For clarification, when you say “ahead of its time” do you mean the biggest jump forward from what was known at that time, or the furthest behind when we expect to have benefited from it?
I ask because if you shift from theories and equations to things like inventions or processes, it is totally routine to encounter things that were actually invented 50-100 years ago but that never saw the light of day because the materials were impossibly expensive or the market wasn’t around yet.
In assessing the question don’t we also need to look at other, probably failed and perhaps even “quackish discoveries” to get much meaning from the identification? What I’m wondering about here is, are we fully identifying what was really a good scientific insight or merely the winner of a bunch if creative theories/ideas from the time?
I think it would also be interesting to consider cases where ideas were initially too at odds with the existing state of knowledge and largely ignored but later rediscovered and found to have been insights that did lead to advances in knowledge—theoretical and applied.
That would be the companion volume to the one about “wrong theories and scientific facts we used to accept as true.”
For clarification, when you say “ahead of its time” do you mean the biggest jump forward from what was known at that time, or the furthest behind when we expect to have benefited from it?
I ask because if you shift from theories and equations to things like inventions or processes, it is totally routine to encounter things that were actually invented 50-100 years ago but that never saw the light of day because the materials were impossibly expensive or the market wasn’t around yet.
Biggest jump forward.
In assessing the question don’t we also need to look at other, probably failed and perhaps even “quackish discoveries” to get much meaning from the identification? What I’m wondering about here is, are we fully identifying what was really a good scientific insight or merely the winner of a bunch if creative theories/ideas from the time?
I think it would also be interesting to consider cases where ideas were initially too at odds with the existing state of knowledge and largely ignored but later rediscovered and found to have been insights that did lead to advances in knowledge—theoretical and applied.
That would be the companion volume to the one about “wrong theories and scientific facts we used to accept as true.”
Anyone know of such a book?