| aptitude (ap te tood) n. [[ ME < LL aptitudo < L aptus: see Apt ]] 1. the quality of being apt or appropriate; fitness 2 a natural tendency or inclination 3 a natural ability or talent 4 quickness to learn or understand. - SYN. TALENT. |
| serendipity (ser en dip e te) n.[ [coined (c. 1754) by Horace Walpole after The Three Princes of Serendip (i.e. Sri Lanka), a Persian fairy tail in which the princes make such discoveries]] an apparent aptitude for making fortunate discoveries accidentally - |
Webster's New World Dictionary
Introduction
Throughout history, numerous advances in science have been achieved through seemingly accidental discoveries. Astronomy is no exception. Are these accidental discoveries the result of hard work, or are they just plain luck?
By definition, to make an accidental discovery one must have the insight and ability to recognize the unexpected. Indeed, one must have the aptitude and talent to recognize the significance of unanticipated information and interpret its meaning.
Do people who make accidental discoveries possess skills that can be learned or taught? If we catalog these skills, can we use this information to predict the likelihood that researchers working in a given field of study will uncover startling results?
In an attempt to answer these questions, this paper will:
Examples of Serendipity in Astronomy
There are many examples of accidental discoveries in astronomy. These include:
How were these discoveries made? What do they have in common? How are they different?
Pulsars
In the late 1960's, Anthony Hewish and a team of graduate students from Cambridge University built a large antenna designed to study Quasars; the active nuclei of distant galaxies. The new instrument consisted of one hundred and twenty miles of wire strung on poles over four and a half acres of the English countryside, built at a cost of 15,000 pounds. As Quasar radio energy passes through the interplanetary medium, its energy is diffracted by the solar wind. As a result, the instrument was expected to detect rapid and apparently random amplitude fluctuations, such that Quasar signals appear to "twinkle" in a process known as Interplanetary Scintillation (IPS) [Bless, 1996, p 383-384].
Graduate student Jocelyn Bell was given the job of scrutinizing chart recorder output that plotted the amplitude of signals visible to the instrument as it rotated with the Earth. No doubt it was a tedious task; one that had to be done manually.
Bell noticed "scruff" on some of the output. When the signal was later visible to the antenna, she called for a faster chart recorder to expand the mysterious signal by plotting it on a longer segment of paper. What she saw was curious. The signal did not exhibit the random amplitude variation that is the hallmark of scintillation. Her mystery signal pulsed at regular intervals of exactly 1.3373011 seconds [Kaufmann and Freedman, 1999, p 569]. This was not a Quasar. This was something new.
If this was not a Quasar, what was it? Or more accurately, what wasn't it? [Bless, 1996, p 386-387]
Bell had stumbled upon Pulsars and the first observational evidence for neutron stars.
Other astronomers went back to take a second look at their old data. Amazingly, evidence of Pulsars existed in data recorded before Bell made the initial discovery, but no one had noticed or recognized the hidden significance [Bless, 1996, p 384-385]. What factors led Bell to be the one to make this discovery before all others?
Teamwork, insight, and a new instrument led to the discovery of Pulsars.
Hewish won the Nobel Prize for the discovery made by his research group; a team composed of other astronomers and graduate students. In a move that some hold to be an academic injustice, Bell was overlooked for the prestigious award. But if Bell hadn't been involved in the discovery, perhaps one of Hewish's other graduate students would have been the one to noticed the "scruff" on the chart recorder output. Even so, Hewish would still have received the Nobel Prize as the principal researcher in the group responsible for the discovery.
Teamwork can be a factor in making accidental discoveries. Synergistic group interaction can lead to a variety of data interpretations and increases the likelihood that someone will discover a new phenomenon as current results are tossed around the tea room.
If a student other than Bell had been given the daily task of examining the chart recorder data, would they have demonstrated Bell's insight in recognizing that the "scruff" was worthy of further investigation? After all, prominent astronomers from other research groups hadn't noticed Pulsar signatures in their data [Bless, 1996, p 384-385]. Bell did notice. In this case, her insight in recognizing that this was something new must be credited as a factor in the discovery.
Hewish and Bell would likely not have made the discovery without their new instrument. The new antenna was designed to detect the rapid signal variation that is the hallmark of Quasar signal scintillation. Fortuitously, it is also the hallmark of Pulsars. Observing rapid signal variation had not been necessary in most previous astronomical observations, and consequently Pulsars had remained a hidden astronomical phenomenon until Bell's accidental discovery [Bless, 1966, p 383].
New technology often leads to accidental discoveries when previously concealed phenomenon are revealed for the first time.
Discovery of the Jovian moons
Hewish and Bell's discovery of Pulsars was not the first time that the use of a new instrument led to an accidental discovery.
