100% Has happened many times. Often those things are later re-discovered. But who knows?
How many reporters around the world have had a car spontaneously explode, or suffered sudden-onset jumpeez near a window?
How many scientists and researchers have had significant breakthroughs or discoveries about hazards of waste or energy efficiency, only for their work to suddenly be labeled falsified and personal reputations dragged through the mud?
I don’t doubt it. It’s a bit like natural selection. A good idea has better odds of taking hold and becoming a part of the next generation’s knowledge base, but there are no guarantees. There are all sorts of circumstances that can affect whether this actually happens, and sometimes it’s just down to dumb luck.
100%
All of us do that every day.
Very likely. This is one of the problems with our global social system.
Keeping such a large proportion of people in poverty and lacking access to education basically guarantees that we’re missing out on more than half our Einsteins.
Antivaxxers, flat earthers and religious people all think they are einstein too.
Not really sure what point you’re making here, could you explain a bit further?
Maybe they have reported it and were met with ridicule.
Oh definitely! And not only cause humankind tend to forget something. We are a really western, at best on top asian and arabic region focused society. So we wouldn’t know if a guy in South America figured out the earth is round or saw gravitation like Newtown.
Edit: and if you wanna read about how much Christianity destroyed knowledge everywhere they went. I would say chances are 99,9999% someone got erased from history
Not only this, but women have been suppressed for most of history and not allowed to participate or taken seriously. This means even in those societies where we were paying attention, we were listening to at best only the 50% of (generally white) men in that fraction of the world.
Different field than the post, but Mozart’s sister comes to mind. She was also a prodigy, was toured around with Wolfgang and got top billings as a kid. But as soon as she was “marriagable age” she was not permitted anymore to pursue any career in music. She had to marry, have kids, and was a piano teacher the rest of her life. What incredible musical compositions could we have had from her, if the patriarchy had allowed?
Oh absolutely! And I really don’t know the names and all, but I heard a lot of great scientists and authors just stole the work of their wives and never really accomplished anything other than stealing (which was totally fine during those times). I can’t imagine how much rage and anger those women felt. So helpless and in the best cases belittled…
I think it’s closer to accurate that life doesn’t have a whole lot of “great mysteries”, not counting frontiers beyond which we simply can’t detect.
Instead there’s just so much to learn, that it’s impractical for any individual to learn even a modest fraction of it. But, there’s usually some philosopher, or niche branch of medicine, or sect of monks somewhere or behavioral biologist or whatever that has figured out the answer to that particular question, and just nobody really bothers to ask them very often. And they only might know that one, just because they specialized in it. They won’t know any of the others, just like everyone else.
Like, what is love could be a common one. But would you really say nobody knows, or just nobody starts knowing, but it is possible to figure it out, and rarely, some people do?
‘What is love?’ is a semantic question, not a scientific one. We know what causes, for example, sexual attraction, but is that what people mean when they say ‘love’?
*Baby don’t hurt me,
Don’t hurt me, no more*
Don’t taze me
I’m willing to believe they thought, “Wow! This is new! Oh, probably everyone else already knew it, it’s just new to me. I’m kinda embarrassed it took me so long to figure it out. I’ll just keep my previous ignorance to myself, by avoiding the whole topic.”
Truly unfortunate
An interesting question. There’s almost certainly someone, somewhere in the last 2000 years that has acquired some profound knowledge, only to not share it for whatever reason. I think as we progress more through the ages, the likelihood of this being some kind of breakthrough about the physical world keeps going down, if we’re talking one person discoveries. As we get more complicated problems, we require more specific and expensive equipment to gather data.
I think the realm this is most likely to appear in today’s world is in the realm of mental health, psychology, consciousness, etc. Things that are, on some level, very much personal, but there’s almost certainly some profound bit that can be applied to the world at large.
Look up Coral Castle in Miami.
100% likely to answer your question.
What kind of thing would that even be? If its anything scientific, we likely know more today than previously. If it’s anything philosophical, then it’s not really a “solution” but just one philosophy among all the infinite possibilities.
Could be like ‘oh this proves conclusively who Jack the ripper is, I’ll tuck it away and write a book when I get back from the war…’
I have made a truly marvellous discovery, which this post is too short to contain.
Oh I think I know which discovery you’re talking about. I’m out at the moment but I’ll post it once I’m home.
deleted by creator
Isn’t that why Fermat’s last theorem had so much hype for so long?
