Avance cientifico. Teoria del Cha-cha-cha

Filosofia de la ciencia.
Este articulo en el ultimo numero de Science (Science 10 August 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5839, pp. 761 - 762) es interesante. Es un homenaje al recientemente fallecido ex-editor de Science, en el que categoriza el avance cientifico en tres tipos:

""Charge" discoveries solve problems that are quite obvious--cure heart disease, understand the movement of stars in the sky--but in which the way to solve the problem is not so clear. In these, the scientist is called on, as Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi put it, "to see what everyone else has seen and think what no one else has thought before." Thus, the movement of stars in the sky and the fall of an apple from a tree were apparent to everyone, but Isaac Newton came up with the concept of gravity to explain it all in one great theory.

"Challenge" discoveries are a response to an accumulation of facts or concepts that are unexplained by or incongruous with scientific theories of the time. The discoverer perceives that a new concept or a new theory is required to pull all the phenomena into one coherent whole. Sometimes the discoverer sees the anomalies and also provides the solution. Sometimes many people perceive the anomalies, but they wait for the discoverer to provide a new concept. Those individuals, whom we might call "uncoverers," contribute greatly to science, but it is the individual who proposes the idea explaining all of the anomalies who deserves to be called a discoverer.

"Chance" discoveries are those that are often called serendipitous and which Louis Pasteur felt favored "the prepared mind." In this category are the instances of a chance event that the ready mind recognizes as important and then explains to other scientists. This category not only would include Pasteur's discovery of optical activity (D and L isomers), but also W. C. Roentgen's x-rays and Roy Plunkett's Teflon. These scientists saw what no one else had seen or reported and were able to realize its importance."

CATEGORIES OF DISCOVERY
Problem that needed solving	Discovery	Discoverer	Category of discovery
Movement of stars, Earth, and Sun	Gravity	Newton	Charge
Structure of C6H6	Benzene structure	Kekulé	Challenge
Clear spots on petri dish	Penicillin	Fleming	Chance
Constant speed of light	Special relativity	Einstein	Challenge
Preventing heart attacks	Cholesterol metabolism	Brown & Goldstein	Charge
Crystals of D- and -L tartaric acid	Optical activity	Pasteur	Chance
Atomic spectra that could not be explained	Quantum mechanical atom	Bohr	Challenge
How DNA replicates and passes on coding	Base pairing in double helix	Watson & Crick	Challenge
Reagent "stuck" in storage cylinder	Teflon	Plunkett	Chance
Why offspring look like their parents	Laws of heredity	Mendel	Charge