If you took the athletes today without their support team and sent them back in time two years before an Olympics event to compete on their own, I don't think it would be as big of a blowout as you suggest.
BTW, the discovery of the Scientific Method was a great leap forward in how to discover more knowledge.
So you went through classes with no written material? You listened to lecture, took notes, and then did assignments and passed tests with no documents to study?
> BTW, the discovery of the Scientific Method was a great leap forward in how to discover more knowledge.
The scientific method is a set of protocols that are followed in order to formalize evidence and prediction. Putting it into a set of words is important, but not required. Humans managed to sail across oceans and build wonders just fine without it.
That's right.
I learned to never miss a lecture, and take copious notes. I also never missed a retch session. And still sometimes I needed help from a patient classmate.
The fun thing about the notes was when reviewing them, I'd recall the verbal part of the lecture. This helped a great deal.
Sadly, the passage of decades has silenced that voice, and I have a hard time understanding the notes today. I've wished many times I'd have had the foresight to bring a cassette recorder to lecture and record them. Too bad all those lectures are lost to time. But nobody recorded lectures in those days, and it never occurred to me.
But take distance running - prior to 1954, nobody had done a sub 4 minute mile. After that was known to be possible multiple people sub 4 minute miled in the following decade. If you sent a top runner back a hundred years they would be able to run a sub 4 minute mile, even with 1920s equipment - and the world record in 1923 was 4:10
The story of a sudden breach is perhaps more attractive though.
> The four-minute barrier was first broken on 6 May 1954 at Oxford University's Iffley Road Track, by British athlete Roger Bannister
> On 21 June 1954, at an international meet at Turku, Finland, Australia's John Landy became the second man, after Bannister, to achieve a sub-four-minute mile.
In 1955 Laszlo Tabori was the third person to break the 4 minute barrier. Then, in 1956, three runners broke the four-minute barrier in a single race.
This matches what I described, multiple people attained it once it was understood to be possible. It was linear up to the 4 minute mark, but the point is that records that used to be impossible are now humdrum once achieved.
Are you sure about that? Can you post a result where someone ran with leather shoes on asphalt?
The men's mile WR is about 24 seconds faster than the women's. Presumably plenty of barefoot African dudes could run a mile a lot faster than Budd did.
With the exception of the new "energy return" shoes, there's no evidence that shoes help runners run faster - probably the opposite.
