Stories of scientific discovery
abound with lucky coincidences. It's true that serendipity and good fortune are
often cited as key factors in making scientific innovations. But look closer.
Even when scientists feel that they just got lucky — like Newton being hit on
the head with his proverbial apple — the steps leading to a new finding or idea
often tell a different story. It takes more than being in the right place, at
the right time, to make a serendipitous discovery. Here are a few important
attributes of scientists who turned a lucky break into a breakthrough:
Background Knowledge
It's not a myth that scientists spend a lot of time
studying. It takes a well-prepared mind to recognize a breakthrough. Many
"serendipitous" discoveries take place only because the discoverer
happened to have specialized background knowledge. For example, a second population
of living coelacanths (a rare type of fish that closely resembles fossils from
400 Million years ago) was discovered in 1997 when a chance sighting happened
to be made by a student of marine biology. The graduate student, Mark Erdmann,
was wandering through an Indonesian fish market with his wife, Arnaz Mehta
Erdmann, on their honeymoon, when she pointed out a strange-looking fish. He
immediately recognized it as a coelacanth — and as a potentially important
scientific discovery. Erdmann did "get lucky" but he was certainly
helped along by his wife's discerning eye and his training in marine biology.
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| Mark Erdmann and his wife were startled to spot a coelacanth while walking through a Sulawesi fish market. |
An Inquisitive Mind
Surprising or anomalous results sometimes
stimulate new discoveries, but it takes a scientific perspective to look beyond
an anomaly and see it as something worth following up. Wilhelm Roentgen's 1895 discovery of the X-ray started with a
serendipitous observation, but explaining
it required careful study. Working by himself in the lab, Roentgen was trying
to make electrons pass through air, when he noticed that with a high charge,
his vacuum tube caused a screen all the way across his lab to light up. He
wasn't the first to see these strange effects — at least two other researchers
had noticed them earlier, but they had not investigated them further. Roentgen,
however, thought that these effects were worth studying. He carefully
documented many different aspects of the new rays, and then published his work
to encourage ongoing research. Roentgen's initial observation was certainly
serendipitous, but it was his subsequent investigation of the anomaly that
turned it into a groundbreaking discovery.
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| An X-ray of Wilhelm Roentgen's wife's hand. Objects that cannot be penetrated by X-rays appear as solid black. |
Creative Thinking
Sometimes,
serendipity doesn't come from being the first to see something, but from being
the first to see it in a new way. While working for the Raytheon Company, Percy
Spencer noticed that microwaves from the radar set he was working on had melted
the candy bar in his pocket. He wasn't the first person to notice that
microwaves generate heat, but he was the first person to think of using this
heat to cook food. He received a patent for his idea in 1950, and Raytheon
developed the idea for commercial and industrial use. In a sign of things to
come, popcorn was the first thing Spencer and his colleagues cooked with
microwaves — it appears in the illustration from his patent! Spencer’s creative
thinking turned a routine observation into a technological breakthrough.
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| The illustration of Percy Spencer's microwave device from his patent documents. |
The Right Tools
New technologies often
allow us to study things in ways that weren't possible in the past. The first
researchers to take advantage of a new technology often get "lucky"
in making exciting new discoveries. One such discovery took place in the 1960s
when a sensitive antenna, developed to communicate with satellites, became
available for research use. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson decided to use the
antenna as a radio telescope to study low levels of radio waves in outer space.
They knew that many celestial bodies — from stars to galaxies — emit radiation
that corresponds to their temperatures, but decided to try and see whether any
waves emanated from places where there were no stars. Penzias and Wilson didn't
expect to find much, but to their surprise, the telescope picked up radio waves
in large amounts! These waves corresponded to temperatures indicating that
space was about four degrees higher than previously thought. Theoretical
physicists later recognized this as leftover warmth from the Big Bang itself —
a discovery that can certainly be attributed to Penzias and Wilson, but also to
the new technology they had at their disposal.
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| The super-sensitive radio telescope used by Penzias and Wilson that
detected leftover warmth from the Big Bang. |
Good
timing
Important discoveries are often made simultaneously by
different people, suggesting that the field is ripe for a new idea. Perhaps the
pieces of a new theory are available in different scientific publications,
just waiting for someone to put them together or perhaps new observations seem
to independently point toward a unifying principle. The theory of evolution by
natural selection may have been one of these ideas. Although Charles Darwin's
notes on evolution extend back to the late 1830s, Alfred Russell Wallace
developed some of the same key ideas independently. Both drew on relatively
recent advances in geology and economics, applying ideas from other fields to
develop a new theory of their own. In the end, they agreed to share credit for
the idea and jointly presented papers on evolution to London's Royal Society.
Darwin and Wallace were certainly great thinkers of their own accord, but good
timing may have contributed to their conceptual breakthrough as well.
-Reshu and Sandhya
