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A comment on The Great German Energy Experiment . Parent comment

Re:The Great German Energy Experiment by WalterBright on Tuesday June 19, 2012 @01:54PM (#4133165)
Consider the invention of the airplane. The Wrights certainly invented it, but if you take a good look at what the other experimenters were doing, it's a pretty good bet that others would have gotten the pieces together in probably another 5 years.

(The Wrights succeeded arguably because they had the first directed research & development program, while the others basically just bumbled about trying things in a seat-of-the-pants manner. None of them, for example, seem to have done any calculation of how much wing area was needed or how much power was required.)

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Re:The Great German Energy Experiment by koide on Tuesday June 19, 2012 @03:43PM (#4133735)
On the other hand, consider how vaccination was invented or any other "accidental" discovery/invention.

I'm aware that there are inventions that even happen at almost exactly the same time, especially when the research on the subject is ripe enough.

But when chance is a factor or the subject is not researched enough (or at all) then the confidence of an hypothesized invention happening in a close timeframe to the actual invention diminishes greatly.

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