Introduction
Discovery! The very word sends tingles surging up your spine. It quickens your pulse.
Discoveries are the moments of “Ah, ha! I understand!” and of “Eureka! I found it!”
Everyone longs to discover something—anything! A discovery is finding or observing
something new—something unknown or unnoticed before. It is noticing what was always
there but had been overlooked by all before. It is stretching out into untouched and uncharted regions. Discoveries open new horizons, provide new insights, and create vast fortunes. Discoveries mark the progress of human civilizations. They advance human
knowledge.
Courtroom juries try to discover the truth. Anthropologists discover artifacts from past
human civilizations and cultures. People undergoing psychotherapy try to discover
themselves.
When we say that Columbus “discovered” the New World, we don’t mean that he created it, developed it, designed it, or invented it. The New World had always been there. Natives had lived on it for thousands of years before Columbus’s 1492 arrival. They knew the
Caribbean Islands long before Columbus arrived and certainly didn’t need a European to
discover the islands for them. What Columbus did do was make European societies aware
of this new continent. He was the first European to locate this new land mass and put it on
the maps. That made it a discovery.
Discoveries are often unexpected. Vera Rubin discovered cosmic dark matter in 1970.
She wasn’t searching for dark matter. In fact, she didn’t known that such a thing existed until her discovery proved that it was there. She even had to invent a name (dark matter) for it
after she had discovered its existence.
Sometimes a discovery is built upon previous work by other scientists, but more often
not. Some discoveries are the result of long years of research by the discovering scientist.
But just as often, they are not. Discoveries often come suddenly and represent the beginning
points for new fields of study or new focuses for existing scientific fields.
Why study discoveries? Because discoveries chart the direction of human development and progress. Today’s discoveries will shape tomorrow’s world. Major discoveries
define the directions science takes, what scientists believe, and how our view of the wor ld
changes over time. Einstein’s 1905 discovery of relativity radically altered twentiethcentury physics. Discoveries chart the path and progress of science just as floating buoy
markers reveal the course of a twisting channel through a wide and shallow bay.
Discoveries often represent radically new concepts and ideas. They create virtually all
of the sharp departures from previous knowledge, life, and thinking. These new scientific
discoveries are as important to our evolution as are the evolutionary changes to our DNA
that have allowed us to physically adapt to our changing environments.
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