The Accidental Scientists

A. A paradox lies close to the heart of scientific discovery. If you know just what
you are looking for, finding it can hardly count as a discovery, since it was fully
anticipated. But if, on the other hand, you have no notion of what you are looking
for, you cannot know when you have found it, and discovery, as such, is out of
the question. In the philosophy of science, these extremes map onto the purist
forms of deductivism and inductivism: In the former, the outcome is supposed to
be logically contained in the premises you start with; in the latter, you are
recommended to start with no expectations whatsoever and see what turns up.
B. As in so many things, the ideal position is widely supposed to reside
somewhere in between these two impossible-to-realise extremes. You want to
have a good enough idea of what you are looking for to be surprised when you
find something else of value, and you want to be ignorant enough of your end
point that you can entertain alternative outcomes. Scientific discovery should,
therefore, have an accidental aspect, but not too much of one. Serendipity is a
word that expresses a position something like that. It’s a fascinating word, and
the late Robert King Merton—“the father of the sociology of science”—liked it
well enough to compose its biography, assisted by the French cultural historian
Elinor Barber.
C. The word did not appear in the published literature until the early 19th century
and did not become well enough known to use without explanation until
sometime in the first third of the 20th century. Serendipity means a “happy
accident” or “pleasant surprise”, specifically, the accident of finding something
good or useful without looking for it. The first noted use of “serendipity” in the
English language was by Horace Walpole. He explained that it came from the
fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip (the ancient name for Ceylon, or
present day Sri Lanka), whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by
accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of”.
D. Antiquarians, following Walpole, found use for it, as they were always
rummaging about for curiosities, and unexpected but pleasant surprises were not
unknown to them. Some people just seemed to have a knack for that sort of thing,
and serendipity was used to express that special capacity. The other community
that came to dwell on serendipity to say something important about their practice
was that of scientists, and here usages cut to the heart of the matter and were often
vigorously contested. Many scientists, including the Harvard physiologist Walter
Cannon and, later, the British immunologist Peter Medawar, liked to emphasise
how much of scientific discovery was unplanned and even accidental. One of the
examples is Hans Christian Ørsted’s discovery of electromagnetism when he
unintentionally brought a current-carrying wire parallel to a magnetic needle.
Rhetoric about the sufficiency of rational method was so much hot air. Indeed, as
Medawar insisted, “There is no such thing as The Scientific Method,” no way at
all of systematising the process of discovery. Really important discoveries had a
way of showing up when they had a mind to do so and not when you were looking
for them. Maybe some scientists, like some book collectors, had a happy knack;
maybe serendipity described the situation rather than a personal skill or capacity.
E. Some scientists using the word meant to stress those accidents belonging to
the situation; some treated serendipity as a personal capacity; many others
exploited the ambiguity of the notion. Yet what Cannon and Medawar took as a
benign nose-thumbing at Dreams of Method, other scientists found incendiary.
To say that science had a significant serendipitous aspect was taken by some as
dangerous denigration. If scientific discovery were really accidental, then what
was the special basis of expert authority? In this connection, the aphorism of
choice came from no less an authority on scientific discovery than Louis Pasteur:
“Chance favors the prepared mind.” Accidents may happen, and things may turn
up unplanned and unforeseen, as one is looking for something else, but the ability
to notice such events, to see their potential bearing and meaning, to exploit their
occurrence and make constructive use of them—these are the results of
systematic mental preparation. What seems like an accident is just another form
of expertise. On closer inspection, it is insisted, accident dissolves into sagacity.
F. The context in which scientific serendipity was most contested and had its
greatest resonance was that connected with the idea of planned science. The
serendipitists were not all inhabitants of academic ivory towers. As Merton and
Barber note, two of the great early-20th century American pioneers of industrial
research—Willis Whitney and Irving Langmuir, both of General Electric—made
much play of serendipity, in the course of arguing against overly rigid research
planning. Langmuir thought that misconceptions about the certainty and
rationality of the research process did much harm and that a mature acceptance
of uncertainty was far more likely to result in productive research policies. For
his own part, Langmuir said that satisfactory outcomes “occurred as though we
were just drifting with the wind. These things came about by accident.” If there
is no very determinate relationship between cause and effect in research, he said,
“then planning does not get us very far.” So, from within the bowels of corporate
capitalism came powerful arguments, by way of serendipity, for scientific
spontaneity and autonomy. The notion that industry was invariably committed to
the regimentation of scientific research just doesn’t wash.
G. For Merton himself - who one supposes must have been the senior author –
serendipity represented the keystone in the arch of his social scientific work. In
1936, as a very young man, Merton wrote a seminal essay on “The Unanticipated
Consequences of Purposive Social Action.” It is, he argued, the nature of social
action that what one intends is rarely what one gets: Intending to provide
resources for buttressing Christian religion, the natural philosophers of the
Scientific Revolution laid the groundwork for secularism; people wanting to be
alone with nature in Yosemite Valley wind up crowding one another. We just don’t
know enough—and we can never know enough—to ensure that the past is an
adequate guide to the future: Uncertainty about outcomes, even of our best-laid
plans, is endemic. All social action, including that undertaken with the best
evidence and formulated according to the most rational criteria, is uncertain in its
consequences.
Questions 27-32
Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Choose the most suitable heading for paragraphs A-G from the list of headings
below.
Write the appropriate number, I-X, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
(I) Examples of some scientific discoveries
(II) Horace Walpole’s fairy tale
(III) Resolving the contradiction
(IV) What is the Scientific Method
(V) The contradiction of views on scientific discovery
(VI) Some misunderstandings of serendipity
(VII) Opponents of authority
(VIII) Reality doesn’t always match expectation
(IX) How the word came into being
(X) Illustration of serendipity in the business sector
27. Paragraph A
Example Answer
Paragraph B iii
28. Paragraph C
29. Paragraph D
30. Paragraph E
31. Paragraph F
32. Paragraph G
Questions 33-37
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 33-37 on your answer sheet.
33. In paragraph A, the word “inductivism” means
A anticipate results in the beginning.
B work with prepared premises.
C accept chance discoveries.
D look for what you want.

