Past Geniuses

You could take it even further and consider the naming of the colours themselves. Orange didn't exist as a separate colour until the 1500's. Blue, violet and indigo would have been seen as pretty much the same colour until relatively recently and for much of human history(and in some cultures even today) blue and green were named as the same thing. Go back a couple of thousand years and a rainbow could well have been named and seen as being red, yellow and green.

They might, or they might be above average university lecturers or the like. Timing is everything. Or a lot of it. Today, while there is of course many many things left to be discovered the various sciences are much more spread out and with many many more people involved. Being a pioneer is harder. Look at personal computing. People like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the like were born just at the right time and place to become pioneers. If they'd been born ten years earlier or later or in India or Ireland it would have almost certainly passed them by, or they wouldn't have been among the pioneers of personal computing. If you were a very average computer geek of the same age and hanging out with those guys in the 70's and stuck around, chances are you'd be very wealthy today and on some wiki about early pioneers of the PC revolution.

Their lack of expertise with glass didn't help alright(they had porcelain so didn't really bother). Much of it was cultural though. Compared to Europe social mobility in China was very low. If you were a farmer and came up with a better mousetrap it would do you little good because you weren't a mousetrap maker. Where they did have social mobility in the vast state exams to get ahead in their bureaucracy the thinking was extremely rigid so innovation was frowned upon. Their deeper philosophy in the nature of reality was different too. European thought had picked up a very different angle from the Greeks. The Greeks considered reality to be ultimately understandable(which was a wild concept at the time and for most of the world), Chinese philosophy didn't to nearly the same degree.

And they were an empire. This made them more inward looking and centralised and rigid. Europe had Rome, but Rome fell, but at the same time didn't as far as religion went. So Europe ended up with a load of competing states, with a background "empire of the soul" and a load of those states wanted a return to Rome(with them running things of course). This drove serious competition and that drives innovation and with a much greater social mobility and growing middle class it kept going. Then after a while og bating the shíte out of each other got too expensive they decided to build empires overseas which gave us the age of exploration. China had already had such an age. It sent out huge ships that explored the pacific, came home and... well feck all. They didn't need an empire, they already had one thanks very much.

Culture can make such a difference. Look at the printing press. The Chinese had it(IIRC it was a Korean invention) and did little with it beyond banknotes(cool) and some religious texts and it's a bit of a pain in the arse because of how many characters you need to make. The idea travels along the Silk road through the Islamic world where it does nada. Why? Well Arabic was also a bit of a pain to print, but mostly because there was too much cash in hand scribing books so the scribes put the kibosh on it. Then it hits Europe. Twenty odd letters and you can print nearly everything, all those competing nations, mucho dinero to be made and a storm brewing in the church(though they used printing for indulgences so even more cahs came in) and when a down at heel sometime conman silversmith tweaks the process to make it much better you get the first great information revolution since the invention of writing.

But I digress... 😂