In the late seventeenth century, spectacle makers began manufacturing the "spy glass"; a device with the seemingly miraculous property of magnifying images of faraway objects and making them appear to be closer.
When word of these devices reached Italy in 1609, Galileo Galilei made several of them. He later wrote [Galilei, 1998, p 37-38]:
| "And first I prepared a lead tube in whose ends I fitted two glasses, both plane on one side while the other side of one was spherically convex and of the other concave. Then, applying my eye to the concave glass, I saw objects satisfactorily large and close. Indeed, they appeared three items closer and nine times larger than when observed with natural vision only. Afterward I made another more perfect one for myself that showed objects more than sixty times larger. Finally, sparing no labor or expense, I progressed so far that I constructed for myself an instrument so excellent that things seen through it appear about a thousand times larger and more than thirty times close than when observed with the natural faculty only." |
Eventually, Galileo pointed his improved telescope toward the night sky. What he expected to see when he did so is not known, but doing so would change history when his subsequent discoveries were reported to the world.
These discoveries include the revelation that the apparently smooth moon is actually rough and pitted with craters, that Venus has phases like the moon, and that the perfect sun is speckled with imperfect spots.
Arguably, Galileo's most important telescopic observation, however, was the accidental discovery of four bright moons in orbit around the planet Jupiter. Although not direct proof, it gave credence to Copernican models that displaced the Earth from the center of the universe.
In his initial publication on the discovery, Galileo wrote [Galilei, 1998, p 35]:
| "I propose great things for inspection and contemplation, by every explorer of Nature. Great, I say, because of the excellence of the things themselves, because of their newness unheard of through the ages, and also because of the instrument with the benefit of which they make themselves manifest to our sight." |
Without the telescope to "make themselves manifest to our sight", Galileo would never have discovered the moons of Jupiter.
Other equally significant factors were necessary for Galileo to discover the moons of Jupiter and be credited with their discovery. These include taking careful observational notes over many nights and publishing the data with his interpretation.
On
the night of January 7, 1610, Galileo pointed his improved telescope
towards Jupiter for the first time. He saw the planet and three
"fixed stars" in the eyepiece. He thought it peculiar
that these bright stars were in a perfectly straight line, and
did not initially recognize them as moons.
The next evening he once again pointed his telescope at Jupiter. The three fixed stars were still in a row, but had moved relative to Jupiter in a manner inconsistent with the retrograde motion he calculated for the planet. He assumed it was an error in his astronomical tables, and waited to observe them on a subsequent night.
To his further surprise, later observations showed that there was a fourth "star" in line with the other three. Although they always remained in a straight line, from night to night they changed their position with respect to the planet. By carefully recording their changing position over many nights, it became obvious that these so-called stars were actually moons in orbit about Jupiter.
Taking one look was not enough. To recognize that the four bright objects were moons and not fixed stars required Galileo to carefully record multiple observations conducted over many nights.
It is also important to remember that Galileo
was not the only one in Europe with a telescope. A German named
Simon
Marius claimed to have observed Jupiter's moons in December
1609, a full month before Galileo's initial observation. Marius'
discovery claim could not be substantiated and remains controversial
[Van Helden, 1989, p 105].
In contrast, Galileo kept meticulous dated notes, wrote letters to his benefactors describing his exciting discoveries, and was the first to publish his observations. As a result, history credits Galileo with the accidental discovery.
With the telescope proliferating throughout Europe, however, the discovery of Jupiter's moons was only a matter of time. The Jovian moons had been observed by October 1610 in England, and by November of that year in France [Van Helden, 1989, p 105]. With the new device, the moons of Jupiter would be revealed to anyone who bothered to look.
Messier the Comet Hunter
Galileo was not the only one to make careful astronomical observations and note them for future reference, nor was Marius the first to be scooped in a discovery.
Charles Messier was a comet hunter who had been given the task of watching for the predicted return of Halley's comet. He was successful in January 1759, but was scooped by Johan Palitzsch who sighted the comet before him on 25 December 1758.
None-the-less, Messier would spend his career scanning the night sky looking for other comets. During his career, he would independently discover 15 comets; but these would not be the discoveries that would provide him with enduring fame. Messier the comet hunter would be remembered for cataloging accidental discoveries of objects that weren't comets.
Messier would sight a fuzzy object in his telescope and believe he'd discovered a comet. On subsequent observation, many of these turned out not to be comets; they moved with the fixed stars. He kept a list of "embarrassing objects" so they would not fool him a second time should he stumble upon them again [O'Meara, 1998].
Some of the objects in his catalog were discovered by Messier himself; his contemporaries discovered others.
