Quote Originally Posted by SirKazum View Post
Thing is, to me, Archimedes's quote is a perfect example of how ridiculous you can get if you discount inconvenient things as "details". "Give me a long enough (and rigid enough, and light enough) lever and a place to stand," feh. If you're going to magically discount away unsurpassable obstacles, might as well say "give me a planet-destroying gun and I'll vaporize the Earth". Which is at the core here - a smartphone doesn't just require knowledge of integrated circuits to build. It requires knowledge of several other hardware technologies, from electronic components to whatever they use as a display to the casing's material and I don't even know what else (and I wouldn't so easily discount any of them as "eh, just build it bigger" because I'm aware that I don't know which challenges that each technology is designed to overcome and which other problems would pop up if it wasn't there); you need to know several levels of programming, from raw machine code to UI design, as well as the software of each application and whatnot involved, inside and out and probably better than any living developer, in order to program it all by your lonesome (or teach someone else to do same); hardest of all, you need to know how to implement the whole chain of production for each component (including knowing where and how to mine the natural resources involved) starting from Renaissance-level tech, or else you can't even test out whether your theoretical blueprints will actually generate a working device. (That's not even including setting up a power grid, cellular network, internet etc. to make your device actually have any use.) If you say "eh, as long as we know the desired end result, we can research and develop the rest," then sincerely, screw you. That'd still be centuries of research and infrastructure building, involving a helluva lot of trial and error, because you don't actually know the technology involved and how to get there exactly. I mean, by the same principle, we should have space elevators, Mars colonies, designer babies, and a bunch of other crazy sci-fi tech right now, because we do know the principles of how they work, it's just a matter of getting the technical challenges out of the way... which, it turns out, isn't something you just handwave away.

I think getting stuck on the details is kind of missing the point of the original question: Do we understand our own modern technologies and know why they work? Whether or not circumstances allow him to physically build the silly thing is irrelevant to whether or not we can impart enough of an understanding for him to be able to do it in theory.