What Is Research but a Blind Date with Knowledge

In 1964 two radio engineers at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were trying to measure radio waves from the Milky Way with a large horn antenna. They kept getting a faint hiss, from every direction, day and night. They cleaned the antenna of what Penzias called a white dielectric material, which was pigeon droppings, and shot the pigeons. The hiss persisted. It turned out to be the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang, and the discovery won them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978. They had gone looking for something else. The topic compares research to a blind date with knowledge, and their story shows why.

A blind date is a meeting arranged without knowing what the other person will be like. One goes with hopes, nerves and a rough idea, and one may leave delighted, disappointed or simply puzzled. Research shares these traits. A scientist formulates a question, but the answer, by the nature of the enterprise, is not known in advance. If it were, the work would be a demonstration, not a discovery. The element of surprise is built into the idea.

The history of science is full of dates that turned out differently than planned. Wilhelm Roentgen noticed in 1895 that a screen coated with a chemical glowed in his darkened laboratory when he ran a current through a tube, though the tube was covered. He had found X rays. In 1938 a young chemist at DuPont named Roy Plunkett opened a cylinder of refrigerant gas that appeared empty and found a slippery white powder, the polymer later known as Teflon. At Pfizer in the 1990s a drug called sildenafil was tested for angina, and the trial participants reported a different effect that led to its use for another condition. The Post it note emerged from a glue that was too weak for its intended purpose.

Indian science has its own examples. In 1921 the physicist C. V. Raman, sailing home from England on the ship Narkunda, was struck by the deep blue of the Mediterranean and asked himself why the sea was that colour. He was not studying the sea. The question led, after seven years of experiments in Calcutta, to the discovery of the scattering of light that bears his name, and to the Nobel Prize in 1930. A curiosity about something ordinary had ended in a new branch of physics.

A curiosity about something ordinary had ended in a new branch of physics.

Why does research behave in this way? One reason is that the frontier of knowledge is, by definition, the place where we do not know what is there. Planning can only extend what is known, and truly new facts tend to arrive from directions that no plan covered. Another is that nature does not organise itself according to the disciplines or the grant proposals of scientists. Thomas Kuhn argued in 1962 that scientific revolutions begin with anomalies, results that do not fit the reigning theory and that people at first try to ignore. The anomaly is the stranger who arrives at the date without being invited.

The comparison also captures the emotional side. Researchers know the nervousness of waiting for a result and the disappointment when it fails. Most dates do not lead to a marriage. About nine in ten drugs that enter clinical trials never reach the market, and countless experiments in every field produce nothing. Careers are built on questions that went nowhere. The scientist must tolerate this regularly, and a culture that punishes failure will discourage the very behaviour that produces knowledge. The funding agency that demands guaranteed outcomes has misunderstood what it is paying for.

Yet it would be wrong to suppose that discovery is mere luck. Louis Pasteur said in a lecture in 1854 that in the fields of observation chance favours only the prepared mind. Penzias and Wilson recognised that their hiss was a real signal because they knew the instrument so well that they could rule out everything else. Fleming noticed the mould because he had spent years studying bacteria. A person without training would have thrown the plate away. Accident supplies the opportunity, and knowledge turns it into a finding. The best blind dates, like the best experiments, go to those who have done their homework.

Method also matters. Once an encounter has produced a surprise, the researcher must test it, repeat it, vary it and expose it to others, which is slow, repetitive and often dull. The first meeting is only the beginning of a long relationship in which the knowledge reveals its character and the researcher learns whether the attraction was real. Many exciting first results have collapsed on replication, as the history of cold fusion and a number of psychology studies shows. The romance must be followed by the discipline. W. I. B. Beveridge urged researchers in The Art of Scientific Investigation to keep an open mind and to treat unexpected results as invitations and not as errors.

For education and policy, the metaphor suggests that institutions should protect open ended inquiry. A system that funds only research with promised applications will find only what it expects. Schools should teach children that not knowing is a starting point and should reward questions as well as answers. The student who is afraid to be wrong will never go on the date. A nation that wants discoveries must provide the freedom to look in unplanned places, and the patience to wait for a result that cannot be scheduled.

The metaphor leaves one thing unsettled, which is the question of who is the pursuer. In a blind date both parties are being judged. It may be that researchers arrange the meeting but that knowledge decides whether it will reveal itself, since nature answers only to those who ask in the right way. Equally, the researcher may be changed more than the knowledge is, taking away a new view of the world and of himself. When the date is over, it is not obvious which party has found the other.