Sociology of The History of Science - The Nature of Scientific Discovery

The Nature of Scientific Discovery

Individual ideas and accomplishments are among the most famous aspects of science, both internally and in larger society. Prolific figures like Sir Isaac Newton, or breakthrough thinkers like Albert Einstein are often celebrated as geniuses and heroes of science. Popularizers of science, including the news media and scientific biographers, contribute to this phenomenon. But many scientific historians emphasize the collective aspects of scientific discovery, and de-emphasize the importance of the "Eureka!" moment.

A detailed look at the history of science often reveals that the minds of great thinkers were primed with the results of previous efforts, and often arrive on the scene to find a crisis of one kind or another. For example, Einstein did not consider the physics of motion and gravitation in isolation. His major accomplishments solved a problem which had come to a head in the field only in recent years — empirical data showing that the speed of light was inexplicably constant, no matter the apparent speed of the observer. (See Michelson-Morley experiment.) Without this information, it is very unlikely that Einstein would have conceived of anything like relativity.

The question of who should get credit for any given discovery is often a source of some controversy. There are many priority disputes, in which multiple individuals or teams have competing claims over who discovered something first. Multiple simultaneous discovery is actually a surprisingly common phenomenon, perhaps largely explained by the idea that previous contributions (including the emergence of contradictions between existing theories, or unexpected empirical results) make a certain concept ready for discovery. Simple priority disputes are often a matter of documenting when certain experiments were performed, or when certain ideas were first articulated to colleagues or recorded in a fixed medium.

Many times the question of exactly which event should qualify as the moment of discovery is difficult to answer. One of the most famous examples of this is the question of the discovery of oxygen. While Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley were able to concentrate oxygen, in the laboratory and characterize its properties, they did not recognize it as a component of air. Priestly actually thought it was missing a hypothetical component of air, known as phlogiston, which air was supposed to absorb from materials that are being burned. It was only several years later that Antoine Lavoisier first conceived of the modern notion of oxygen — as a substance that is consumed from the air in the processes of burning and respiration.

By the late 20th Century, scientific research has become a large-scale effort, largely accomplished in institutional teams. The amount and frequency of inter-team collaboration has continued to increase, especially after the rise of the Internet, which is a central tool for the modern scientific community. This further complicates the notion of individual accomplishment in science.