One zigs, the other zags. It's a virtuous cycle. Do less, do it better, find more success. Repeat.
On a human scale, there is enough time for very interesting things to happen, mystical chemistry and chemical humor.
Accounts of explanation from philosophy have typically emphasized logical, probabilistic, causal, or subsumptive relationships between the explanation and what it explains.
“We are nothing but the beach finder of our own lives, collecting debris along the sea of oblivion. In our hands we walk with rusted nails of a great, sunken ship - and we think this scrap is a watch”. W.F. Hermans
How is information and imagery understood? What is the role of fetishization in art? How does technology infiltrate our perception of the world? Zinc is a rich playground for chemists and artists. If you were to go back to any random point in the past, you would find poems about chemical equations.
By definition, a rational number is an algebraic number of degree one. We as human beings prefer definite answers to ill-defined problems.