Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Why Are Scientists Constantly Surprised By What They Discover?
Slashdot reader dryriver asks about "the sheer number of times scientists consider something to be 'scientifically impossible', are badly disproven by some kind of new finding or discovery a few years later, and then express 'surprise' that 'X is indeed possible'."
If you do a Google News search for the keywords "scientists were surprised" or similar, a huge number of science-related news articles contains a passage about "scientists being surprised" by what they discovered. There seems to be a great disparity between the mindset of inventors -- who always try to MAKE new things become possible -- and the mindset of many scientists, who seem unable or unwilling to consider that what "science holds to be true today" may not turn out to be quite so true tomorrow.
Here's the question: Why do many scientists, having knowledge of the fact that surprises in science happen all the time, continually express "surprise" when they find something unusual? If surprises in scientific research are so common, why are scientists still "surprised" by "surprise findings"?
"The surprising stuff is what we hear about, and there has to be some reason why it is surprising," argues gurps_npc in response to the original submission. "A common answer is that current state of science thinks the surprising stuff was impossible."
"The whole premise is flawed," counters long-time reader Martin+S. "Natural skepticism is an essential component of science." And long-time reader UnknownSoldier supplies a one-word answer: "Ego."
But how would you answer the question? Share your best thoughts in the comments. Why are scientists constantly surprised by what they discover?
Here's the question: Why do many scientists, having knowledge of the fact that surprises in science happen all the time, continually express "surprise" when they find something unusual? If surprises in scientific research are so common, why are scientists still "surprised" by "surprise findings"?
"The surprising stuff is what we hear about, and there has to be some reason why it is surprising," argues gurps_npc in response to the original submission. "A common answer is that current state of science thinks the surprising stuff was impossible."
"The whole premise is flawed," counters long-time reader Martin+S. "Natural skepticism is an essential component of science." And long-time reader UnknownSoldier supplies a one-word answer: "Ego."
But how would you answer the question? Share your best thoughts in the comments. Why are scientists constantly surprised by what they discover?
In many scientific fields, especially mathematics (which is of course not technically a science but that's not the point here so let's not argue about that), results are often not interesting unless they are "surprising". Hence the tendency to exxegerate things.
There are also the occasions when scientists are pessimistic about certain results, and when these turned out well, they become pleasantly surprised.
So are scientists lying when they say they are surprised? No, they are indeed surprised. However, the level of surprise is low. It's a figure of speech.
For us to be alarmed, we would have to be "shocked" and "in disbelief".
Being thorough on a subject makes you preoccupied. Especially if you're smart that way. Being thorough on the scientific method makes you discover things and are truly proven to be new. Which makes details you had the wrong assumptions about ever more surprising.
Also: calling a discovery surprising makes a report about it more interesting.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." - Arthur C. Clarke's first law
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
As a neuroscientist I can tell you why many scientists in the life sciences are surprised by findings: shocker! It's because living systems are so absurdly complicated. Just take a look at what is known currently for any major biochemical pathway, or gene regulation, or mitochondrial metabolism, or protein trafficking in the cell. The complexity is mind boggling. Anyone who thinks you can wade into that abyss of unknowns with certainty hasn't done any biological research.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Yep. More people read a 'surprising' article, than something about 'theory z confirmed/rejected'.
Surprises are more interesting, hence no surprise that scientists are surprised. Especially if the topic isn't too hot.
They didn't act surprised about the Higgs boson, because it was hot enough on its own. No marketing tricks needed to sell that story.
.. gets surprised - how else are you going to lead research and proof results? I mean only way there were no surprise were if you had preset results and you 'proved' them to be true every time. There are places and there were times, this was how science worked. I recalled reading that during the siege of Leningrad (took 3years and people were starving to death) the advice from soviet scientists have been modified to include reality instead of dogma as to provide people with home grown food the most efficient way possible. Seems the threat of millions dying is sometimes the only thing that helps. I think we should be happy if modern day scientists get surprised often instead of proving dogma is true? I wonder however if that is not being washed away by the sjw - after all if even particles can fight for justice as recent controversy surrounding Mr Strumia then the truth is not the goal anymore especially if it disturbs the prevailing mindset. Number of events on US campuses (and elsewhere in the West) where certain speakers have been refused entry or being shouted away by 'oppressed' shows me that the campus is not a place for open mind anymore. If that is so there how do we get 'surprising' results when the students become scientists?
Simple: funding. It's similar to how negative results get such a poor reception. Journals, funding agencies, tenure committees, don't want to hear "we didn't discover what we were hoping to find" and they're only slightly more receptive to "we discovered exactly what we expected". They like to hear "man! you'll be as surprised as we were when you hear what we found."
Because if they already knew in advance, it wouldn't be science. Holy Jeebus, this is science 001 (not even 101), propose a theory, devise an experiment to test it, (hopefully) get results, come to a conclusion. The opposite of this is nonscience, "we know that MMR vaccine causes autism, no need to test it, finished".
Things going according to plan don't make for exciting news. Discoveries that were planned for don't make for exciting news. Only the unexpected gets attention. If you find something you were expecting anyway, then there is nothing to be excited about.
You could even cite Claude Shannon: Information is the inverse of probability. If the Improbable happens, you get much more information than from an event highly probable. Thus yes, important discoveries are often not expected.
Scientists are not surprised by nearly everything they see when they run an experiment. There are many many articles about how this or that confirms such and such earlier understanding. That is BORING! What is exciting is when they see something that does not behave they way they expect. When they are SURPRISED by the result of the experiment there is something new to discover! It may be only that the experiment was flawed in some way or that there really is something going on. That is exciting! Every scientist wants to be the one remembered for opening a new door into a deeper understanding of our world. As for inventions. Most great inventions start with a discovery. The words first spoken after a new invention is usually not Urica I have Found it! it is usually hmm that's odd??? The rest of the invention process is hard work figuring out how to get that odd result all the time and have it do something useful.
But how would you answer the question? Share your best thoughts in the comments. Why are scientists constantly surprised by what they discover?
