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Comment by buttermeup | Hacker News Reader

What are some examples of questions that at first seemed stupid yet became brilliant when connected with other seemingly stupid ideas?

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Rather than a singular "question" that seems stupid, consider prime numbers. People toyed with prime numbers for centuries, asking all sorts of questions, with little-to-no impact on the vast majority of humans. Fast forward to the age of telecommunications: suddenly massive innovations in cryptography are being built on knowledge of prime numbers that previously was a novelty.

Yeah, math has a lot of ideas that seemed like silly puzzles when first explored. The term "imaginary numbers" was originally an insult (from Descartes!) for math involving the square root of negative numbers.

A lot of early work into physics seemed like dumb questions at the time. When taken to the extreme “Do heavy objects fall faster?” tells you quite a bit about how the world works. And critically people intuited the wrong answers to many such questions before careful experimentation.

Obviously we have the benefit of hindsight, but “do heavy objects fall faster” doesn’t seem like a stupid question to me in the same way that “do chimpanzees like crystals” does.

I think we can call them both stupid in they are malformed.

Let go of a feather and brick on the ISS gets a different result than doing so on top of Mount Everest. Similarly understanding chimpanzees behavior is a deeper question here noticing some chimps find some crystals interesting in some situations and moving on.

My understanding is that much of discrete mathematics was considered to be purely academic until computers were invented.

Microwaves were invented as hamster defrost machines. Seriously!

And it worked, but unfortunately humans are too big for it to work on us.

They were able to freeze hamsters entirely then reanimate them with a microwave.

While that sounds like an interesting tidbit, it also doesn’t appear remotely true based off of the history sections in the wiki pages for microwaves and microwave ovens.

That article is somewhat revisionist.

> In 1945, the heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was independently and accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer

Sure, meanwhile using microwaves to heat stuff up dates back to the 1920’s. WWII soldiers would regularly stand in front microwave equipment to warm up. The resonant-cavity magnetron was a British invention that finally made microwaves far more efficient to produce.

The story about noticing a candy bar melting in his pocket is also kind of funny as that’s what normally happens to candy bars in your pockets, further it means he didn’t notice he himself warming up.

The Tom Scott video(https://youtu.be/2tdiKTSdE9Y) did a pretty good summary of the Percy Spencer microwave (a giant commercial oven) and the later parallel development by J. E. Lovelock of a small microwave to reheat small mammals for experiments with cryorevival (replacing lamps and hot paddles).

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