There were similar things at the dawn of the jet age. Someone wrote a paper demonstrating that jet power could not improve over propeller power because radial-flow compressors generated too much drag and axial-flow compressors were too inefficient. What the author of the paper didn't know is that, contemporary to him, it was discovered that shaping each blade of an axial-flow compressor like an airfoil significantly improved efficiency. Thus a "physics problem" became a "manufacturing problem"