"The Cha-Cha-Cha Theory of Scientific Discovery"

Daniel Koshland Jr., the long time editor of Science magazine, died recently. He made a great contribution to scientific journalizm. This article of his appears in the current issue.

It is even on a subject dear to the heart of this blog:

Scientific discoveries are the steps--some small, some big--on the staircase called progress, which has led to a better life for the citizens of the world. Each scientific discovery is made possible by the arrangement of neurons in the brain of one individual and as such is idiosyncratic. In looking back on centuries of scientific discoveries, however, a pattern emerges which suggests that they fall into three categories--Charge, Challenge, and Chance--that combine into a "Cha-Cha-Cha" Theory of Scientific Discovery. (Nonscientific discoveries can be categorized similarly.)

"Charge" discoveries solve problems that are quite obvious--cure heart disease, understand the movement of stars in the sky--but in which the way to solve the problem is not so clear. In these, the scientist is called on, as Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi put it, "to see what everyone else has seen and think what no one else has thought before." Thus, the movement of stars in the sky and the fall of an apple from a tree were apparent to everyone, but Isaac Newton came up with the concept of gravity to explain it all in one great theory.

"Challenge" discoveries are a response to an accumulation of facts or concepts that are unexplained by or incongruous with scientific theories of the time. The discoverer perceives that a new concept or a new theory is required to pull all the phenomena into one coherent whole. Sometimes the discoverer sees the anomalies and also provides the solution. Sometimes many people perceive the anomalies, but they wait for the discoverer to provide a new concept. Those individuals, whom we might call "uncoverers," contribute greatly to science, but it is the individual who proposes the idea explaining all of the anomalies who deserves to be called a discoverer.

"Chance" discoveries are those that are often called serendipitous and which Louis Pasteur felt favored "the prepared mind." In this category are the instances of a chance event that the ready mind recognizes as important and then explains to other scientists. This category not only would include Pasteur's discovery of optical activity (D and L isomers), but also W. C. Roentgen's x-rays and Roy Plunkett's Teflon. These scientists saw what no one else had seen or reported and were able to realize its importance.