Why would you care what we think? If you were a scientist you'd run a goddamn experiment and find the actual answer.
I believe it's a combination of being proud and thinking within a silo that every possible option has been exhausted. Often impossible is a term used to describe many unknowns such as scope and depth. When a researcher does a related work search it often only covers some of the categories and sometimes seemingly unrelated work results in changes that the original researcher could not see.
For further details on bad journalism, read http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
Because you're comparing a tiny percentage of apocryphal, paraphrased quotes using loose fluffy editorial subjective language to describe an objective process
Was this originally posted in the 'random dumb questions people ask at parties' topic ?
The universe is under no obligation to make sense to primates that evolved for life on the savannahs of Africa.
It's rather amazing that natural laws are amenable to logic, mathematics, and thought experiments, and that scientists so often guess right.
In other words, this is the wrong question. The question should be "Why is the natural world predictable in such detail, and why are we getting it right more often than not?"
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Scientists aren't surprised. That's just the language that is used to describe findings that don't match up with existing dogma.
As another poster suggested, the natural world is exceedingly complex. Physics aside, our models of it tend to be simple. Simple models perforce do not capture complexity, and thus, are often wrong when you test them beyond their domain.
If you, as a scientist, aren't constantly stumbling across unexpected results (which are written as surprises, that term has a different meaning in scientific papers than in the general public), then you aren't exploring new areas. As a scientist, you work by taking an existing model or hypothesis, and pushing it to its limits, finding where it breaks down, and creating a new, better model that accommodates a wider area. There are precious few cases where such models are sufficiently complete that we have run out of things to test ... low-energy fundamental particle physics seems to be the best-known one. In biology, which is the field I work in, we aren't even remotely close.
Take paleontology, for instance. One a seemingly monthly basis, new dinosaur species are being discovered, or old bones are realized to have been put together wrong, or new details about extinctions have been discovered. For that field, much of the surprise comes from additional data sources -- our older, simpler models were based on less data, and with additional information, better models can be built. Dinosaurs, when I was a kid, were thought to all be lizard-like in appearance. Recent discoveries of exceedingly well-preserved specimens suggest many of them had feathers, and were colored.
Take planetary sciences / cosmology. We have discovered a vast trove of objects in our solar system, thanks to new streams of data. We have discovered large numbers of planets beyond our solar system, also thanks to new streams of data. The better we build our telescopes and sensors, the better a picture of the cosmos we get. Each increase in available resolution continues to bring surprises because we do not have fully-developed models of the universe.
Take geology. Plate tectonics was validated only about 50 years ago. We don't know for sure that the same thing happens on other planets.
And biology. The combination of Darwin, and Watson and Crick seemed to explain all of evolution. Except that, as we look more and more closely, there *are* acquired traits that are inherited ... they're just not the dominant means of evolution. Our tools are getting better and measuring with finer molecular detail, revealing secrets of the scaffolding around DNA and the immense role it plays in determining externally observable characteristics.
Or sleep. We actually understand much of the metabolic mechanism for sleep, now. There is a real rejuvenation process. But we wouldn't have understood that without new tools that allow us to probe at high temporal and spatial resolution, and with fine molecular resolution using genetic tools.
In short, scientists are surprised because we discover new things all the time. We remain on the cusp of wide troves of knowledge, all of which is new. Each new revolution in data collection brings with it a new, unexplored realm and, as is written in many papers, surprises.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Full stop.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I'd like to correct the rumor that senior citizens are not having sex. We are! We're just having it slower. Come to think of it, that's pretty good!
The entire question is malformed. Classic example of cherry picking bias.
Part of it is click-bait headlines. When do you ever see "scientists surprised" in a technical paper? Never.
But most of it is scale. You have millions of scientists around the world doing experiments across thousands of disciplines every day. Of course a few of them will make surprising discoveries. It would be shocking if no one ever discovered anything new.
The question sounds like major aspects of scientific knowledge are constantly being overturned. No. A surprising result here or there is the exception, not the rule. In most fields, you might have one or two really earth shattering discoveries a decade. And you have a few more a year that make you say "huh, I wouldn't have expected that" without any significant implications. Scientific knowledge isn't being completely overhauled every other month.
The status quo exists because it's generally been right for countless experiments across decades. Surprising results are memorable precisely because they are rare.
The "question" is nothing more than a reflection of scope and scale. Science does many things in many fields. Aggregate anything that large together and it will superficially seem like "ZOMG everything is changing all the time!". When all you're really doing is focusing on the outliers.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
"Why are scientists constantly surprised by what they discover?"
By definition, if you discover something, it is surprising. This is seriously how low slashdot has fallen? Accepting questions that make it obvious that the poster doesn't understand the language? So sad, so fucking sad.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because "scientists were surprised" is click bait.
If you find exactly what you expected, you don't feel the need to even mention that. The only exception is experimental findings that confirm Relativity exactly as expected - because mentioning that is what is expected (by the public mostly) for traditional reasons.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Heck, it scientists don't find what they expected, some fudge the numbers to get the desired results - and then don't mention what they had expected not to raise suspicion of their behavior.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I studied some of the mechanical and contractile properties of smooth muscle. In spite of vast morphological differences between smooth muscle and striated (skeletal) muscle, smooth muscle demonstrated qualitatively similar results as striated muscle. https://www.pnas.org/content/7.... The surprise here is that form and function do not necessarily follow each other.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
The Scientests aren't actually surprised
It's the Reporters writing the news stories that are surprised
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
Indeed, that was what I came up with first too. I was a scientist for a long time, and of course sometimes nature surprises you, but to get funding you need to use every superlative in your tool set, and 'suprising' seems to work well even with stuff you didn't find that surprising. And ince you have funding the money givers will want to hear great stories, so there we go again.
-- Cheers!
Yes, but if you conduct an experiment to see if one of two possibilities happens either outcome is not surprising.
-- Cheers!
