Speaker
Description
Recent historiography has emphasized that the birth and flourishing of the new astronomies beyond the optical (X-ray, gamma-ray, and neutrino astronomy, alongside relativistic astrophysics), from the 1950s onward, did not merely add further "information" about already well-defined celestial objects. An “additive narrative” that assumes a smooth convergence of results across different bandwidths and observational communities is both historically inaccurate and conceptually untenable. Nonetheless, the conceptual changes and the remarkable challenges to match the results reached by different communities—specialized in the study of the sky with different channels/tools—are not the only features jumping to the eye in the first decades that defined the "violent universe", involving previously unimagined phenomena at energetic scales far beyond our terrestrial experience or our optical contemplation of the sky. Equally striking is the constitutive role of serendipitous discoveries of primary scientific importance, from the cosmic microwave background radiation to pulsars. Far from being mere accidents, these episodes can only be properly understood against the background of an early heuristic synthesis, which already in the 1950s oriented prepared individuals of remarkable versatility, and later on équipes of a new kind, toward recognizing the significance of unexpected signals detected through new technologies. Technologies and expertise emerging from defense research were systematically redirected toward astrophysical investigation, yielding crucial advances in the study of supernovae explosions and black holes. Taken together, serendipity and exaptation reveal the understanding of the violent universe not as a straightforward cumulative achievement, but as the outcome of a complex, contingency-laden, and socio-materially embedded scientific process.