was happening in the tests they performed, but they knew how to do the tests and add chemicals or make adjustments accordingly as needed, we normally had chemical and equipment sales men who were chemist who would also be advisers, one was fairly amazed at my understanding of the chemistry and the process and what was going on chemically with the water, but he would get very mad and argumentative when I called the minerals in water "rock" like calcium magnesium, silicates...
What was funny after working with me for several years he sometimes began calling the minerals in water "rock" also, especially when we would discuss the scale in the boiler. because that is where the minerals came from, and basically what they were, I knew they were minerals and He did too, but the important thing is that we understood each other, with the words we used, and understood the important parts of the communication getting our points across.
Actually I think he learned quite a bit from me (maybe as much as I learned from him) besides using the wrong words to describe the minerals. I have worked as a boiler man for many years, and knew and practiced some of the older chemistry used, some of which the modern chemist may not learn with the more modern chemicals they use today, to do the same thing that we done with things that were not actually considered chemicals, but that when added to the boiler would produce a chemical reaction, understanding these older chemical reactions (which were basically the same chemistry they were using with these modern chemicals), gave me a little advantage on understanding the chemistry going on with these newer chemicals (with names, that were like what shore company uses to keep their chemicals at a high cost,a trade secret, and you can only get it from their company, and the main reactive component of their chemical a trade secret), many of these were common chemicals, or slight modifications to a common chemical like sodium sulfite, basically being sodium sulfite but with names like there company's name followed by BSD 133.
I went to a big lab (a friend there who was a head lab technician for many years) and asked him to help me with some chemistry questions, he was astonished by some of the questions I had, but he said he could not answer them, he said he took many years of college chemistry, but forgot most of it, I asked him how can he still do all of the chemistry he does, and all of these very important tests, He said that they just add the chemicals to the machines,and perform tests, read and record results, they do not have to understand all of the reactions chemically, or what chemicals are used (again many with company trade names), or what the machines are doing or how the chemicals are reacting, they just had to know what to add when, and what buttons to push and know how to read the results and record them.
It is kind of like that with recovery and refining, you wouldn't need to understand all of the goings on chemically, you could just learn to push the right buttons, but I have always wanted to understand more (and believe it is helpful to do so), I want to find out what happens when that button is pushed, and why it happens the way it does.
Try not to get to upset because I call minerals rock.
