Could just a brilliant idea advance science by decades, or even centuries?

Inspired by this story, I started thinking.

Let's say we have a person, from the modern day, who miraculously gets a superpower: He can rewind time, but retain his own memories. He can rewind all the way back to his birth, and can even rewind if he is dead.

Otherwise, however, he is unexceptional for a human. Mostly, he won't live longer than a human could (though he won't have any chance of dying early, since he can rewind).

Being tired of living out the same major events over and over, and being unable to really die (after he does, it's basically blank nothingness except for an annoying popup window that just says "Would you like to rewind?" that reopens when he closes it), he decides he wants a change of scenery.

Ultimately, he decides that exploring space would be cool. But after thinking about it (or maybe trying it a few times), realizes that even if he advances human knowledge to get to cool Sci-Fi stuff, he'll still be stuck by what he can accomplish in his lifetime. So, he instead turns his efforts to curing aging, so he ("and everyone else too, I guess"), doesn't have to work his butt off to get Sci-Fi stuff to a worthwhile level.

But, after learning about the topic, he realizes that the cure for aging isn't easily obtainable. While some techniques in the modern age could extend his life to around 150 years at max, a full-blown cure for aging would take a tech level that he (as an expert in this (as well as everything, eventually)) estimates is 300 years in the future.

Or at least it would be, if normal people were working on it.

So, he wants to accelerate development on this topic in order to reach the goal before his death. Preferably sooner, as medicine that reverses aging seems to be around 500 years away, and he'd rather not spend 200 years as a 135 year old man (though if that's the only way, he won't knock it).

Since he can only bring back knowledge, not infrastructure, or experimental results, or scientific consensus, he's in a somewhat similar position to someone who just came up with a brilliant idea. Perhaps the most brilliant idea.

So, the question is: Could someone who just happens to come up with a brilliant idea advance science by decades, or even centuries? Or is that just not how it works?

Support for one's answer could include examples of ideas discovered by chance that, had they not been, would have prevented us from making progress for a significant amount of time. Or, on the other side, showing that discoveries tend to require previous discoveries to work (e.g. If you have Theory A, it wouldn't make sense if you brought it back to before Theory B, which it was based on, which itself couldn't be brought back before Theory C, etc. And you couldn't just introduce them days after each other for whatever reason.)

Solid reasoning could also constitute evidence. For example I think answering a question like "How much of science is thinking vs. doing?" would, while not answering the question per se, get well on the way to a good answer.

posted over 5 years ago

awenonian‭

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