Can a computer do this? That is, take in the footage and output a drawing or a 3D model that accurate? I don't know what SOTA of that sort of image processing is (and of course nowadays we have better ML models).
Noether's theorem is an interesting one. The evidence was there, but it's the sort discovery that's incredibly nonobvious even if you have a pile of evidence staring right at you. Perhaps Einstein would've gotten it. That she figured it out while working with Hilbert and Einstein on relativity suggests that the ideas that lead to relativity help you think of the ideas of Noether's Theorem. But I think it's pretty likely she was quite counterfactual here.
I think they're talking about a formulation with the same essential point having come up earlier? I'm personally not familiar with Schwinger's formulation so cannot intelligently comment much. I'll also note that the true significance of path integrals took a while to realize (at least going by a comment in Shankar's Princples of Quantum Mechanics, a standard QM textbook, where the preface to the 2nd edition says something like "In the first edition I put a chapter on path integrals because I thought they were important even though most people don't include them. Boy, they became really important. I've added 100 extra pages on path integrals")
However, I'll note that Feynmann diagrams are another example of a conceptual advancement that was huge. Though, it seems like the mathematical development of the perturbation series and the fundamental concept was already around. Furthermore Stueckelberg came up with something similar, but didn't provide as good a way of mechanically translating perturbation expansion terms into diagrams, and didn't have the path integral (this is additional evidence for counterfactualness of the path integral, if you can apparently get halfway to Feynmann diagrams without coming up with path integrals). Likewise the diagrams took a while to become standard.
Thus it seems likely that Feynmann was pretty counterfactual here. Plausibly others that may have come up with the notation may have dismissed it like the people that dismissed Feynmann.
Feynmann was also famously good at this sort of conceptual insight, and so I am willing to believe that his unique abilities were actually important here.
CMB seems not counterfactual. The discovers did have to notice it and remain confused about how it was unexplained by problems with their equipment, and then be receptive to being told about a paper about how there might be radiation from the early universe. But the discovers were just looking at a sensitive radio detector meant to detect radio waves reflecting off hot air balloons. Anyone that developed sensitive equipment and then try to see faint signals would've noticed the mysterious noise.
Given the sheer importance of radio technology, I think there'd be many instances of people developing a similarly sensitive device and noticing the noise. It surprised me to learn that already at the time there was a paper about the possibility of radiation from the early universe, which plausibly sped up discovery. Note also that some astrophysicists nearby were (independently of the first discoverers, not independently of the paper as some of the people wrote the paper) about to look for a signal in the right region with the explicit intent of looking for background radiation.
So, if anything here is counterfactual, it would be Dicke and Peebles predicting the CMB. But I still don't buy it, because even if nobody predicted it, people would've seen it not that long in the future. In fact before the main discovery in 1964, McKellar in 1941 observed a background appearing like a blackbody with the right temperature while observing the spectra of a star. He even guessed it had some significance.
I agree, but, he seems to have rather low counterfactual impact. His discovery was definitely very counterfactual, but it seems like his work was only recognized around the time it would've been rediscovered.
Langmuir's adsorption isotherm is a little bit of statistical mechanics that, given my understanding of what you know already, I think you'd find really easy to understand. Undergrad classes derive it nowadays.
If it's counterfactual, it would have to be due to spurning some development of statistical mechanics, because after some of the basics were developed someone would've derived it. I think it was actually a homework problem! All you have to do is consider a two state system (gas molecule attached to substrate/not attached), then use the grand partition function (the chemical potential, case of the partition function), then substitute a term for the value it has for an ideal gas. You'll then get something that tells you the fraction of the substrate that will have an attached gas molecule. A neat application is hemoglobin and myoglobin attaching oxygen gas.
For a reference, see Chapter 5 Page 140-143 of Kittel's "Thermal Physics", a standard book on undergrad level statistical mechanics.
Onnes discovery seems clearly not counterfactual. My understanding was that multiple people were quite interested in the question of what happens to the resistance when you cool something down using the new tech of Dewars (invented by Dewar) and liquefied helium. For example, Dewar himself was looking into it! Onnes was motivated by an ongoing research agenda with multiple researchers trying to do the thing he was trying. Note also that it was a very short time between when the tech to cool down enough was invented to when Onnes made his discovery.
Onnes's was the first to liquefy helium, but he bought the device he used (which had the novel innovation of exploiting the Joule Thomson effect to liquefy gases) from the inventors of the device (Linde Machine, using the Hampson-Linde cycle). Onnes performed an earlier resistance measuring experiment, this time with mercury, and then observed the superconductivity. Both of these seem like they would've been done pretty soon by someone else.
Surely others would've tried cooling a bunch more metals in the already ongoing quest to understand the resistance at cold temperatures, and then realized the superconductivity in some of them. Mercury, lead, and niobium superconduct at low temperatures - surely someone would've tried metals as obvious as mercury and lead. At the very least, observation of the superfluidity of liquid helium should've spurned people into cooling random stuff and seeing if anything weird happened.
I meant in terms of the way people use the word "SPR" - of course, if a linear model performs better than experts, than I would expect a linear model for the logit to as well, and if it doesn't, that doesn't change the point of the argument because you can just use the linear model.
It seems like you could do better with a logit model
p = logistic( \sum_i w_i c_i ) that is, logit(p) = log odds(p) = \sum_i w_i c_i
Are these also called SPR's?
An example, to point out that this isn't necessarily a market failure caused by imperfect information/biases: fiction. Something new has a lower bar that something old. You can't surprise me with the same plot twists, can't give the same novel speculation (especially for the most important parts of the work, which I forget less).
Likewise if I have a way of detecting errors in e.g. code, I may want a completely-different-paradigm tester even if it's on average worse, in hopes of catching the places where my first tester failed - likewise for emergency preparedness and backup techniques generally, where you want to minimize positive correlation in error so that something is very likely to work at all.
Sub-likewise, generally if you are willing to take a hit to the mean in favor of increasing variance (because you care about the positive heavy tails more than the negative ones, e.g. if you can take the max of your attempts, or if you need a hail mary in football to win) you will have an example of wanting worse but different.