by bbirdwell Fri Sep 10, 2010 11:43 am
(C) is wrong because it's unsupported. Who's to say whether modern physics discoveries would have been IMPOSSIBLE without those advances? Also, on a nit-picky level, we don't have any evidence to suggest that the 19th century mathematical advances were "major."
This is what the argument boils down to:
old math ideas were used much later than they were originated.
this is what (A) says: application long after discovery.
(C) would be a good answer if somewhere the argument said something like "the ONLY reason Einstein found relativity... the ONLY way scientists can explore quantum mechanics."