As well as the point about sensationalist journalism (as plenty of others have already pointed out), current estimates are that there are 2.5 million scientific papers published each year (http://blog.cdnsciencepub.com/21st-century-science-overload/). Obviously, only an incredibly small fraction of those get any coverage in the wider media - the vast majority of research that gets done is the "long tail" of work that is generally rather dull and unremarkable.
We totally expected that there would be comets that broke the speed of light so we weren't even looking for them when we *Yawn* found one while looking for the planet Cybertron.
That's because you have a lot of experience with what is normal and abnormal in this world, enough to understand how surprising a unicorn on Main Street is. But there is nothing impossible about the anatomy of a unicorn; indeed nothing particularly implausible. If you *read* about a unicorn cantering down Main Street in a fantasy novel, you wouldn't be particularly shocked, unless the author was amazingly good.
When you are a toddler, an unusually small or large dog on Main Street is a wonder. Most people, when it comes to science, are as unacquainted as a small child when it comes to basic science facts, much less more arcane ones. A study of college students and their science knowledge some years ago revealed that a large number of them believed the Moon had no gravity. When asked how the astronauts stayed on the surface of the Moon, the most common answer was "heavy boots". So these people would not be surprised at all if an astronaut stepped out of his spacecraft and floated away because his boots weren't heavy enough.
Finally, only a fool believes that inventors accomplish the *impossible*. At best, what an inventor achieves is the implausible. Most often what they achieve is the plausible but economically unfeasible. Now it may be that some day in the future an inventor will create something which most scientists now believe to be impossible. Most people won't be particularly surprised if someone invented a material that shields you from gravity, or faster than light travel. That's because they're *ignorant*.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"the sheer number of times scientists consider something to be 'scientifically impossible', are badly disproven by some kind of new finding or discovery a few years later, and then express 'surprise' that 'X is indeed possible"
Name three such times.
I can't think, off the top of my head, of a reputable scientist who a) said something was impossible that b) was speaking for the community as a whole where c) it was then proven to be possible, and c) they were then surprised that it was possible.
Maybe over 50-100 years (i.e it's impossible "with current science", but overall?).
Even things like cold fusion (which we suspect to be impossible) is stated as being "unlikely", "improbable", etc. rather than concretely impossible.
There are extremely few absolutes in the scientific world, and they are the most-open-minded group of people (don't confuse this with the naivety of being "open-minded" about psychic phenomena, etc.... those kinds of things are stated to be as close to impossible as they can be, and proven by double-blind trials which prove they are nonsense).
And there's also a problem of interpretation. It's *not possible* for information to travel faster than the speed of light in any of the current scientific models, for instance. But we not only know that they are possibly incomplete or inaccurate, but that people mis-state, mis-interpret, and mis-understand quite what it is that the scientists say is impossible.
You get idiots - like the E-Cat guy - who claim to be scientists, may even have some qualifications, but come up with nonsense that's absolutely 100% bullshit and roundly condemned by the rest of the community. But that's like having the vegan nutter interviewed on the news somehow "representing" all the vegans in the world, or similar.
Scientists are rarely surprised, though it is fascinating when something unexpected happens (that doesn't mean we ever thought it was "impossible", just that we hadn't imagined that it was possible... which is very different*).
Really, it's just the reporting that's the hyperbolic thing. Scientists don't write press releases like that.
(* if you told a scientist from the 1800s that we'd all be driving computer-controlled electric cars, he wouldn't have said it was *impossible*. He just may not have imagined that it would be so well harnessed, prevalent, and considered mainstream, and that we had managed to store enough energy, control it with energy itself, etc. Impossible is a big word)
While that's true, there's a difference between the science community and individual scientists. As humans we tend to get stuck in our ways, you can tell how many great changes are not truly over until that generation is dead and buried. If you're an expert it's even harder to get over the fact that your expertise is wrong, we have our known unknowns but many things we think we've figured out completely. So while journalists obviously pick the juiciest headlines, I'm not surprised there are scientists that are in fact blindsided and baffled when it turns out their knowledge in a particular area was in fact incomplete or incorrect.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They didn't act surprised about the Higgs boson, because it was hot enough on its own.
No, we were not surprised because it had been predicted as a solution in 1964. Then we built a massive collider and two huge experiments specifically to search for it. Anyone who expressed surprise at finding it in 2012 would have to have been an idiot.
Indeed the vast majority of recent surprises in particle physics have been exactly the opposite to what the article suggests. In our case, the surprises have generally turned out to be someone making a serious error. For example, the claim of a faster than light neutrino surprised everyone because it violated relativity. The eventual result was that it was caused by a cable that was not properly plugged in, which was a result that surprised nobody.
A similar thing happened a few years ago at the LHC where both experiments started to see signs of a surprising new resonance. However, as more data were collected the significance declined and it appears that it was just a statistical fluke. So in my experience surprising results are usually the ones that turn out to be wrong which is what you expect when you have a good understanding of what you are studying.
If you have lots of surprising results which turn out to be right then you clearly have a very poor understanding of whatever you are studying because the predictions of your theoretical model are constantly being proved wrong.
Looking at the news* on CNN.com today, I see that about 85% of people are politicians, and almost all are doing something crazy today.
Or maybe it's called NEWs because it's something NEW, something at least somewhat unexpected.
Neither the popular press nor the science news reported "the sun rose today - in the morning!", precisely because that's not surprising. "Guy goes to work, does his job, and gets a paycheck" isn't surprising - and therefore you don't hear about it. "Boss gives every employee a $20,000 bonus" is new(s), it's surprising, and therefore you hear about it.
* Whether what CNN reports is actual news vs propaganda is a different discussion.
Also there is a tendency of journalism to report on the surprise of the general public when the scientists had an expectation of the event. For example, the Higgs boson particle was found by CERN but it was predicted more than 50 years ago.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Just because scientists looking at something were surprised does not mean they thought it was impossible. It just means they learned something unexpected. Even in cases where they learned they were wrong about something does not mean they thought the alternative was 'impossible', more often than not the 'right' answer is well within the space of the possible, they just thought something else was the case.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not âoeEureka!â (I found it!) but âoeThatâ(TM)s funny â¦â
â" Isaac Asimov
Surprise is a way to express the discovery of something unexpected-- the premise, all scientists by virtue of understanding a constantly changing world should, "expect the unexpected," is silly. Scientists are people and have emotional responses to unexpected events.
