Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
while investigating a completely different idea—that iridium could
be used to measure sedimentation rate—they discovered the iridium
"spike." This is often how science works: While looking for one thing,
sometimes for nothing, a scientist by accident makes an important
discovery. In the eighteenth century, Sir Horace Walpole read a fairy
tale about the "Three Princes of Serendib" (Sri Lanka), who "were
always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which
they were not in quest of," and he coined the term
serendipity
to
describe their approach. Royston Roberts' delightful topic of that
name describes some of the many discoveries, aside from that of
dinosaur extinction, that have had their origin in accidents: penicillin,
X rays, Teflon, dynamite, and synthetic rubber, to name a few.
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Accidents happen to everyone, the great and the not-so-great
alike, but accident does not necessarily imply serendipity. The
Alvarezes made an accidental discovery, but turned it serendipitous
by what they did next. They could have put down the unantici-
pated finding of high iridium levels to contamination or to a freak
event and ignored it. Instead, they immediately turned their atten-
tion to finding out why the strange result occurred; that led them
on to earthshaking discoveries.
In the absence of Pasteur's "prepared mind," chance turns away,
accidents are not converted into serendipitous discoveries, and
average scientists are sorted from great. The minds of most geolo-
gists, trained to believe that the earth changed slowly and imper-
ceptibly over geologic time, certainly were not prepared to accept
the meteorite impact theory. Not only was the introduction of the
theory unnecessary, it appeared to many geologists to be a mis-
guided attempt by outsiders to reverse 150 years of progress.