Messier would hardly describe the discovery of these objects as serendipitous; a fortunate discovery made accidentally. From Messier's point of view, these discoveries were not fortunate. They were not comets. To him, these fuzzy objects were noting but an disappointment. Ironically, Messier's catalog is a treasure trove of nighttime gems; galaxies, nebulae, and globular clusters appreciated and enjoyed in modern times by countless amateur astronomers to whom telescopes with improved optics are economically available.
Regardless of whether one considers it fortunate or a disappointment, the fact remains that Messier cataloged over one hundred accidental discoveries in collaboration with his contemporaries.
The principal factor leading to these discoveries was perseverance. Messier's catalog was the result of scanning the night sky, night after night, searching for elusive comets.
Cosmic Background Radiation
If Messier was annoyed when fuzzy objects turned out not to be comets, imagine the frustration and puzzlement of Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. In the 1960's, they were Bell Labs engineers using a horn antenna designed to relay telephone calls via satellite. Regardless of where Penzias and Wilson pointed their antenna, they heard the same thing when tuned to wavelengths of 7 centimeters; an annoying and consistent hiss.
But what produced it?
And indeed they could. Princeton's Robert Dicke was planning to build an antenna to listen for the cosmic microwave background radiation ,a remnant of the hot big bang predicted by theory as the Universe expanded and cooled.
But Dicke had been scooped. Penzias and Wilson had stumbled across Dicke's cosmic background radiation.
Although Dicke and the Bell Labs team jointly authored two companion papers on the discovery, it was Penzias and Wilson who won the Nobel Prize [Bless, 1996, p 482-483].
Once again, a new instrument had been responsible for uncovering a hidden phenomenon.
Penzias and Wilson had stumbled across it by accident. If Penzias and Wilson hadn't uncovered it, Dicke would have made the discovery himself once his own antenna was ready.
Once again, history records that the first to utilize new technology will make important and perhaps unexpected discoveries if that technology allows them to observe the universe in a new way.
Once again, it would seem that the process of discovery is accelerated through teamwork. Had Penzias and Wilson not extended their partnership to include Dicke and the Princeton researchers, history might credit them with nothing more than having a really clean antenna, free from nesting birds.
They asked for help when they recognized that the source of the annoying hiss had eluded them. Together, the expanded team produced strong new evidence supporting the theory that the Universe was created in a Big Bang.
Factors promoting accidental discoveries
Examples of accidental discoveries in astronomy are too numerous to enumerate here. Most examples share attributes with those just described. The table given below expands the list of attributes that promote making new and perhaps accidental discoveries. The table includes a brief example of each attribute.
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New data has the potential to lead to surprising conclusions, but a scientist must have the aptitude to recognize the significance of unexpected data and the skill to interpret its meaning. Under normal circumstances, an astronomer adheres to the Scientific Method in which a new model or hypothesis is developed to explain a natural phenomenon. An experiment or observational protocol is then established to test the model.
When observational data produces unexpected results for which there is no reasonable model, a good scientist will revise the original model and its assumptions. Once modified, predictions from the revised model must stand up to further observational scrutiny. Throughout this process, a good scientist will adhere to the basic tenants of good science, attributes of which are listed below.
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Likelihood of Accidental Discovery in SETI Research
For over forty years, astronomers have looked for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. So far, it would appear that we are alone in a universe built for life.
SETI researchers expect that they will ultimately be successful. Perhaps they will be. What is the likelihood that humanity will ultimately find signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, but only arrive at this most impressive result through some accidental process or by unexpected means? Alternatively, what is the likelihood that they will make some other unexpected discovery?
At the present time, we can't accurately predict the outcomes of SETI research. But perhaps, by examining the attributes of other astronomers to whom history has credited accidental discoveries, we will be in a position to say if the conditions are right for their work to astonish and amaze humanity in an unexpected way.
SETI research has traditionally searched radio frequencies, beginning with Frank Drake's initial search in 1960 and continuing with various research projects.
Not coincidentally, one of those projects is called Project SERENDIP, which is an an acronym for Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations. Will they need luck to make an accidental discovery? Almost certainly. But using a multichannel spectrum analyzer piggybacked to the largest radio telescope in world, the odds of humanity determining if extraterrestrial intelligence exists is greatly improved. In the words of Cocconi and Morrison (1959), who first suggested that a radio search was possible, "if we never search, the chances of success are zero."
Although originally suggested as long ago as 1961, serious SETI research at optical frequencies has only recently begun. These searches are based on the assumption that an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization might build an optical beacon using laser technology with the intention of attracting the attention of another civilization who might be watching. If humankind chose to build such a beacon, the technology exists today that would allow us to build a pulsed laser that would outshine the sun at a narrow-band optical frequency.
