Slashdot Mirror
The Power of Accidental Discoveries
schmiddy writes "An article from Wired mentions the surprising number of discoveries that have been made entirely by accident. In an older article, The Discovery Channel's site points out a different subset of inventions that happened by accident. A much older article from PBS goes into more depth on the subject of accidental discoveries, and gives a great quote from physicist Joseph Henry: 'The seeds of great discoveries are constantly floating around us, but they only take root in minds well prepared to receive them.'"
Most of the best food combinations were discovered by accident too..
mmm.. peanut butter & bananas.
I remember hearing about how Canon discovered inkjet technology when a lab worker accidentally touched an ink-filled syringe with a soldering iron. This idea then became the basis for their bubblejet technology, albeit on a much smaller scale. I've heard this a few times now and have no idea whether it's myth or a true story.
The accidental discovery of the potato chip was important only in that ultimately, when people searched for a way to improve the thin and lackluster potato chip of the masses, the miracle of Pringles was born. I don't know how people could just eat those greasy things that come in a bag for several decades.
One item of trivia that might amuse fans of science fiction is that the machine responsible for Pringles was invented by Gene Wolfe, author of the masterpiece tetralogy The Book of the New Sun and formerly a professional engineer.
there is a big difference between accidental and intentionally sought discovery though.
for instance.. when the periodic table was first created, it was surmised there were many elements which were to be discovered.. loe and behold they were eventually, but a lot of the later ones had to be lab created. Had the periodic table not been produced we might not have been interested in doing so.
What I don't get is why half the polymers we use dont end up on that list linked in but viagra does, oh wait yes i do ; ).. but i mean several polymers (the names of which i can't recall off the top of my head) were discovered as a biproduct of petrol purification experiments.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Sheer irony that their inventor was named Crum. You can't eat just one, but you never seem to be able to eat the whole thing either. How cruel.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
It's no surprise that a lot of discoveries happen by accident. After all, that's more or less why they're called "discoveries," rather than "confirmations."
Sure, there are lots of non-accidental discoveries as well: You test a thousand samples looking a specific enzyme and discover that one of them has it. You take spectra over the course of months for a bunch of stars likely to have planets, analyze them looking for planets, and you discover that one of them has planets. You try to find a quantitative model to explain a bunch of specific data, and you end up finding one.
But most of the time you discover something really new either by getting lucky and stumbling across it or by looking at the world with an new instrument and figuring out the results. Either way, you can't know what it is you're looking for until you've found it.
Unfortunately, most of the examples cited by the articles aren't really discoveries at all. They're inventions. And some aren't really accidental. (The exception is the Nova site, which provides a thorough and engaging look at people expecting to find one thing and finding something else entirely.)
Velcro wasn't an accidental discovery, even according to the description in the article itself. A man picked up a natural object and observed it, noticed a particularly appealing characteristic, and then spent years struggling to reproduce it in a practical commercial product. That's about as non-accidental as you can get. It's a textbook (well, children's book) version of engineering, with no surprises anywhere in sight.
A quote I once heard; Most scientific discoveries don't start with 'eureka', they start from 'hmm... thats odd'.
Fundamental discoveries are made by accident. One of the best examples of this was Michaelson and Morley's interferometer that they used to measure the speed of light in different directions. A well designed experiment that very accurately measured the speed of light. The experiment objective was to determine the direction through which earth was passing though the "ether", at the time a theoretical media that supported the wave propagation of light. As such the experiment failed because the speed of light was the same regardless of the orientation of the interferometer. A few years later Einstein re-interpreted the results and declared that there was no ether and that the speed of light was a constant. There was nothing wrong with the original experiment, just the interpretation of the result. It was a discovery that changed our understanding of the universe. Years ago I opened a fortune cookie that said "Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want." The universe was telling me to look for a learning opportunities whenever I didn't get an expected result.
No, it wasn't forgotten, it was in the first article. Oh wait, I read the article, I must be new here.
We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents.
- Bob Ross
My guess is that the first accident induced invention was underwear.
Be relentless!
"Accidental discoveries" are almost always made by outstanding people.
Alexander Fleming got his petri dishes accidentally ruined by mould. Fleming realised that the mould's antibacterial property could be useful and eventually another scientist succeeded in producing penicillin.
What would your average scientist have done in the same circumstances? Cursed his/her luck and thrown away the dish, most likely...
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Both homogenation and pennicillin were discovered when something expected _didn't_ happen. If they were sloppy, they'd never be able to figure out 'what just happened?'.
My father is a blogger.
A quote from Asimov on the subject:
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but 'That's funny...'"
Is that what you where remembering?
[i]is a method for the separation of mixtures. Flotation is a separation technique used widely in the minerals industry, for paper, de-inking, and water treatment amongst others. It can also be used in the food and coal industries. The technique relies upon differences in the surface properties of different particles to separate them. The particles that are to be floated are rendered hydrophobic by the addition of the appropriate chemicals. Air is then bubbled through the mixture and the desired particles become attached to the small air bubbles and move to the surface where they accumulate as a froth and are collected, or if the non-desired particles float to the surface they are collected and discarded. The flotation process was developed on a commercial scale early in the 20th century at Broken Hill in Australia and is widely used for processing of sulphide minerals (copper, lead, zinc, nickel, cobalt etc...).[/i]
The anecdotal story I heard was the chief metalurgists wife was washing his work clothes and commented on the shiny qualities of the bubbles.
...I obey the laws of physics....