05-21-2015, 12:35 PM
(05-20-2015, 06:07 PM)Rynn Wrote: The news has a tendency to report very early successes as imminently finished. In reality the vast majority of scientific research falters along the way and much of it never succeeds.
Sometimes it succeeds, but it ends up that there are better ways to do things.
Take the rolamite linear bearing, for example. When it was first invented, they thought it would have literally thousands of applications. A fundamentally new kind of mechanism, how could it not?
It's had just a handful over the decades--not because it wouldn't work in myriads of applications, but because it's not the best way to do [whatever].