How different do you think our understanding of the natural world would be if every observation, every experiment, were forced to be static? How would our view have been different were Newton unable to watch the apple drop but only see the setup before or after the event occurred? How different would our view of magnetic induction be if Faraday were only able to see static images of his wire dipped in mercury? Perhaps we would have eventually figured our the laws of mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and others eventually, but it certainly would have been a struggle (beyond the struggle it already was and is!).