You're right, it's not strictly just the knowledge, but it's also the expertise to execute it, the tooling to build precision machinery and devices, and a production chain of raw materials of sufficient quality.

Even theory itself doesn't just come out of the blue. Einstein didn't pull the General Theory of Relativity out of his ass, he was building on centuries of groundwork and experimental evidence and just connected the dots. On the shoulders of giants, indeed.

Its funny to look at games like Civilization 5 that make you work your way down a tech tree and think of them as reductive, but in many ways the actual progress of technology was not far off.

But I was just thinking that it's crazy that it's theoretically possible that we could have had this technology at any point if we had the capability. Like, there was no rule that was like "must reach game year 1945 CE to unlock nuclear weapons".

I'm pretty sure a lot early doctors were also burned at stakes because they were called witches or smth.

You don't even have to go back that far to find blatantly dangerous willful ignorance, not even two whole centuries.

The idea of a doctor washing their hands to avoid the transfer of disease-causing germs from one patient to another (like, going from an autopsy in one room to delivering a child in the next without washing up) was deemed so ludicrous and laughable that the backlash and rejection led to the man who suggested it having a mental breakdown and dying in an insane asylum.

This was right in the middle of the development of the germ theory of disease, among a mounting pile of evidence that it wasn't just "bad smells" that cause disease.