I think that has to do with the fact that one discovery or invention leads to a cascade of others. And upon those, yet more cascades of discoveries and inventio

I think that has to do with the fact that one discovery or invention leads to a cascade of others. And upon those, yet more cascades of discoveries and inventions. It's as if technological and scientific advancement was a genome, it's very difficult to predict how it would branch out from a single mutation yielding many new families along the way.