Speaker
Description
This paper examines how anomalies, errors, and unexpected findings constitute constitutive - rather than merely incidental - moments in the history of physics and astronomy. Building on Barber and Fox's classic case of "floppy-eared rabbits", which illustrates how "lost" and "gained" serendipity shape discovery, I extend this analysis to landmark episodes in the history of the physical sciences.
Cases of gained serendipity - where anomalies or apparent failures unexpectedly opened onto major discoveries - include Jocelyn Bell's detection of pulsars and Penzias and Wilson's cosmic microwave background radiation. Yet serendipity is not the only engine of productive error: Enrico Fermi's celebrated "discovery" of transuranic elements in 1934 represents a paradigmatic case of productive misinterpretation, in which a systematic experimental error - correctly recognizing the results as nuclear reactions, yet misidentifying their nature - ultimately enabled to achieve the discovery of nuclear fission. Similarly, the anomalous precession of Mercury's orbit and the perturbations of Uranus proved generative: the former eventually confirmed General Relativity, the latter led to the prediction and discovery of Neptune.
What unites these cases is that their productive dimension tends to be retrospectively erased from canonical historiography and formal scientific communication, which present discoveries as linear progressions rather than as processes punctuated by misinterpretation, friction, and contingency. Drawing on philosophy of science, I argue that reinstating error and anomaly as epistemic categories offers a richer and more accurate model of how scientific knowledge emerges, with implications both for the history of physics and astronomy and for scientific pedagogy.
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