Most science is methodical and incremental, but it is also often surprising and monumental. Most nobel prize winners were just following their passion. It was a surprise for many, to discover how important their work was to the rest of the world.
The true story is "Scientists explained an interesting phenomenon in greater detail than before. They seemed excited about this. However, I failed to grasp the essence of what was important about it".
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
(Fiction is a wonderful thing - but probably not science).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I am a scientist. I essentially agree with the post that said âoeitâ(TM)s not the scientists who are surprised but the reportersâoe, but on reflection I realized that there is an aspect of surprise in the wider scientific community vs the scientists conducting the research themselves that can be genuine. i think the practice is somewhat incidental and not of any nefarious intent. The practice is not specifically to get grants but to write an interesting story, and it may have more to do with science writers than scientists. The proof of it unfortunately requires access to the scientific literature, but if you search for âoesurprisingâ in Google Scholar, that word is unlikely to appear very often â" much less is it likely to appear in the scientific article itself that corresponds to a press release that includes the word âoesurprisingâ. The reason is because those of us who write scientific articles wouldnt describe our results as surprising (most of the time), but those who turn our research results into narratives for press releases do â" possibly as a gimmick, or possibly because the way we explain it to them emphasizes different possible outcomes that could have been possible, and that âoesome peopleâ might have expected it to go a different way. Another reason it gets translated as surprise may be just related to how convoluted some scientific decision-making can get it, as a result of trying one thing, having it not work but noticing something âoestrangeâ, following up on that strange thing, and realizing that what seemed like an outlier ended up being related to something very specific and reproducible that no one previously knew about. Again, surprising at some level, but not at a low level to the scientist â" eg a scientist probably felt surprise at the first result with âoestrangeâ findings, but having followed it up to its logical conclusion, confirmation that something systematically strange is going on in a reproducible way that suggests a real phenomenon is no longer surprising bc at this point the scientist probably had a hunch he or she was on to something, or else he or she wouldnt have been pursuing those additional experiments â" and yet that is probably the result that a science writer would call surprising. I think the reason is partly related to the need to construct a narrative but often the âoesurpriseâ really does capture the reaction of other scientists not directly involved with the work. Eg, the reaction to any âoescientifically unexpectedâ result that in theory was possible but perhaps had never been tested and a random sample of scientists might be mixed on what the expected outcome should be, or might actually have predicted the opposite. If a portion of the scientific community could find your result unexpected, then the press release will usually get written up as saying that we ourselves were surprised. It is a âoecollectiveâ or a figurative surprise, that gets used maybe as a way to acknowledge to the readers that from a 30,000 foot view of established science prior to the investigations in question, the results would be surprising, and we are taking a step back from the results to join them there.
I dont know why the formatting turned out bad. No no one will read it without paragraphs haha ðY
As a molecular biologist, this is 100% the correct answer. The reason isn't that scientific discovery is inherently surprising, or that journalists are sensationalist (both statements are true to an extent) -- it's that you NEED to publish something that is framed as novel/surprising to keep your job. So the "surprise" starts at the source, when the scientists communicate their findings to the journals.
The Scientific Method is somewhat to blame. The premise is that everything is false until proven to be true, and to go there one must provide a theory and then prove it. This requires that you think of a theory first and propose it. This alone means that you have to think of an answer to a question. By definition if your tests result in something other than you expect, you are already surprised. Then the whole scientific method is pessimistic. Take Bigfoot. whether one believes in Bigfoot or not, Bigfoot is assumed to not exist unless a scientist sees him digging through his trashcan, and most of the suppositions assume him to be an 'animal' of limited intelligence. Why do we not find bones or bodies? Suppose Bigfoot has death rituals as humans do? ... not accounted for. Why haven't we found him? Did we ever find D.B. Cooper? Maybe Bigfoot is smart enough to evade human contact. I propose that the scientific method has a flaw. It should become optimistic at some point. If there are hundreds of Bigfoot sightings in a year, as some of the researchers claim, then it becomes unlikely that all are hoaxes or misidentification, so maybe the scientific method should then assume that Bigfoot is likely to exist and is undetectable for some reason. At this point scientists would be less surprised when we finally find real evidence, when, as Jane Goodall did with the great ape, someone finds an encampment someday.
I am not a scientist, and maybe I am oversimplifying it, but I find scientific studies frustrating when I read that everything is always dismissed out of hand until an apple falls from a tree and hits them on the head.
I suggest that they aren't actually "surprised," but that they have learned how to present things to the public in a way that draws attention and interest - like the "caused jaws to drop" click bait thing.
E Proelio Veritas.
Pretty much anything mankind has ever 'known' has eventually turned out to be incorrect.
It shouldn't surprise anyone when something is disproven.
My senior advisor who passed away 20 years ago taught us that true scientific discovery happens and is recognized when you make it sound so obvious that everybody is astonished: "how on earth we did not see this before?".
What was astonishing in early history of science was the mesmerizing simplistic beauty of new: epicycles were tedious, boring, repetitive, ad hoccerish (adhoccer.adhockey player - you heard that here first), while Kepler's laws were weeping-inducing elegant and aesthetically pleasing.
Nowadays it's the opposite: take the protein structure prediction: we started with simple and beautiful ab initio models on every level of prediction and ended up with epicycles of HMMs.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
My girlfriend's answer was that if you do a bunch of tests and repeatedly get negative or boring results, then when something new happens you're surprised.
My answer is that it's media, and that scientists want to sound surprised so that they continue to get funding. Same reason you keep seeing the word "slammed"in politics all the time now: media spin. Media wants attention.
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Also there is a tendency of journalism to report on the surprise of the general public when the scientists had an expectation of the event. For example, the Higgs boson particle was found by CERN but it was predicted more than 50 years ago.