Searches underway by amateurs in Ohio, and academics at Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Western Sydney are looking for nanosecond laser pulses using fast detectors that were specially designed and built for the research. Hopefully, optical SETI will be successful and evidence will be found for extraterrestrial intelligence. But might the researchers stumble upon some new astronomical phenomenon that produces bright, rapid pulses at optical frequencies? This is an interesting question considering that the application of new technology often brings unexpected discoveries.
There is indeed precedence for such a phenomenon. Only three Pulsars are known to pulse at optical frequencies; these are in the Crab Nebula, Vela, and the Large Magellanic Cloud [Bless, 1996, p 386]. Why are these the only neutron stars that are known to pulse at optical frequencies? Might it have something to do with the age of the neutron star? Might it have something to do with some other property of the star or the surrounding interstellar environment? One can only speculate at this stage. But when looking for optical pulses, perhaps SETI researchers will stumble across the answer to these questions or discover some other phenomenon.
Extrasolar planet hunter Geoff Marcy has entered the search for ETI. Marcy uses high-resolution spectrograph readings to look for the wobble indicative of a massive planetary companion. Recently, he has also begun looking for previously unnoticed ultra narrow-band spectrograph spikes resulting from a laser beacon, hiding amongst his data. Perhaps Marcy has already recorded an interesting new optical phenomenon, or found signs of an extraterrestrial intelligence, but has not yet noticed it in his data because he wasn't originally looking for it when the data was collected.
Other factors that might contribute to or hinder an unexpected SETI discovery are listed in the table below. While no one can say for sure, the likelihood of startling results from SETI research seems promising, given that SETI research shares several of the hallmarks characteristic of other projects that have produced unexpected discoveries!
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Conclusions
Accidental discoveries are made as the result of hard work, teamwork, and a commitment to observing the universe around us.
If one can observe with new technology, promising results become all the more likely. New technology almost always leads to surprising insight if it gives talented people a novel way to view the Universe.
Perhaps the only role that can be ascribed to chance is bringing the right people together with the right resources at the right time. Fortunately, however, clever people can often find a way to do this on their own if luck doesn't conspire to help the process along.
Insight and inspiration come from education, experience, and research environments that support and nurture scholarly work.
Consider this analogy. Could a skilled symphony musician "discover" a melody by playing a few wrong notes? Perhaps.
It is less likely that someone without a musical background would have the same good fortune. They wouldn't have the skill and dexterity to manipulate a musical instrument since this is achieved through training and practice. They would be unable to draw upon a previous repertoire when embellishing or expanding an accidental note sequence. Perhaps more significantly, they would be less likely to have the skill needed to repeat the same note sequence later.
Clearly a musician possess skills that increase the likelihood of producing an accidental masterpiece from unlikely inspiration. Similarly, a good scientist possess skills and attributes that lead to good science. Under the right circumstances, these might also contribute to making an accidental discovery.
Continuing the analogy, while a musician might find accidental inspiration from a few bad notes, not all activities in which they engage have the same likelihood of leading to an accidental masterpiece. While singing in the shower might provide unexpected inspiration, meetings with the trustees to agree upon next month's playbill is less likely to directly lead to great new works of music.
Similarly, while an astronomer might gain insight from organizing thoughts when preparing to write a research proposal or traveling to arrange for funding of a new experiment, new knowledge and discoveries generally come from the collection and analysis of new data. More data means more discoveries.
As any backyard astronomer will tell you, seeing a meteor dart across a dark night sky is not uncommon. While it is true that they occur with greater frequency and in well known regions of the sky at certain times of the year, anyone who has spent time under a dark night sky will have seen them at unexpected times. To see them, the only requirement is to keep looking up.
References
Bless, RC (1996) Discovering the Cosmos, University Science Books, ISBN 0-935702-67-9.
Cocconi, G and Morrison P (1959) Searching for Interstellar Communications, Nature, 184:844-846.
Drake, F and Sobel, D (1997) Is Anyone out there? The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Pocket books, ISBN 0-671-01029-8.
Galilei, G (1998) Sidereus Nuncius, translated by Albert Van Helden, The University of Chicago Press, 0-226-27903-0.
Horowitz, P (2000) Flash! Optical SETI joins the search, Planetary Report, 20(2):8-18.
Hoskin, M (1999) The Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-57600-8.
Kaufmann III, WJ, Freedman, RA (1999) Universe, 5th ed., WH Freeman and Company, ISBN 0-7167-3495-8.
O'Meara, SJ (1998) Deep-sky companions: The Messier Objects, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-55332-6.
Van Helden, A (1998) Sidereus Nuncius or the Sidereal Messenger by Galileo Galile: Translated with introduction, conclusion, and notes, The University of Chicago Press, 0-226-27903-0.
