What scientific discoveries or inventions happened oddly early or late?

[AdmiralAdama]

I've often wondered if any humans invented or discovered something way too early or late, all things considered. if history was run again over the last two thousand years, what invention or discovery would you probably see earlier or later than it happened in our timeline?

 

Penicillin is something that some people think was discovered later than it should have been. Hot air balloon? Steam engine? Telescope? Algebra?

 

Any thoughts on what invention or discovery seems, looking back, to not have happened exactly at the "right time"?

[swansont]

James Burke did a couple of series in the general area of the opposite subject, The Day the Universe Changed and even more to the point, Connections. There are lots of examples of things that needed all of the parts before they could be invented/discovered. So you probably need to focus on accidental discoveries, or discoveries that were delayed because of some wrong paradigm or restrictive ideology that had taken hold.

 

There are plenty of examples of things that one culture invented, and others did not, but rather had to wait for the knowledge to travel in order to adopt the technology. A number of inventions by the Chinese, for example, or the technology of the middle east.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/how-islamic-inventors-changed-the-world-469452.html

[Sisyphus]

There was a rudimentary steam engine at least as early as the first century AD, but there's no evidence it was put to practical use, and it was forgotten. In the third century BC, 1500 years before Columbus, Eratosthenes measured the size of the Earth with pretty good accuracy using only trigonometry. The Greeks and Romans had all sorts of knowledge and technologies that were never put to widespread use, or were put to widespread use but were later forgotten for millennia after the fall of the empire. So too with the Chinese, and then the Arabs.

[ajb]

I am going to say that quantum field theory was discovered "before its time".

 

The discovery of quantum mechanics is ,say circa 1925 with the work of Bohr, Heisenberg and then Schrödinger in 1926. (The experimental work goes back before this.) Dirac in 1928 laid the foundations of quantum field theory.

 

Despite the two theories being conceived at about the same time only quantum mechanics become a proper mathematical subject very quickly. This lead to the development of functional analysis and operator algebras which are now fundamental in any proper description of quantum mechanics (as well as quantum field theory). Things here are very "algebraic".

 

Since the 1980's quantum field theory has started to become a proper mathematical subject that is deeply tied to geometry, low dimensional topology, category theory etc. The study of topological and conformal quantum field theories is now a respectable pursuit for a mathematician. Quantum field theory has instigated the study of many geometric structures, such as supermanifolds and moduli spaces etc...

 

In sort today, slowly QTF is become a proper mathematical subject like its "little brother" QM.

Edited July 18, 2010 by ajb

[jimmydasaint]

Not having understood most of what ajb has written (but respected it greatly), I will go back to swansont's post. I was amazed that the father of Chemistry was this guy:

 

Distillation, the means of separating liquids through differences in their boiling points, was invented around the year 800 by Islam's foremost scientist, Jabir ibn Hayyan, who transformed alchemy into chemistry, inventing many of the basic processes and apparatus still in use today - liquefaction, crystallisation, distillation, purification, oxidisation, evaporation and filtration. As well as discovering sulphuric and nitric acid, he invented the alembic still, giving the world intense rosewater and other perfumes and alcoholic spirits (although drinking them is haram, or forbidden, in Islam). Ibn Hayyan emphasised systematic experimentation and was the founder of modern chemistry.

(bold font is mine)

 

Edited July 18, 2010 by jimmydasaint

[Genecks]

DNA processors seem a little ahead of their time. Then again, we've had the past knowledge to put things together.

 

Something that's behind it's time is using gene therapy to possible treat AIDs. Then again, we didn't build to population studies until the effects of the virus on communities occurred. Still, the logic to say (this is a protein, gene(s) code for proteins..) was there...

 

Maybe just a lack of funding all around.