Scientific Exploration and Serendipity

Chapter 3C

Scientific Exploration and Serendipity

2. Scientific views determine what problems, dangers, and opportunities we can be aware of.

Since our worldviews tell us what the world is like, they also determine ultimately what opportunities we can take advantage of, and what problems and dangers we can be warned about. And thus it follows that:

3. With changes of worldview come the realization of new problems, dangers and opportunities.

As we have seen above (Point 1), those changes can be profound, which means that as our science is radically transformed, so is our panorama of problems, dangers, and opportunities.

4. By becoming aware of new problems, dangers, and opportunities, we also become able to think of new solutions and new technologies.

Einstein began his career by asking "useless" theoretical questions such as "What would the universe look like if I were traveling on a ray of light?" In trying to satisfy his curiosity about this and other equally “impractical” issues he was led eventually to develop his theory of relativity and to take a decisive role in pushing physics toward quantum theory (although he later disagreed with the full-blown quantum physics of Bohr and Heisenberg). In these and other respects he changed several of our views of the world in profound ways, opening in the process the opportunity for a new understanding of light. This new understanding led to the theory of lasers. Lasers in turn opened up many technological opportunities. It was not long before some researcher decided to apply them in medicine.[1] Today lasers are used in extremely delicate surgical procedures that would not be possible with any other technology known to medical practitioners. And it all began with a change of worldview in a field far removed from medicine at the time.

In contrast imagine a crash program in Einstein's early days to have surgeons develop a surgical instrument that could do the sorts of things that a laser can do today. Is it reasonable to suppose that the point would have come when the well-funded surgeons would have realized that their aim required the overthrow of the physics of their day? And would they have then laid out the steps necessary to replace that physics with a view that would lead them to lasers, and so on? I think not. But without the new physics, could the surgeons have developed the equivalent of lasers, or of much other Western medical technology for that matter? Again I think not.

These considerations undermine the objection that all the good indirect results (e.g., the spin-offs) of the space program can be achieved by spending the money directly in the relevant areas: for benefits in one area may well require a prior radical transformation in another.

Such theoretical transformations make us aware of possible new solutions and opportunities, and that is precisely what we mean by serendipity.

Having established that:

1. Scientific views are instruments for interacting with the universe, and they tell us what the universe is like.

2. Scientific views determine what problems, dangers, and opportunities we can be aware of.

3. With changes of worldview come the realization of new problems, dangers and opportunities.

4. By becoming aware of new problems, dangers, and opportunities, we also become able to think of new solutions and new technologies.

We may then conclude that:

5. Serendipity is the natural (practically inevitable) result of scientific change.

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[1] I do not mean to suggest that this process is automatic or easy. In the case of the laser, it took a maverick with a combined background in physics and engineering, Charles H. Townes, to see the possibilities. It also took a great amount of persistence on his part, in the face of profound skepticism by the profession. Charles H. Townes, “Resistance to Change and New Ideas in Physics: A Personal Perspective,” in E.B. Hook, ed., Prematurity in Scientific Discovery, California University Press, 2202, pp. 46-58.