And Scientists are surprised, shocked, and baffled that it took so long.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Further, most of the popular science site press releases don't give enough information for the new "surprise" to even be falsifiable or teach anything if not. Total waste of gee whiz futurism shiny verbiage.
Or maybe that was the whole point.
.
And a disgustingly large amount of what you see is a rediscovery of somthing that's been known for a long time, but was just too obscure enough that around the 3rd generation of the blind leading the ignorant doesn't know they're covering old ground. A deep and wide knowledge of science would prevent that, but no one takes the time - or can afford to at today's economic conditions, high tuitions for lousy education and so on. As an old guy, I shake my head a lot these days.
It's like back when I also did EE - if you're looking at a spec sheet for say, an op amp - it's the parameters that aren't on page one where the device sucks. Don't mention slew rate? It's slow. Don't mention bias current? It's high. Don't mention linearity? It sucks. It's what they don't say...you have to know how to read critically.
Almost room temperature superconductivity! - all you need is millions of bars in a diamond anvil cell, with other conditions unspecified.
New material makes super faster transistors! But there's no way to make them other than with an AFM putting things down atom by atom - no photolith. Will therefore never be integrated at the level of silicon transistors, or even close....
New Li battery has 10x the capacity. Well, it can have 10x the Li per sq area. It'll weigh more, and be bigger. I can get to 10x with existing tech under those non-constraints. And oh, while many new types are lithium-oxygen - the PR guy immediately makes them sound like they can be lithium-air. Hint, lithium combines with things other than oxygen in the air too and you can't recover from that, so far. You get the idea.
The lies are mostly in what they conveniently leave out. I used to think it was just being sloppy, but with around 100% rate, it can't be.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
To be a scientist you need to be curious about the unknown or unexplained.
Once you can formulate a new approach and explain an answer to these questions you become a successful scientist.
Even for yourself but especially for the laymen the explanation might look surprising, who cares, you found the solution.
And very likely a new question has now arisen.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
This whole submission strains to avoid any examples of what it's talking about. Maybe if you could be a little more specific than asking us all to search for different things and attempt to find some case of "scientifically impossible." Did someone travel faster than light or something like that, and I just missed it? That would be a good case to talk about, if that's what you mean. Or was it something else?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The Scientests aren't actually surprised It's the Reporters writing the news stories that are surprised
No, scientists do not operate in absolute certainty of what they will discover, they are regularly surprised by what they discover. It is the religionists who have absolute certainty because they are the only ones I have met that claim they can explain everything in the universe, ... with a collection of ancient religious texts and the fickle opinions of their clergy.
This is one solid reason.
The media fucks up a lot of shit. Scientists can publish in-progress or speculative results and the media, whose business model is to attract eyeballs, pumps that up to solid, verified fact with a whole bag of consequences.
I remember early on reading that brontosaurs could have possibly communicated with loud grunts.
The Enquirer came out with the following headline:
BRONTOSAURS HONKED LIKE BUICKS!!
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Or is it just the spin out by the reporters?
Are there scientific papers that exclaim the surprise?
I haven't read any.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
... surprised are not learning a goddam thing.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Some scientists actually have a passion for science, some love it, some like it.
To have their whole world turned upside down, to be surprised many times, that is reason enough for some.
It's nothing magical. It's just rare.
(Find your passion, follow it!)
Is it possible that scientists are so surprised so often of the time because "surprised" make a better headline? Look at the overuse of "surprised", "shocked" and "couldn't believe what they saw" in the last few years in all types of news.
The news industry makes money by selling content or selling advertising when you view the content. There's a perception (probably true) that "shocked at what they found" "scientists surprised" "discovered the impossible" and such hyperbole gets fingers on buttons or (much less now) pocket change in newspaper machines.
What scientists actually feel, is, I STRONGLY suspect, a lot more boring.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Most of those experiments that cause surprise? Nope. They do the experiment because their guess (hypothesis) says the result may actually happen. They have an idea already (a theory) about what could happen, they do an experiment, and find out of their guess was correct.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
One wonders how many scientists were "surprised" only in news articles...
How much of this "surprise" is down to newspapers trying to sell the story?
Often, unsurprising findings are published, or previous results are confirmed. And then, people make comments like, "What? They needed a grant from the NSF to figure that out? I could have told you that!" There's no winning with some people.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
...and what they did next will amaze you!
Beware of the Leopard.
Who do so many people, having knowledge of the fact that suprises happen in health all the time, continually express "surprise" when they find that they have cancer?
Why do so many people, having knowledge of the fact that robberies happen all the time, continually express "surpise" when they get robbed.
When something happens to someone, something or some topic you care about, this makes a lot more impact than when it happens to the population in general. The universe won't care if an asteroid wipes out humanity, but for the humans it would be pretty surprising if it happened tomorrow.
I like to remember that most significant scientific finds never start with, "Eureka! I have found it!" but more, "That's odd."
According to Shirlock Holmes "when you have eliminated the possible, only the impossible remains!"
I do not know who Shirlock Holmes is, but the actual Sherlock Holmes quote is: "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth"
So... exactly the opposite of what you said.
Science is about exploring the frontier of knowledge. On the frontier, no one knows what to expect, so almost anything can be surprising. In contrast, engineers (and inventors) are all about turning knowledge into usable products. There's less surprise there because the basic science is already worked out.
Is it the researchers, or is it the journalists who are reporting on the science?
Not even that. Scientists have long known the difficulty of detecting such a heavy particle. The wait was all about building an accelerator big enough and sensors fast enough to detect it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Most science follows the pattern of âoecurrent knowledge suggests the next step in furthering that knowledge which, after some testing, is proven to be likely correctâ which is solid and useful and not exciting enough to be widely reported. But when following the path of knowledge takes an unexpected turn, then the news is all over it. Thereâ(TM)s nothing wrong with this, but it has to be expected, acknowledged, and accounted for. Donâ(TM)t judge the state of scientific advancement solely by headlinesâ"youâ(TM)ll only be getting a sliver of the truth.
