Science
Today in science, researchers are often forced into playing a game with Catch twenty two rules to obtain support for their research. Commonly, they are expected to submit a proposal stating what it is that they hope to discover before they can be awarded a research grant to discover it. Many of the greatest scientific discoveries in science have been discovered on accident. You can ask fiction writers what their next book will be about, and the chances are that they will be able to provide you with a pretty good idea of what the outcome will be. But to ask a scientist what his or her next discovery will be is to misinterpret the scientific method, and an insult to the world of science as a whole. Of course, it is possible for experienced scientists to plot the latest trends in their field and to anticipate where the next scientific discoveries are likely to be, but its not possible to know.
Science is one big experiment and the results found within it are usually a result of trial and error. There are many examples in science that prove that sometimes, things just fall into place. In seventy ninety one, Luigi Galvani was an anatomist at the University of Bologna. Galvani was investigating the nerves in frog legs, and had threaded some legs on copper wire hanging from a balcony in such a way that a puff of wind caused the legs to touch the iron railing. A spark snapped and the legs jerked violently. In one unintended step, Galvani had observed a closed electrical circuit, and related electricity to nerve impulses. This discovery lead to further scientific discoveries that further advanced the study of nerves in the human body. In eighteen seventy nine, Louis Pasteur inoculated some chickens with cholera bacteria. It was supposed to kill them, but Pasteur or one of his assistants had accidentally used a culture from an old jar and the chickens merely got sick and recovered. Later, Pasteur inoculated them again with a fresh culture that he knew to be virulent, and the chickens didn’t even get sick. Chance had led him to discover the principle of vaccination for disease prevention. This lead to more scientific discoveries about the human body and the ability to fight off viruses when they are injected into the body in small doses.
Science sometimes offers life changing discoveries that are continuously used to save lives. Other scientific discoveries that have done this as well. Wilhelm Roentgen was experimenting with electrical discharges one evening at the University of Wurzburg in eighteen ninety five. There was a screen coated with a barium compound lying to one side, and Roentgen noticed that it would fluoresce when an electrical discharge would occur in the tube he was watching. On reaching for the screen, Roentgen got his hand between the discharge tube and the screen and saw the bones of his own hand through the shadow of his skin. In nineteen zero one, Roentgen received the Nobel prize for his accidental discovery of X-rays. Additionally, Alexander Fleming, was a young bacteriologist at St. Mary’s Hospital in London in nineteen zero eight. One day in his cluttered laboratory, he noticed that a culture dish of bacteria had been invaded by a mold whose spore must have drifted in through an open window. Under the microscope, he saw that, all around the mold, the individual bacteria that he had been growing had burst. He saved the mold, and from it produced the first penicillin. Penicillin is used all the time to aid people in getting rid of problematic bacteria. Science is an arena where anything can happen, sometimes discoveries prove to be life changing, even when found on accident