Where do new scientific hypotheses come from? Pasteur’s nugget, “Chance favors only the prepared mind,” suggests that scientific breakthroughs—ones that are groundbreaking and impactful—do not occur idiosyncratically. Rather, the scientific mind needs to contain a reserve of information, but also be open to anomaly and surprise, to recognition when something novel comes into view, and to accepting that something new is not impossible. This could happen for an individual scientist long-experienced in her field who remains persistent: one who has assembled enough evidence over time to make a new claim. Or it could happen when a scientist crosses fields and solves a problem far from her home domain, who steps over a line to speak to a new audience. It turns out that breakthroughs in content (papers, methods, concepts, patents) are indeed prodded by new context (input from a faraway technological discipline).
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