Failure and science
The literature of science is as much about wrong turns, aborted lines of inquiry, failure to thrive, and outright failure as success. Even the greatest of scientists fails now and again, just like the rest of us. Indeed, unless one is selective to the point of unrepresentativeness, it must be admitted that much of past science is a collection of dead ends and well-intentioned mistakes, eventually to be discarded. These failures can take many general forms. They can be discoveries that after a short time are proved erroneous, as was the case with N-rays, cold fusion, and polywater. They can also be concepts with a long, successful track record that are found to be invalid or somehow theoretically inadequate, such as phlogiston, light particles, and the universal ether. They can also be ambitious research programs that appear, from the vantage of hindsight, to have been futile because the then-current body of knowledge or research techniques were too primitive to permit a major breakthrough, as in Einstein's failed attempts at constructing a unified field theory. Some research projects fail to survive because of a loss of financial backing, as was the case with the effort to build a colossal superconducting supercollider in Texas. And of course experiments, observations, or theories can be flawed in some small or large way: to error is human and part of the discovery process.Smaller errors, once detected, may be announced in the "Erratum" section of a scientific journal. These entries are usually short and straightforward, but one example shows an author mercilessly disparaging his own published work. In an item in the Journal of Chemical Physics (vol. 47, 1967) titled "Erratum: Charge Exchange between Homonuclear Diatomic Molecules and Protons," R.G Breene, Jr. summed up his views on an article he had published in the Journal the previous year: "The material contained in this article is nonsense and should be discarded in toto. As will be shown elsewhere, one of the most serious defects is the poor transformation given by Eq. (9). It is to be emphasized that the printer set the manuscript precisely as the author had concocted it." Argument and controversy
To do science is to assert that something is true of the natural world and to be prepared to defend that claim before a community of peers. In short, to do science is to make arguments and to argue. And nowhere is the argumentative nature of science more apparent than in the give-and-take of a controversy. It is during such episodes that arguments for or against a new knowledge claim are most severely put to the test. One can also find emotional outbursts at odds with the image of the scientist as dispassionate seeker of the truth.
On any short list of key scientific controversies in the twentieth century one would have to include the continental drift theory--that at one time the earth's surface housed a single supercontinent, which broke apart some 225 million years ago. This bold new theory made its first substantive appearance in a pair of 1912 articles by the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener. For decades, Wegener's theory remained "a beautiful dream" because it lacked any plausible mechanism capable of propelling such large land masses over thousands of miles. It was dismissed within the scientific community as a "German theory," "heretical," and "bizarre." That all changed in the 1960s with the seafloor-spreading theory and plate tectonics, which offered a plausible mechanism for continental drift. At the same time, a small band of holdouts, led by a distinguished Soviet geophysicist, V. V. Beloussov, and a father-son team from Oklahoma, the Meyerhoffs, fought tenaciously against the rising tide of drift theory and proposed their own variant theories, ultimately to no avail. Literary curiosities: For better or verse?
 | | American Chemical Society |  Hidden within a diagram of an apparatus from a 1955 article is a tiny fisherman. |
The poet and novelist entertain their audiences by drawing upon a great bag of literary devices, such as metaphor and simile, onomatopoeia, irony and satire, and pun. In contrast, the scientist-writer is expected to transmit information accurately and unambiguously as possible to their intended readers, not dazzle them with literary virtuosity. Anyone who reads the scientific literature is all too aware that the prose style tends to be maddeningly drab and predictable. Despite these restraints on individual creativity, scientists have managed to slip into their prose occasional literary sleights of hand. Most famously, the great German chemists of the nineteenth century, Justus Liebig and Friedrich Wöhler, published an anonymous article in the 1839 Annalen der Pharmacie reporting fictitious experiments meant to ridicule recently reported microscopic observations indicating that yeast is a living organism capable of converting sugar into alcohol. A sentence gives the flavor of this strange parody: "To summarize, sugar is sucked into the stomach of this little animal, a stream of alcoholic fluid gushes out continuously from the anus and short bursts of carbon dioxide are squirted out an enormous genital organ" (translated by Irving M. Klotz). Other scientists have constructed elaborate puns and metaphors, imported literary quotations and famous paintings into their text, hidden strange images in technical illustrations, written articles in verse, and even provided musical notes to sing along with. What we are privy to in such articles is not in any way business as usual, but science on holiday. Or in the case of Lord Kelvin, scientists on holiday. One of Lord Kelvin's many interests was the physical properties of light and its perception by humans. One day in August 1899, perhaps on a vacation in the Alps, he rose before dawn to make some observations about the first light of dawn. Fortunately for us he wrote them down in a Nature article that is a combination of a prose poem and scientific report. Hotel du Mont-Revard, August 27, 1899 Looking out at 4 o'clock this morning from a balcony of this hotel, 1545 metres above sea-level, and about 68 kilometres W. 18° S. from Mont Blanc, I had a magnificent view of Alpine ranges of Switzerland, Savoy, and Dauphiné; perfectly clear and sharp on the morning twilight sky. This promised me an opportunity for which I had been waiting five or six years; to see the earliest instantaneous light of sunrise through very clear air, and find whether it was perceptibly blue. I therefore resolved to watch an hour till sunrise, and was amply rewarded by all the splendours I saw. Having only vague knowledge of the orientation of the hotel, I could not at first judge whereabouts the sun would rise; but in the course of half an hour rosy tints on each side of the place of strongest twilight showed me that it would be visible from the balcony; and I was helped to this conclusion by Haidinger's brushes when the illumination of the air at greater altitudes by a brilliant half-moon nearly overhead, was overpowered by sunlight streaming upwards from beyond the mountains. A little later, beams of sunlight and shadows of distant mountains converged clearly to a point deep under the very summit of Mont Blanc. In the course of five or ten minutes I was able to watch the point of convergence travelling obliquely upwards till in an instant I saw a blue light against the sky on the southern profile of Mont Blanc; which, in less than one-twentieth of a second became dazzlingly white, like a brilliant electric arc-light. I had no dark glass at hand, so I could not any longer watch the rising sun. You might wonder about the term "Haidinger's brushes." According to a lecture on optics theory Kelvin delivered to the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, in 1884: "The discoverer is well known in Philadelphia as a mineralogist, and the phenomenon I speak of goes by his name. Look at the sky in a direction of ninety degrees from the sun, and you will see a yellow and blue cross, with the yellow toward the sun, and from the sun, spreading out like two foxes' tails with blue between, and then two red brushes in the space at right angles to the blue. If you do not see it, it is because your eyes are not sensitive enough, but a little training will give them the needed sensitiveness." These brush-like patterns also appear when a viewer looks at a bright surface through a polarizer.
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