Scientific Progress

Mr Benevolent

Only recently found this forum and have a question that's been nagging me for years:

Why have most major scientific discoveries been accidental?

Niall

kevmy

Who said most scientific discoveries were accidental?

Most were the result of hard work and an inquisitive mind. Sure there have been some accidental ones or ones were unexpected results happen (but then the whole point of doing an experiment is to find the result if you know the result before the experiment then there is no point in doing it).

As Edison said it's 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.

Professor_Fink

Confab wrote: »

Only recently found this forum and have a question that's been nagging me for years:

Why have most major scientific discoveries been accidental?

Niall

I'm with Kevmy on this. The major discoveries were not accidental: mechanics, universal gravitation, quantum mechanics and relativity in physics, evolution in biology, etc.

The only major physics discovery that was purely accidental that I can think of was the detection of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Even with this though, it was preceded by substantial theoretical work, and had been predicted theoretically before the detection.

Mr Benevolent

Ok, a few examples:

Radioactive materials (Curie)
Innoculation (Pasteur)
X-Rays (Roentgen)
Antibiotics (Fleming)
Circuits (Galvani)
Electromagnetism (Faraday)

The list goes on and on, right up to today. There are a lot more examples.

Professor_Fink

Confab wrote: »

Ok, a few examples:

Radioactive materials (Curie)
Innoculation (Pasteur)
X-Rays (Roentgen)
Antibiotics (Fleming)
Circuits (Galvani)
Electromagnetism (Faraday)

The list goes on and on, right up to today. There are a lot more examples.

Very few of those are completely accidental. The stories that are commonly told about these type of discoveries tend to play up the random chance part, beyond what actually happened. Certainly the discovery of vaccination wasn't random, nor was the discovery of radioactivity (which was discovered by Becquerel, not the Curies), nor electromagnetism. I'm not sure about the others.

What really happened was that people were doing experiments and observed weird effects. But this is exactly what experimentation is about. When we don't understand a particular area we probe deeper and use the effects we observe to determine what is going on. That is how science progresses.

Notice that none of the physics break throughs you mention occured with everyday materials. That's because at the time, the behaviour of common materials was relatively well understood. So people pushed beyond what we understood into unproed regions, and so made discoveries of new effects.

The same is true today. The LHC is specifically build not just to verify our current theories, but to probe beyond the standard model. We actually expect to see unexpected things.

These aren't accidental discoveries, they are the essence of science.

nesf

I'd be inclined to agree with the other posters on this one. The question comes down to what you mean by accidental, unexpected results from a series of scientific experiments aren't accidental, they are a fundamental part of the scientific process and it's this attribute that most distinguishes science from a priori reasoning, i.e. that you can go looking for X and find Y which you would never have guessed at existing before the experiment. Scientific progress is disorganised and unpredictable for any time horizon past the short term, it's the nature of the beast.

The whole need for the edifice that is science is that we can't accurately predict what we'll find when we peel back the veil of ignorance just a little bit further. It's nowhere near as steady and solid a progression as many would like, especially for things like medical disorders like cancer or alternative energy sources etc, but it's the only way to make progress that seems to work.