Talk:Role of chance in scientific discoveries

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Astronomy talk[edit]

The following is moved off the page until (A) we can get some sources, (B) some of the language can be rewritten, and (C) the paragraph is focussed on proving the relevance of a few examples — rather than listing so many (because the rest of this article indicates that luck is fundamental to science: another reason not to go on listing lucky discoveries)

" In astronomy, the role of chance is important in the discovery of many distant objects. In addition to other previous statements, to a certain degree, the long-since-disproved Titius–Bode Law estimated the semi-major axis of ice giant planet Uranus, and even asteroid/dwarf planet Ceres. A better example is of the discovery of planet Neptune and the dwarf planet Pluto: "wobbles" in Uranus' orbit were taken as perturbations by Neptune: ironically it was discovered despite the absence of perturbations. The truly odd part was about Pluto. A pause was noticed in the patterns – Pluto was found apparently as it tugged on Neptune, which is far too small to have that much of an effect: Neptune's mass had been overestimated. Another was the occultation of a star by the dwarf planet Eris, and the discovery of distant dwarf planet-candidate90377 Sedna, as it was barely visible. Asteroid 5 Astraea was discovered by an astronomer looking for 4 Vesta. 2 Pallas was discovered by Wilhem Heinrich Olbers, after searching for Ceres, which he recovered after it briefly got lost. Also, the chance-discovery of Saturn's rings, and those of Uranus (which is only serendipity because the discovery that a star was to be eclipsed) can qualify. Most recent^[when?] minor planets are of a chance discovery.^{[citation needed]}

-Tesseract²(talk) 18:38, 21 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Cleanup needed[edit]

This article is so poorly organized that it's hard to discern what it's even about. It feels like original research in parts, though some citations are good. Maybe could be merged into another article. Even the title is clunky. It seems to be addressing two different issues: "serendipitous" discoveries (like penicillin) and the psychological research on how people make discoveries or react to surprises. The latter isn't closely related to the former: even when a discover is surprising, it's rarely due to chance. Experiments are set up for the purposes of observation, even if the outcome isn't known in advance. The former topic is more suited to a list of trivia, maybe not an article in its own right. Lrieber (talk) 17:08, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

a. Does one outcome prevent other outcomes? (sometimes it does - we need a spectrum of examples) b. If we weren't lucky on subject A wouldn't it be natural for some other arbitrary luck to occur somewhere else? Isn't luck probabilistic?[edit]

You aren't analytical enough, and that leads to misconceptions by the reader as he/she/it fills the gaps.