Many scientific achievements have been made thanks to talented scientists and hard work. But no fewer discoveries were born due to luck, coincidences, intuition and other, not quite "scientific" and not quite "logical" factors.
On Monday, November 17, a research group at Stanford University and Google independently announced that they had developed an artificial neural network capable of recognizing photos using machine learning and image classification.
Jordan Pearson of Motherboard magazine found that none of the groups were even aware that someone was developing in parallel.
“It is an incredible coincidence that the researchers made their statements so synchronously,” Pearson writes. "But for a number of reasons this is understandable." According to him, modern technologies were ready for such a development of events. There is currently a demand for such a feature. Since the work with neural networks had already been done earlier, there were all the prerequisites for the emergence of this system.
Does this explain the simultaneous emergence of ideas in different people? Alexander Bell and Elisha Gray separately invented the telephone in 1876 in 1773 and 1774. Karl Scheele and Joseph Priestley independently discovered oxygen. From 1915 to 1918, Mary Pattison and Christine Frederick studied the possibility of simplifying household chores with mechanical devices.
Left: Alexander Bell. Right: Elisha Gray
Around 500 BC many great thinkers, philosophers and religious leaders have appeared in the world. Buddha, Socrates, Lao Tzu and others made a huge contribution to the development of human civilization, despite the distances separating them - from Greece to India and China. Perhaps the world is ripe for their ideas to come.
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“Ideas, like seeds, need fertile soil in which they can develop and grow,” says Dr. Bernard Bateman, a Yale psychiatrist who founded the science of coincidence. He cites a 1922 report by William F. Ogbarn and Dorothy Thomas, who found that 148 of the greatest scientific discoveries were made by two or more people at about the same time.
From Dr. Bateman's perspective, these scientists have tapped into a kind of collective subconscious. They were able to "tune in" to the cloud of information with which we are all connected.
“Was it a simultaneous discovery and / or just spreading a good idea? It happened and the hive mind was ready to accept the idea,”says Dr. Bateman on philosophical or spiritual ideas that spread in about 500 BC. AD
Coincidence and intuition
Although scientists pay a lot of attention to the logical process, sometimes the breakthrough is made by intuition.
One such example is described on the website of the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. “A bleeding patient was lying on the operating table of cardiologist Mimi Guernari. She tried every means to stop the bleeding, but nothing worked. Then a method came to her mind that she had never used before and never used afterwards: gel foam. This intuitive answer for a moment led her into a stupor, it seemed to her that she was hallucinating.
Penicillin, the antibiotic that revolutionized the treatment of bacterial infections, was discovered through coincidence and coincidence.
Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming caught a cold in November 1921. He had a runny nose, and a drop of mucus from his nose fell into a saucer of bacteria. He saw that the drop had killed the bacteria, leaving a "zone of suppression" around. The component that killed the bacteria turned out to be the enzyme lysozyme from his mucus, but lysozyme could not be mass-produced as an antibiotic.
Almost a decade later, he was doing research at St. Mary's Hospital. The conditions in the laboratory were very bad: there were cracks in the ceiling and a draft in the room.
He went on vacation, leaving the petri dish in the sink. When he returned, before washing it, he decided to examine its contents and saw that it was full of dead bacteria. The zone of suppression was formed near some mushrooms that accidentally fell into the saucer: spores flew through cracks in the ceiling from the room where another experiment was being conducted.
The spores flew to the right place at the right time, when the temperature was optimal. If the bacteria in the dish were in a different phase of development, then the fungi could not produce the desired effect.
Fleming realized that mold can kill bacteria. But it wasn't until the 1940s that another group of scientists who experimented with mice discovered that mold (penicillin) can survive inside a mammal and has the potential to treat bacterial infections in humans. They were doing research in another area, it was an accidental discovery.
So Fleming noticed a zone of suppression around the nasal drop, a factor that helped to achieve results with further matches. This is one of the reasons Dr. Bateman is so interested in learning about coincidence - awareness can help people pay more attention to useful coincidences, he said.
If the lab were in better condition, the spores would never end up in Fleming's sink. If Fleming hadn't been so pedantic, he wouldn't have studied the mold before rinsing it off, and he wouldn't have noticed the zone of suppression. If the mold spores had not landed at the right time, Fleming would not have been able to make his discovery. At least he would not have done it at that time, perhaps penicillin would have been discovered later.
A lot of coincidences and observation led to a discovery that saved millions of lives.
