Well just in case this ends up being a solution to some mystery I’ve not come across, here’s a genuine (albeit seemingly pointless) finding from a research project I did a while back:

When saltwater is poured into the soil around the roots of a tomato plant, the plant’s internal electrochemical response oscillates with a 0.1hz frequency.

I’m not sure what mystery that will solve but now nobody can accuse me of not reporting/recording it!

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.

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?

I have made a truly marvellous discovery, which this post is too short to contain.

…one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Some of these things probably were recorded, then promptly lost or provided no context. Ramanujan and his mathematical equations we are still trying to parce out is one great example of this.

All the math is there, the context is not.

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.

It doesn’t seem very unlikely actually, plenty of things were conceptualized by someone long before they were coined/popularized. Problem is most ideas we can trace to someone were typically coined by people already reputed to be physicists or philosophers, the traction of ideas having always been anti-layman. There was some random old bishop from the late Roman period for example who spoke about making a United Nations, but no public mind was saying anything about it, so he got a reaction similar to one caveman talking about inventing the flashlight to curb the dangers of fire before the other one asks “what’s fire?”

All of us do that every day.

100%

watch out for those monks! they already solved it and is just waiting the rest of the world fumble their way through.

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Isn’t that why Fermat’s last theorem had so much hype for so long?

Maybe they have reported it and were met with ridicule.

Look up Coral Castle in Miami.

100% likely to answer your question.