As a researcher who has made and published "surprising" discovery of a new class of solution to a longstanding problem, my surprise came mostly from knowing that some really smart people have worked on my problem for decades, and they did not find it. I think that understanding of numerical methods led me to approach the problem from a standpoint that they would/could not. Maybe not so surprising then, but invigorating to know that for a time, you are the only person on Earth that knows a certain thing.
We can't prove that there wasn't a shadowy actor who made slight nudges to evolution over the course of billions of years to lead amino acids to humanity.
In other words, we cannot yet disprove theistic evolution.
Personally, I have nothing against you if you want to believe in a god who made really tiny nudges like that, good on you
Nor do I.
but that's not the god most religious people appear to believe in.
Many Christian denominations, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, accept the scientific consensus that Earth is billions of years old. Old Earthers since Saint Augustine in the fifth century have reconciled this with the creation week of Genesis 1 using a day-age theory, citing other scripture to justify interpreting a "day" of creation as a metaphor for an arbitrarily long era. Some day-agers accept evolution in a theistic form; others, the progressive creationists, posit created families within which God has allowed microevolution to happen.
Now as for "most", I'm curious about the fraction of believers who belong to old-Earth denominations, young-Earth denominations, or denominations that take no position on Earth's age. The Roman Catholic Church falls into the last category.
Of course nobody gives money to a charity that has the job of helping the slightly disadvantaged. It is human nature to shout louder to be fed as anyone with many siblings will know. The thing is society has no parents to dispasionately hand out the goodies, only "the market" and whether an emotional response can be generated. No suprise then that everything in the media is always being shouted at volume 11.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Headlines that say "New finding shocks scientists" are almost always clickbait written by reporters who don't know what they're talking about. Scientists are rarely very surprised by their results. You don't know in advance what the result will be, but it usually is somewhere in the range where you thought it might be. Truly surprising results are rare. But when they do happen, they of course get a lot of press.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
It's the reporters who keep talking about how scientists are surprised and it'll change everything. The scientists are just happy to have discovered anything and adds to current knowledge.
It is such a pity that scientists doing research very often do not publish their negative results.
They design an experiment in order to gain knowledge about a hypothesis, in the expectation that their results will support their hypothesis.
All too often, after a few months of negative results, they give up and move onto something else, leaving the work unpublished.
Negative results are often as interesting as positive results, in fact, often more so!
And that info needs to get out there, before some other poor schmuck comes up with a similar experiment and gets the same results.
Rinse and repeat.
A lot of our work ends in blind-alleys and it is just as important to know about these (if only to revisit them and get a different result)!
Maybe under different experimental conditions the expected WILL happen (and maybe not).
Mac
This, too, is largely a myth that should be carefully examined.
Suppose string theory hadn't been a crock for working physicists (as opposed to chalk artists). What would Richard Feynman have done next?
First of all, mathematics is notoriously a young man's game (as far ahead of her times as Ada Lovelace managed to be, she was no Srinivasa Ramanujan).
I've been trying to model this in terms of distributed represention. Perhaps at a younger age, your brain has the signal to noise ratio required to maintain a larger concurrent vector representation of your analytic quagmire, and all its fizzled leads, dead ends, and hardships. Gradient is important in artificial neural networks. Perhaps the extended mental vector of youth can "see" gradient that a curtailed mental vector can not (modulo the underlying formalisms you suckled from the womb). One part of this is to have full command of the formal idioms required to capture your inspiration in hard currency. Feynman still had those in spades to the end of his days.
But what to use them for? The novel approach—the wobbling plate in its fully hyper-dimensional glory—was no longer arriving courtesy of the long view of youth.
I don't think an aging Feynman would have had any special trouble navigating the formalisms of string theory—had it actually made testable predictions in this lifetime. But I don't think an aging Feynman could have done creative work there. By no means would this have anything to do with Feynman being a stick in the mud, unable to accept a radically changed physical paradigm. But the problem is that his creative circuits would have still been welded to the displaced currency of his mathematical prime (ages 19 and 23). Furthermore, QED would not have suddenly lighted up a giant red FAIL klaxon for the hearing impaired. One can still do a lot with QED, even without it being the last word.
So now let's bring in an economist for the standard lecture on comparative advantage and marginal opportunity.
Mastering QED is not without peril for the second rate. Much remains to police in the maintenance of this impressive intellectual edifice (even after the shine is taken off by a superior deep theory).
In software, we somehow grudgingly accept that maintenance happens. But then we're too stupid to imagine that any form of maintenance ever existed in any other profession before our own. NIH syndrome, they name is hubris.
Most theories that ever made any scientist famous delivered a lot of value to society in their time and place. Just because the next hot theory comes along, that doesn't mean the previous paradigm has finished pushing its last ever maintenance branch.
Man, those scientists, too intellectually leaden to abandon the failed model of maintaining multiple releases concurrently.
You see, unlike software, ideas in the physical sciences have no inherent metabolism: the better idea would flash across space and time without so much apparatus as a carrier particle, were it not for the hidebound gargoyles of past eminence.
There are, of course, many fine examples of churlish egotism.
Heroes of Science: Michael Faraday — 27 July 2016
They are pretty damn rare, and often taken out of context (like the quote about airplane not being possible - it was about directed flight within the known engineering - dumb but not as dumb as saying flight in general was impossible - just look at birds). I have not seen many of them , usually it is down to claim not being shored up by evidence, but when that DO happens much later to have evidence, then they are recognized. e.g. plate tectonic or giant wave. But even those case are pretty damn rare, and scientist are willing to examine what goes against the old knowledge. If they did not we would still be back to 17th century knowledge. Who do you think threw everything and wanted answers ? The scientist of the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st century ! Nobody else !
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"scientist X does his job and advanced knowledge a little bit" is unsexy. "scientist is surprised by X" "scientist says X is impossible to be later proven wrong" all are headline which sell 1000 more than the first. As a general rule all fellow scientist I ever worked with WANTED to be surprised, to write their name somewhere, in posterity, to find the new laws, new particle, new material or anything new, the dream of the average scientist is not to go to an event less day at work, or be proven correct in the actual existing knowledge. No the dream is to find something new breaking the old knowledge down and potentially maybe a nobel.
