Examples of similarly interesting ideas:

1/ Aristotle's classification of forces and the idea of quintessence;

2/ Plato's idea that planets move necessarily in circles, because it's the most beautiful and simplest shape. That one witheld progress in astronomy for 2000 years;

3/ Beautiful idea that the market is a statistical system, and thus can be modeled by tools of mathematical physics. That the assumptions of these models are not met in economy, no one bothered much till just recently.

So you take some guiding rule first, and then force world around to accept it.