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 un- charted regions.
Discoveries open new horizons, provide new insights, and create vast for- tunes. 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 cre- ated it, developed
it, designed it, or invented it. The New World had always been there. Na- tives 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 un- til 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 develop- ment 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 world changes over time. Einstein’s 1905
discovery of relativity radically altered twentieth- century 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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