Looking into the history of science, I’ve been struck by how continuous scientific progress seems. Although there are many examples of great intellectual breakthroughs, most of them build heavily on existing ideas which were floating around immediately beforehand—and quite a few were discovered independently at roughly the same time (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries).
So the question is: which scientific advances were most ahead of their time, in the sense that if they hadn’t been made by their particular discoverer, they wouldn’t have been found for a long time afterwards? (Ideally taking into account the overall rate of scientific progress: speeding things up by a decade in the 20th century seems about as impressive a feat as speeding things up by half a century in ancient Greece).
Cases where the scientific knowledge was actually lost and then rediscovered much later provide especially strong evidence w.r.t. the discovery counterfactuals. E.g. Hero’s eolipile or al-Kindi’s development of relative frequency analysis for decoding messages. Probably there are far more cases of this than we realize, because the evidence that someone somewhere once had the knowledge and then lost it has itself been lost; e.g. we could easily have just never rediscovered the Antikythera mechanism.
I was a bit confused here. Do you mean the rediscovery provides evidence that the idea was ahead of its time, especially when the rediscovery was much later, because we have an actual counterfactual?
In scientometrics, there is a literature on “Sleeping Beauties”—papers whose relevance has not been recognized for decades, but then suddenly become highly influential and cited. The Einstein paper “Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?” is a popular example of this.
This is a quote from somewhere? From where?
Sorry if that was unclear, but it’s the title of the paper by Einstein:
https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.47.777
It’s also known as the Paradox paper- which is where you might know it from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox
I think Eli was asking whether your whole response was a quote, since the whole thing is in block quote format.
Oops- that was accidental. I wrote that paragraph. Have edited this.
More engineering than science, but Turing’s 1944 ‘Delilah’ system for portable speech encipherment had no equivalent for more than a decade. (His biographer claims “30 years” but I don’t know what he’s comparing it to.) It was never deployed and was classified by the British government, so it had no impact.
AI Impacts’ project on discontinuities in technological progress might have some relevant examples for this: https://aiimpacts.org/cases-of-discontinuous-technological-progress/
I don’t recall the source, but I remember hearing from a physicist that if Einstein hadn’t discovered the theory of special relativity it would surely have been discovered by other scientists at the time, but if he hadn’t discovered the theory of general relativity it wouldn’t have been discovered until the 1970s. More specifically, general relativity has an approximation known as linearized gravity which suffices to explain most of the experimental anomalies of Newtonian gravity but doesn’t contain the concept that spacetime is curved, and that could have been discovered instead.
While I am certainly not an expert on this topic, the claim that general relativity wouldn’t have been discovered until the 1970s without Einstein seems false to me. David Hilbert was doing similar work at the same time, and from what I’m aware there was something of a race between Einstein and Hilbert to finish the work first, with Einstein winning narrowly (on the order of days). More information can be found on Wikipedia pages: History of General Relativity and Relativity Priority Dispute.
I’ve just examined the two Wikipedia articles you link to and I don’t think this is an independent discovery. The race between Einstein and Hilbert was for finding the Einstein field equations which put general relativity in a finalized form. However, the original impetus for developing general relativity was Einstein’s proposed Equivalence Principle in 1907, and in 1913 he and Grossman published the proposal that it would involve spacetime being curved (with a pseudo-Riemannian metric). Certainly after 1913 general relativity was inevitable, perhaps it was inevitable after 1907, but it still all depended on Einstein’s first ideas.
That’s a far cry from saying that these idea wouldn’t have been discovered until the 1970s, which I’m basing mainly on hearsay and I confess is much more dubious.
Charles Babbage designed The Analytical Engine, that was a mechanical general purpose (Turing complete) computer, in 1837. This is remarkable, because it came a century before all the theory that was put in place by Turing, which inspired, and is at the heart of, today’s computers. You can find a description of The Analytical Engine in Babbage’s biography: “Passages from the Life of a Philosopher”. His apprentice Ada Lovelace wrote some programs for it, becoming the first programmer in history.
This fact inspired a lot of Steampunk fiction, reasoning along the lines of: “What if the Analytical Engine was actually built and improved upon at that time? What if other non general purpose mechanical calculators like The Difference Engine followed the same development of the ones based on circuits we saw during the twentieth century?”
This post might be relevant to your question: https://kk.org/thetechnium/progression-of/
On Einstein: