To ask that question after the passage of two centuries, says Pietro Nivola of the Brookings Institution, is to pose an impossible thought experiment.
They managed to do what had previously been thought impossible: they probed reality without disturbing it.
The match was turning into a gripping affair, something Newcastle fans might have thought impossible just a few weeks ago.
It means that we can build airplanes and fetal monitoring systems and space shuttles to tolerances and levels of reliability heretofore thought impossible.
It was impossible it was thought to really truly compete with the Soviet Union in science and math and other areas without a broadly educated public.
BBC: NEWS | UK | Education | Higher education 'market' warning
Skirting around ol' Wernie Heisenberg and that Principle of his, the team exploited quantum entanglement to read the encryption keys encoded in photon polarizations from their momentums, avoiding detection by either end -- in other words, doing what was once thought impossible by cryptographers.
"I have created a situation everyone thought was impossible to have at Ferrari with Michael Schumacher, " he said.
BBC: SPORT | Motorsport | Formula One | Barrichello keen for new deal
"We're looking for things that have a combination of properties you really would have thought was impossible, " says Schacht.
Is it possible to succeed at a task you thought was impossible?
This week, a team of Finnish researchers did what we would have thought was impossible, building an electricity-free computer that's powered by water droplets.
ENGADGET: Inhabitat's Week in Green: GPS shoes, shape-shifting bicycle and a wheelchair helicopter
We have a national debt and we have a deficit that are at levels that a few years ago we would have thought were impossible to believe.
T. and The Color Purple, lauds digital cinema for achieving a picture quality many thought was impossible, but wonders whether compressed digital bits can ever surpass the sharpness of film.
Not only did this transformation put American wines on par with the finest French, something previously thought completely impossible, it paved the way for the emergence of the New World wines many of us enjoy today.
FORBES: 2012 Year In Wine: Big California Reds (And Whites) Prevail
But we need leaders in business and public life who challenge us do what we thought was impossible, who stir our souls, captivate our imaginations, and elicit the kind of bravery Armstrong showed when he took those first magnificent steps.
They have never seen anything like this and until recently thought it was impossible.
FORBES: What If This Is As Good As It Gets: Financial Stability Edition
And then in a mere 12 years people doubled that, breaking a barrier thought to be impossible.
FORBES: Win Big by Unleashing Millennials' Connective Intelligence
We certainly thought it was impossible that the START treaty would be ratified.
And to be sure, many technologies that were once thought to be impossible are used every day now--inspiring science-fiction writer Arthur C.
It is also because he IS a highly intelligent man and it is completely impossible that he has not thought this through himself.
Recently, though, fracking has presented the promise of substantially inreasing our domestic energy supply by opening up new shale formations previously thought to be impossible to produce.
Manipulating the shape of the threads using this method, called thread-rolling, was thought to be impossible because it would be too hard to control the structure of the screw if metal oozed into odd shapes.
"To our complete surprise, we found several red dwarf binaries with orbital periods significantly shorter than the 5-hour cut-off found for sun-like stars, something previously thought to be impossible, " the study's lead author Bas Nefs, from Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, said in a statement.
MSN: 'Impossible' stars found in our galaxy - Technology & science - Space - Space.com | NBC News
So when we set out on this, I thought this is mission impossible.
Eventually they hope to see crops worldwide grown on land which was previously thought difficult or even impossible to farm.
He thought it was virtually impossible to do what we were doing in getting promotion to the top flight in consecutive seasons.
They thought it would be impossible for your company to make the kind of changes necessary to restore fiscal discipline and move towards viability.
However, other senior board members, led by Keith Bradshaw, chief executive of the MCC, thought that it was impossible to have a lame duck coach going into the summer.
At the time "there were skeptics by the million" who thought it would be impossible to shut off signals for cancer growth without also interrupting signals needed for healthy functions, he says.
It is impossible to believe that anyone at all thought that creating a paperwork chain for entire global supply chains would not be hit by delays like this.
But since riddles and thought experiments rely on imagining impossible realities, by choosing a riddle in the first place, the Rabbi is paradoxically introducing the young man to the value of magical thinking as well.
应用推荐