> there is a large chasm between discovery and information that is widely known and accepted among the population
There are even more extreme examples of this. The Moscow Papyrus is from 01850 BCE, and it explains how to calculate the area of a hemisphere from its diameter and how to calculate the volume of a truncated pyramid, so this information had already been discovered 3870 years ago—perhaps for many centuries.
Yet what fraction of people today know it? Try asking your taxi driver next time you're on vacation in Perú or the Philippines. Heck, I don't know the pyramid-volume thing myself! I'd have to work it out by integrating a quadratic.
(I recall that studying the calculus as a kid was a bit of a transition for me, because for the first time I came face to face with the realization that most adults' intellectual development was arrested around the year 01583 for some reason. It wasn't that they took a long time to grasp differentiation, or that they had some weird irrational belief at odds with reality, but that they just stopped learning and never grasped differentiation in the decades and decades they lived, converting themselves into intellectual dwarfs. I was still young enough to imagine that somehow I would avoid this...)
The phenomenon I'm talking about is not that people learned how to differentiate functions in college, then forgot, though that certainly does happen. I'm talking about people who never learned to differentiate at all, or never learned linear algebra, or never learned group theory, or never learned complexity theory. And not because they were busily learning something else and just hadn't gotten to group theory yet, but because at some point they just stopped learning things.
I'm not convinced of this finite-space theory. I mean, yes, in a physical sense, there's clearly finite space in your skull. But even the synaptic connections outnumber the bits in the textbooks for a B.A. by about four orders of magnitude, and the potential neural DNA methylation sites outnumber synaptic connections by another six orders of magnitude. So I don't think this intellectual stunting is accounted for by space limitations.
There are even more extreme examples of this. The Moscow Papyrus is from 01850 BCE, and it explains how to calculate the area of a hemisphere from its diameter and how to calculate the volume of a truncated pyramid, so this information had already been discovered 3870 years ago—perhaps for many centuries.
Yet what fraction of people today know it? Try asking your taxi driver next time you're on vacation in Perú or the Philippines. Heck, I don't know the pyramid-volume thing myself! I'd have to work it out by integrating a quadratic.
(I recall that studying the calculus as a kid was a bit of a transition for me, because for the first time I came face to face with the realization that most adults' intellectual development was arrested around the year 01583 for some reason. It wasn't that they took a long time to grasp differentiation, or that they had some weird irrational belief at odds with reality, but that they just stopped learning and never grasped differentiation in the decades and decades they lived, converting themselves into intellectual dwarfs. I was still young enough to imagine that somehow I would avoid this...)