Certainly it can be done for some inventions. The RSA cryptosystem patent comes to mind as something that even experts wouldn't have seen. Likewise much of the original work on image compression, etc... You don't have to look that far to find brilliance -- we're swimming in it. So again, that just sounds like a platitude to me. Rather than try to defend the nonsense, you're hiding behind the fact that you can't be proven wrong.

Or conversely: the world you apparently want to live in is one where "protectable innovation" is cheap and worthless. Every simple improvement on an existing system becomes someone's property. Do you really want that? I don't think you do -- I think, frankly, that you want every simple improvement made by Apple Computer to be protectable. Prove me wrong. I don't think you can. :)

RSA is an interesting example, because that definitely seems to fall into the territory of "you can't patent math". "Oh, it's just some multiplication, how hard can it be? You can fit the whole thing on a single whiteboard."

You're on a tangent. The point wasn't whether or not RSA is patentable (it was patented, obviously, though it was released to the public and would have expired by now anyway). It's that even among people ("experts in the field", legally) who understand modular exponentiation and can implement RSA correctly, the discovery of public key encryption represents a sublime moment of brilliance. I certainly never would have seen it, nor do I know anyone who claims they would have. Your point was that this kind of certainty didn't exist, and thus you're wrong (or else you're actually claiming that you think RSA was an obvious innovation, in which case let me compose myself before continuing...)

Even to someone (Hi!) who thinks all software patents are bad, RSA is patentable if anything is patentable. Slide to unlock, not even remotely so.