The only one with the "scientist don't like to go agaisnt dogma" or using the "old scientist being proven wrong" are people having NEVER met a scientist : the SAME people endorsing the film/tv serie caricature of a scientist (you know , the first guy being killed by a demon or meeting an angel, or the first guy killed by the monster he said was not existing, you know the trope) and projecting their own unwillingness to face toward the unknown. They think this is what scientist do, because this is what they would do (and in the case of people projecting CT often already do).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Scientist try not to speculate on things that aren't supported by current data and models, so when something unexpected happens, they are obviously surprised.
They aren't shocked, yelling Eureka, having their entire worldviews damaged, or any of the other hysteria that media seems to want you to think happened.
They also try to damp down assumptions that aren't based in facts so they certainly don't expect unicorns and rainbow-poop, leave that for the wackjobs and conmen. Scientists intentionally limit themselves to expecting what is known, so if something outside that range happens, it's a surprise.
They're just surprised. Like when you walk into the kitchen and your wife is there, but you thought she went to the store 10 minutes ago. It's not a big deal.
When it comes to scientist, the first thing they like to do when surprised in scientific experiments is to try and verify that they didn't screw it up!
Also to make sure that there is no failure of the equipment.
Then they throw it out for their colleagues to figure out where they screwed up since they can't seem to find it yet.
This is around the point where they start getting excited, because if it's shown they didn't screw up, they've found something unexpected, and for scientists, that is exciting! Something like that can overturn old science, or even open up entirely new branches of science. THIS is what they live for!
There's nothing sinister, stupid, ignorant, or even egotistical about this at all. The fact that apparently some people seem to think it is just shows that there are people out there that don't understand how the scientific principle and research actually works. They've also probably been influenced by 'reporters' that hype up and distort all this stuff. Those people rarely understand what's being discussed, and they just want to hype reactions for the public, so they make a big deal out of it without even understanding it.
So the next time you see an article exclaiming that scientists are shocked or surprised at some new thing, just hit the actual science sites and see if the scientists are actually talking about it a lot, or if they're just giving it a luke warm reception, if they're even discussing it at all.
In other words, stop listening to the chicken little with the microphone, and look to the responsible adults actually working on the situation.
That was funny, thanks.
Scientists are often wrong, while science is never wrong. So scientists are either surprised they're right or they're completely wrong and surprised by what they find.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Spot on.
Discover (verb) find (something or someone) unexpectedly or in the course of a search.
The majority of surprising discoveries fall into two categories:
. A contradiction of previously held notions,
. Unanticipated finding
It's largely the lottery phenomenon: "There's 10^6 dollars behind one of these doors" "Number 2" *cheers* But you knew the prize was there, you knew it was behind 1/3 doors, so why does *anyone* have a reaction to the correct selection?
Powered heavier-than-air flight was a "discovery" when we simply stopped doing it the wrong way.
Black holes would test the validity of many models, but nobody knew for sure if they really existed. Across those camps were different camps that varied on whether a black hole would be detectable. We were "surprised" at the ways we were able to discover black holes, not for the result but for the pass-on implications of the methods used and the models tested.
Exoplanets: The presence of accumulated rock or gas around a distant star... Literally: "Look, more rock/gas!"
Generally, we "discover" them by looking at where we think they will be, often clued in by previous data: "There's something behind this single door, or there isn't".
The gas, dust and rock themselves are completely tedious, but the implications of them being present in the necessary combination in the right orbit around a good star close enough to ourselves has the *potential* to provide opportunities for further investigation, and it's against the odds by more than 1/3.
In this way, they are "discoveries" the way any piece of land that someone intentionally traveled to was a "discovery" - Africa, India, America... There were people already living there, but it was still a discovery to those who confirmed that the place they'd been told was there ... was there.
So if you are testing some random property of bricks that involves your throwing them, and you record the right values of data, you could easily "discover" that bricks do in-fact experience some degree of lift as they fall, but that their other properties are more than enough to defeat it, and so they don't fly very well.
But it's not going to make the press unless you have some previously unknown or novel extra revelation, insight or finding that comes with that piece of "news".
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
> What causes religion? Ego.
That's an incomplete answer.
While it is true that sometimes, sadly usually more often then not, men are motivated by greed, power, and ego to start a religion, however, you are assuming that is the ONLY reason. It is not.
You are forgetting that some people WANT to help others. My local churches donate their time and money to help the less fortunate. Do you? They are doing it because they understand the Golden Rule: Treat others how you want to be treated and indirectly the Law of Karma: You receive what you give. They consider it our moral duty to help others, ego notwithstanding.
Likewise when a person has a mystical insight they try to communicate what Spiritual Principles they learned with others on how to live a better life -- this True Ego is OK in spite of you trying to trivializing it.
This principles, or Spirit of the Law, get codified into a Letter of the Law. Unfortunately, over time, people start to worship these Letters of the Law and lose their sense of compassion and humanity due to False Ego.
Case in point: Yeshua pointed out the stupidity and hypocrisy of Judaic man-made laws when he asked the Pharisees: "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?" Since they refused to answer him he pointed out "If one of you has a child or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull it out?" Somehow this wasn't considered work -- but yet magically healing / helping your fellow man on the Sabbath had a bullshit excuse of "work"?! The point was: What is more importantly? Mindless following man-made rules and ignoring our brothers when they need help? Or having compassion for our fellow man (and lesser brothers the animals) REGARDLESS of what day of the week it is??? There was no law against doing good in spite of what the ignorant Pharisees preached.
And while religions tend to have monochromatic blindness (only MY color is the right one), and egomaniac pissing contests (my god is bigger then your god) the CORE of what they ALL teach is compassion -- along with a process in which our False Egos is transformed into our True Egos.
You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater focusing on corrupt implementations of principles. Why did you focus on Religion and ignore Spirituality? Here is a refresher:
* Religion: One man telling another what they SHOULD do to understand The Source,
* Spirituality: One man telling another what they COULD do to understand The Source.
