It would be interesting to see a list of solutions to problems that were that were previously thought, e.g. by almost all experts in the field, to be clearly impossible i.e. insoluble.
One that occurs to me is public key encryption. I.e. the very notion that you could send a message in code where anyone can see the encoded message and know how you’re encrypting it, yet can’t decode it.
Relativity may be another case—specifically weird things about e.g. simultaneity and time dilation, which seemed to be more or less logical impossibilities. While that was a discovery as much as a solution (i.e. theory), the solution was extremely unobvious.
It would be interesting to see a list of solutions to problems that were that were previously thought, e.g. by almost all experts in the field, to be clearly impossible i.e. insoluble.
One that occurs to me is public key encryption. I.e. the very notion that you could send a message in code where anyone can see the encoded message and know how you’re encrypting it, yet can’t decode it.
Relativity may be another case—specifically weird things about e.g. simultaneity and time dilation, which seemed to be more or less logical impossibilities. While that was a discovery as much as a solution (i.e. theory), the solution was extremely unobvious.