One Tenth of a Second
I always say that important scientific discoveries arise from better tools. Once technology can make the tool, it doesn't take long for the discovery to be made. It may take a genius, but there are a lot of geniuses on Earth.Without precision instruments, how can we know that light has a speed, that stars are not points of light on a crystal sphere surrounding the earth, that diseases are carried by microbes... General relativity was a way to solve anomalies in the orbit of Mercury, something only detectable with precise measurement. Without it, general relativity would make no sense: why use all these complex formulas when Newton gravity works just as well? Send Einstein's work to the 16th century and it will be slashed by Occam's razor.The "tenth of a second" problem is just that, technology able to measure tenth of seconds opened new fields.I don't mean that technology is more important than scientific research, but they go hand in hand, no good science without good observation, no good observation without good tech, and no good tech without good science.