"There was this famous idea that gem-cutters could cleave a diamond" — that with a mallet and a chisel they could create exquisite jewels out of lumpen stone.
Ever since St. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, discussion of translation has dissolved into the ineffable — the famous idea that each language creates an essentially different mental world, and so all translations are doomed to philosophical inadequacy.
There's also a rather disconcerting change of focus at the climax, when the opera borrows the famous idea from Barrie's stage play and Peter calls on the audience to help in reviving Tinkerbell.
Pythagoras may have referred, vaguely, to the "music of the heavens," which he alone seemed able to hear; and later Pythagoreans seem to have assumed that the distances of the heavenly bodies from the earth somehow correspond to musical intervals a theory that, under the influence of Platonic conceptions, resulted in the famous idea of the "harmony of the spheres".
Darwin's most famous idea, natural selection, explains much of the diversity of life.
In 1952, Turing [1] proposed a famous idea of "diffusion-induced instability," which says that the destabilization of otherwise stable constant steady state will lead to the emergence of stable nonuniform spatial structures, which are usually called Turing patterns.
The move to thought, and thereafter to language, is perpetrated with the use of Wittgenstein's famous idea that thoughts, and propositions, are pictures—"the picture is a model of reality" (TLP 2.12).
Hegel's famous idea that we gain self-consciousness only through a process of mutual recognition (see 1.1 above) has been taken up by some neo-Hegelian philosophers of mind.
The famous idea of "womanism," as coined by author Alice Walker, is an attempt to answer one bit of this exclusionary issue -- how can women of color feel comfortable and heard in a movement hugely dominated, throughout history, by white women?
