It's not just time and temperature; the idea of quantitatively measuring most things is a pretty recent innovation. The idea that masses should be weighed before and after chemical reactions, for example, and that individual molecule or atomic masses could be determined and could be relevant to the understanding of processes didn't get a secure hold in chemistry circles until the 1850s. Most economic indices were created only after World War II. And it's only since 1980 that trying to identify what it is that makes some materials brittle and others flexible has been given any sort of systematic study for a predictive theory.
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It's not just time and temperature; the idea of quantitatively measuring most things is a pretty recent innovation. The idea that masses should be weighed before and after chemical reactions, for example, and that individual molecule or atomic masses could be determined and could be relevant to the understanding of processes didn't get a secure hold in chemistry circles until the 1850s. Most economic indices were created only after World War II. And it's only since 1980 that trying to identify what it is that makes some materials brittle and others flexible has been given any sort of systematic study for a predictive theory.