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.'"

Recipes

[michaelhood (667393)]

Most of the best food combinations were discovered by accident too..

mmm.. peanut butter & bananas.

Like chocolate chip cookies...

[icefaerie (827772)]

Yum. :) If I recall correctly, chocolate chip cookies were invented in the late 30s who ran out of bakers' chocolate to make chocolate cookies, and instead added now-standard semi-sweet chocolate chips, assuming they'd melt. They didn't, and the chocolate chip cookie was born. :D

Or Reeses?

[Scarletdown (886459)]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...

Scene : Death Star Troops' day room as they are approaching Yavin.

TIE Fighter pilot-1 : Mmmmm... Chocolate.
TIE Fighter pilot-2 : Mmmmm... Peanut butter

Pilot-1 bumps into Pilot-2

Pilot-2 : Hey! You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!
Pilot-1 : You got your peanut butter on my chocolate!

Both taste the new combo. "It's delicious!"

Pilot-1 : You know who would like this? Governor Tarkin.
Pilot-2 : Yeah. He likes chocolate, and he likes peanut butter.
Pilot-1 : Let's bring him some.

Alarm klaxons go off and all fighter pilots are ordered to their ships.

Pilot-2 : As soon as the battle's over.

And so the galaxy would have to wait...

Inkjet printers

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

Is this surprising?

[munpfazy (694689)]

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 fascinating quote

[DerekLyons (302214)]

A quote I once heard; Most scientific discoveries don't start with 'eureka', they start from 'hmm... thats odd'.

Re:A fascinating quote

[by Anonymous Coward]

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'
Isaac Asimov [brainyquote.com]

Serendipity

[romit_icarus (613431)]

Isn't there already a word invented to describe this situation?

Fundemental discoveries are made by accident.

[djl4570 (801529)]

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.

Re:Fundemental discoveries are made by accident.

[by Anonymous Coward]

This history is false. Michaelson and Morley devised an experiment to measure the presumed qualities of the static ether, which the Earth was presumed to move through. They found no evidence for its existence, and produced the finding that it therefore did not exist.

"The interpretation of these results is that there is no displacement of the interference bands. ... The result of the hypothesis of a stationary ether is thus shown to be incorrect." (A. A. Michelson, Am. J. Sci, 122, 120 (1881))

The experiment was therefore a success. It was interpreted correctly, and an appropriate conclusion was drawn from it. Einstein had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Unless you have a limited capacity for rational thought, and believe that the only scientist of any note was Einstein, so he must be involved in every story you tell.

Interestingly, I have often found that explaining that Einstein was not born in America, and only took American citizenship when he was no longer producing any useful physics often produces a sudden re-evaluation of his scientific importance to a more appropriate level. Why don't you read original research documents instead of making up history in the Hollywood style?

Best quote

[lunartik (94926)]

We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents.

- Bob Ross [wikiquote.org]

Gaunch

[MarkRose (820682)]

My guess is that the first accident induced invention was underwear.

There is a pattern to accidental discoveries!

[by Anonymous Coward]

"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...

Actually, that's the nature of "discovery".

[mazur (99215)]

If a discovery is not an accident, it's called an "invention", rather than a discovery. Or a "finding", depending on who's talking.

Pasteur had a great quote:

[Big Sean O (317186)]

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?'.

Flotation - For the separation of mixtures

[itsthebin (725864)]

from Wikipedia

[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.

How can I "prepare my mind" (Joseph Henry quote)?

[mnemotronic (586021)]

I seems that one way to encourage new discoveries is to learn how to cultivate or induce a state of mind or being that will make oneself more receptive to tangential thinking - by that I mean that moment where one takes a step back and "the light comes on" about something completely unrelated to the current course of research or study. This, IMHO, would be be open-mindedness, or egolessness. Too bad a massive ego is a prerequisite for tenured college professorship - I guess they won't be teaching how to do it.

In an alternate train of thought, it's too bad Charles Robert Richet, the French physiologist mentioned in the article [pbs.org], couldn't have experimented on politicians instead of dogs.... Maybe a precident could have been set that

Perspectives

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

Scientist: "The power of accidental discoveries."

Creationist: "The power of the Dark Side."

You can't make brandy this way.

[Phanatic1a (413374)]

Medieval wine merchants used to boil the H20 out of wine so their delicate cargo would keep better and take up less space at sea. Before long, some intrepid soul - our money's on a sailor - decided to bypass the reconstitution stage, and brandy was born. Pass the Courvoisier!

Um...alcohol boils at a *lower* temperature than water does. If you "boil the H2O" out of wine, the alcohol's gone long before the H2O is.

Re:Number 10: Potato Chips

[by Anonymous Coward]

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 [amazon.com] and formerly a professional engineer.

Re:Number 10: Potato Chips

[Firehed (942385)]

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.

Re:Not so surprising.

[plasmacutter (901737)]

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.

Re:LSD

[firemangreg (964292)]

No, it wasn't forgotten, it was in the first article. Oh wait, I read the article, I must be new here.

Asimov quote

[RoceKiller (699407)]

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?

Re:X-Rays

[ichigo 2.0 (900288)]

He died at the age of 78, so it is in fact suprising that he lived that long and didn't die from something else before that. And, as the wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] points out:

Röntgen died in 1923 of carcinoma of the bowel. It is not believed his carcinoma was a result of his work with ionizing radiation because his investigations were only for a short time and he was one of the few pioneers in the field who used protective lead shields routinely.

While a lot of people like to feel clever by deducing that the inventor of the x-ray died from cancer because overexposing himself to it, it just isn't true.