>> What causes us to strive to break world records? Ego
There is nothing wrong a sense of pride and accomplishment when it is in balance with the rest of your life.
You are under the delusion that ALL ego is bad. It isn't. Likewise you are confused between True Ego and False Ego.
> The list goes on without any discernible limit. Making your response "Ego" completely meaningless trite.
Is that why did YOU made a trite list?
>> What made you say it?
> Ego.
Just because you don't like one of the main factors doesn't make it any less true.
Let's conveniently ignore the quote I included:
"Science progresses one funeral at a time." -- Max Planck
In this particular case I was summarizing:
* A scientists with an ego is shocked by what he discovers,
* A scientist who is humble isn't shocked, rather he is intrigued.
Lastly, I'm responding, not because of my ego, but because your title was a query To unknown soldier; but you'll probably blame that on Ego as well. LOL.
Go in peace.
> If you do a Google News search for the keywords "scientists were surprised..."
Injecting irony into a story makes the story more stimulating. Are you samping scientists, or are you sampling people who need to sell stimulating stories over and over?
/sarcasm I'd rather be known for having an ego then being an anonymous coward who resorts to ad hominem fallacies.
Do you have a specific complaint or do you just like to whine?
No, scientists aren't getting constantly "surprised" or even "baffled". These are words journalists are putting in their mouths as a way of making a story more interesting.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
"Being surprised" by something doesn't mean that you previously thought it impossible, only that you thought it unlikely (or hadn't even considered "it" at all, as something else seemed possible/probable).
...and what they did next will amaze you!
Its all the fault of a housewife in Pennsylvania, who has the insurance companies running scared.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That red shadow light (which is earthglow) is always there, it's just usually way below the level of illumination provided by the sun.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Journalists reporting on Science have virtually no scientific education so their stories typically mis-represent the results. They then publish a story on new results which offer sensational conclusions rather than the entirely non-surprising subsequent results that verify and validate the original results.
Another reason is the media only report on the first experimental results, which are wrong about 75% of the time, so for the majority of results, they're surprised because the results are invalid and cannot be verified by later attempts to confirm the results (i.e. The Scientific Method). They are surprised because the results are indeed impossible.
1) Are scientists constantly surprised by what they discover?
2) Why?
Answer to #1 is "NO!" Constantly? Really? What do *YOU* think 'constant' means?
Answer to #2 is "Because careful research, or even a cursory pair of Google queries, demonstrates that 'conventional wisdom', the basis for much theoretical research, is confirmed far more often than it is overturned.
Google reports:
"scientists were surprised" 76,300 results
"research confirmed" 965,000 results
better than 12:1 ratio the other way: not my idea of "constantly"
I, on the other hand, *AM* "constantly surprised" at the absence of critical thinking skills frequently displayed by otherwise allegedly sensible individuals.
Well, not "constantly". More like intermittently, but frequently.
(T)he (O)ld (M)an
While I agree with the journalist story telling discussions here, scientists should always approach the universe with wonder, surprise, and openness.
Just because we don't believe in magical ideologies, doesn't mean you should let egos replace imagination. Lack of wonder and imagination risks the very foundation of the furtherment of science.
It is impossible today for any scientist to understand everything we've collected across science. I think it's probably impossible to do in any recognized sub-field.
A large portion of the "understanding" of science is wrong. There's bad data, bad analysis, and bad evaluations out there.
When disagreeing with some of that, it is extremely difficult to simply say people are wrong. It's much easier to say that "we're surprised" about some result. If we were really good, we wouldn't be surprised by as many things. Truthfully, we're not as surprised about as much as we say we are. We're hoping to guide the emotions of key readers of our work. However, none of us really knows what we're doing.
Well sometimes you conduct an experiment and you find out that the results are totally different from what you would expect. The world isn't binary.
Science is frequently like "we know MMR vaccine doesn't cause autism, this has been tested six times, let's peer-review the tests and use knock-out mice to test various genetic profiles as well, all of which will probably not experience autism". If some strain of mice experiences severe neurological and behavioral changes, then the scientists kind of gawk and go "WUT?" before recommending a change to MMR vaccine chemistry.
Often they expect to gain more information about something they don't much understand, and get something completely-unexpected instead of a refined viewpoint. It's like sailing out to find the edge of the earth and somehow ending up back where you started, then trying to explain how your pathing works on the flat-earth model. Scientists were surprised to discover the earth was round.
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Have you ever read an article that was much more mundane or equivocal than the headline promised? Scientists rarely use sensational phrases like "scientifically impossible" to describe their work, and anyone who does is basically giving you the "headline version" of what was actually found.
Science is more of a plodding business of incremental advance rather than one of frequent bombshell discoveries. Too much is already known about the world for there to be too many "Eureka!" bathtub moments, or scientists "surprised" by Apples falling on their head.
Of course occasionally some experimental outcome or accidental discovery may run counter to expectations, but given that experiments are designed to probe the limits of our knowledge it'd be a bit sensationalist to say that experimental outcome A is "surprising" vs experimental outcome B, especially since outcome A might be what the experimenter was hoping for as confirmation of some new intuition/theory in the making.
I'm not sure what sources your reading that gives the impression that science is still a non-stop party of surprising discovery, but sadly it seems more like sensationalist pop-sci journalism than reaility.
Scientists are steeped in theory. They have often studied for many years in universities, and may work their entire lives in a university. Their professors' teachings have been drilled into their heads. They know these teachings to be true.
Inventors and entrepreneurs are all about trying to make something new, so they can sell it. They don't really care what the professor said, they just want to make money.
Thus, the scientists is shocked by what the inventor proves to be true.
And most likely they were paraphrasing a scientist that actually said: "I would be really surprised if the guy really could overcome the principles of thermodynamic as he claims to do."
bickerdyke
I don't think it's so much a case of a scientist setting out to prove or disprove phenomenon "A" and being surprised by the result. It's that the process of proving/disproving "A" results in the accidental discovery of previously unknown phenomena "X", "Y", and "Z".