[Xcelerate]

> It may have happened years or decades later, but overall scientific progress is very rarely strictly dependent on one individual.

Which brings up an interesting question. What is the most "far out" discovery that someone has made? In other words, had that person not thought of it, what idea would take the longest amount of time for someone else to arrive at? My bet is on Godel's incompleteness theorems, but I may be missing something even more bizarre. (I don't necessarily mean obscure though; inter-universal Teichmüller theory might take forever to reach independent reinvention but it's also very niche.)

[maverick_iceman]

I doubt that Godel was indispensable for the discovery of the incompleteness theorem. It was one of Hilbert's problems so clearly people were thinking about it. Moreover, a few years later Turing came up with his notion of computability from which Godel's incompleteness their can be easily deduced.