alt Hacker NewsAristotle spent serious time on this and concluded eels spontaneously generated from mud, that's not a knock on him, you genuinely cannot find reproductive organs in a wild eel because they don't develop until the final migration, it took satellite tagging in 2018 to actually confirm what was happening. A 2,300 year old mystery closed by a GPS tracker is a good reminder that some problems just had to wait for the right instrument
That is a very big deal observation. Philosophers of science have a concept called "theory ladenness". Until the right tool arrives you may not even be able to formulate the question, and you don't know it. You keep dancing around versions of the wrong question.
The history of heat versus temperature is quite enlightening. The absence of thermometers means you have a hard time conceiving of heat capacity. They knew that phlogiston wasn't right but all of their experiments kept assuming it was measurable. Same with mass versus weight; the difference isn't hard to measure once it occurs to you to measure it.
These can be great aha moments in the history of science. It's both daunting and inspiring.