If you're understanding is based on what's been observed before, you will never progress beyond it.
During the Enlightenment, all this science stuff looked extremely stupid. If people didn't persevere through the cynicism, we wouldn't have advanced the way we did.
Hmm. It seems quite obvious that, to the common person in that time period, science would have seemed like an irrelevant waste of time. Some cursory googling doesn't reveal much either way.
I'm not super confident in my speculation, it just seems the most likely to me. What makes you so confident?
During the Enlightenment, all this science stuff looked extremely stupid. If people didn't persevere through the cynicism, we wouldn't have advanced the way we did.