Serendipity
The Unexpected in Science
-
- 14,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
From the bestselling author of Imperfection, a theory of uncertainty as the very core of the scientific method—and the essence of its wonder.
How many times have we looked for something and found something else? A partner, a job, an object? The same thing often happens to scientists: they design an experiment and discover the unexpected, which usually turns out to be very important. This fascinating phenomenon is called serendipity, which takes its name from the mythical Serendip, a place from which, according to a Persian fable, three princes set off to explore the world, making chance discoveries along the way. In Serendipity, the award-winning author of Imperfection Telmo Pievani returns to weave a compelling story about the unexpected in science and its fascinating role in our understanding of the world.
Going far beyond the usual examples of penicillin, X-rays, the microwave oven, and Christopher Columbus, Pievani shows that the most surprising stories of serendipity in the history of science reveal profound aspects of the logic of scientific discovery. In this book, he presents for the first time: an archaeology of the idea; a taxonomy of serendipitous discoveries; an “ecology of serendipity” (the surrounding conditions and factors that can promote it); and lastly, a theory of serendipity (why it occurs so frequently in so many sciences). From Zadig to Sherlock Holmes, Pievani shows that such great discoveries are not just the product of luck. Instead, serendipity comes from a mix of cunning, curiosity, sagacity, imagination, and accidents caught on the fly. Serendipity illuminates how much we don’t know and how much we don’t even know we don’t know. Above all, Pievani reminds us that the human brain is of a piece with the world it is investigating—a world so much bigger than our knowledge—and it has also evolved within that world, adapting as it has to.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this stimulating study, Pievani (Imperfection), a biology professor at the University of Padua, surveys chance's role in advancing scientific knowledge. He describes how in 1928, British microbiologist Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin after one of the petri dishes he was using to grow staph bacteria became contaminated with Penicillium mold, which, to his surprise, killed the surrounding bacteria. Elsewhere, Pievani explains that 18th-century chemist Joseph Priestley was the first person to describe oxygen after his attempts to produce carbon dioxide for use in soda (which he invented) generated a mysterious gas that made his lungs feel "stronger and lighter," and that in 1967, Cambridge University PhD student Jocelyn Bell unexpectedly confirmed the existence of pulsars ("rapidly rotating neutron stars" that had been first theorized decades earlier) after detecting radio signals from distant stars while studying "the behavior of radio waves in interplanetary space." Pievani uses such examples to argue for the importance of research "driven by the mere curiosity to learn about nature," rather than by practical applications, and to argue that scientists should embrace "good ignorance" by candidly accepting the limits of their knowledge and allowing doubts to drive their research. Erudite and illuminating, this persuades.
