How does a major breakthrough in science happen? Is it because noone has thought of it that way? Are there major breakthroughs in the future of medicine and technology because noone thought of it that way?
In: Technology
Sort. It’s more like a chain reaction of stuff. For example, if I discover a new chemical X that no one knew existed or how to make, then that opens a lot of doors. There are thousands of different things that you could do with any particular chemical, like putting it in toothpaste, or washing your car with it, or adding it to pharmaceuticals, or cooking pies with it, or coating industrial equipment with it, etc etc etc. So, in some sense you could say that for every single pair of (Chemical, Application), nobody has ever thought of it that way, unless they have. Most such combinations are useless or dangerous, you don’t want to put motor oil in your toothpaste, you don’t want to put grass in your toothpaste, etc… So brute force trying combinations randomly is a bad idea. But if I invent some new Chemical X that no one has heard of before, then every single one of these combinations will be untested, and if there’s some good understanding of its properties then this could lead to a series of very quick new discoveries of things it’s good for.
Now maybe one of these combinations allows Chemical X to mix with something else to create another brand new Chemical Y, and the whole process repeates, leading to another series of discoveries. And then maybe that creates Chemicals A,B, and C and a chain reaction happens with lots of new discoveries in a short time period.
Now try to generalize this to things outside of chemistry. New theories creating new theories creating new theories, because there are thousands of different combinations of things that they can apply to, and a brand new thing has a lot of low-hanging fruit that are easy to test, while older things have already had all of the easy discoveries made already so progress tends to be slower.
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