Serendipity has played an important role in a surprising number of scientific discoveries, but it also takes an exceptional scientist to follow up on the lucky break.
I once read a definition of serendipity: when you want to go fishing, dig for worms, and strike oil. If this happened in real life, there are many who would bemoan the black goo and their inability to catch fish. Only a few would recognize the value of the black goo.
Sometimes scientific discovery is like this. Serendipity plays a large role, but the scientist must take advantage of the lucky break to make a discovery. Examples of serendipitous discoveries in science abound.
In 1820, Hans Christian Oersted performed an electrical demonstration for a class he was teaching, when a nearby magnetic compass started behaving strangely. Oersted could have declared the compass broken and tossed it in the trash. Instead he investigated further and discovered a long sought connection between electricity and magnetism.
In 1967 Jocelyn Bell-Burnell was a student worker on a large radio observation project. She noticed what she called "a bit of scruff" in her data. Her fellow students told her to ignore the scruff, finish her project, and graduate. She chose to ignore the well meaning advice instead of the scruff. For her efforts, she discovered pulsars, which turned out to be the neutron stars that had been predicted more than 30 years earlier but never found. After her discovery, it turned out that a few other astronomers had observed similar effects in their data, but ignored them.
Bell-Burnell found the equivalent of black goo in her data. Her reward for not going fishing and instead investigating the nature of the black goo was the scientific equivalent of finding oil - a major new discovery.
How many scientists missed out on an important discovery because they ignored the black goo or scruff in their data?