34. Medawar says “there is no such thing as The Scientific Method” because
A discoveries are made by people with determined mind.
B discoveries tend to happen unplanned.
C the process of discovery is unpleasant.
D serendipity is not a skill.

35. Many scientists dislike the idea of serendipity because

A it is easily misunderstood and abused.
B it is too unpredictable.
C it is beyond their comprehension.
D it devalues their scientific expertise.
36. The writer mentions Irving Langmuir to illustrate
A planned science should be avoided.
B industrial development needs uncertainty.
C people tend to misunderstand the relationship between cause and effect.
D accepting uncertainty can help produce positive results.

37. The example of Yosemite is to show

A the conflict between reality and expectation.
B the importance of systematic planning.
C the intention of social action.
D the power of anticipation.

Questions 38-40
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.
38. Who is the person that first used the word “serendipity”?
39. What kind of story does the word come from?
40. What is the present name of serendip?
The Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence
The question of whether we are alone in the Universe has haunted humanity for
centuries, but we may now stand poised on the brink of the answer to that
question, as we search for radio signals from other intelligent civilisations. This
search, often known by the acronym SETI (search for extra-terrestrial
intelligence], is a difficult one. Although groups around the world have been
searching intermittently for three decades, it is only now that we have reached the
level of technology where we can make a determined attempt to search all nearby
stars for any sign of life.
A - Reasons for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence
The primary reason for the search is basic curiosity - the same curiosity about the
natural world that drives all pure science. We want to know whether we are alone
in the Universe. We want to know whether life evolves naturally if given the right
conditions, or whether there is something very special about the Earth to have
fostered the variety of life forms that we see around us on the planet. The simple
detection of a radio signal will be sufficient to answer this most basic of all
questions. In this sense, SETI is another cog in the machinery of pure science
which is continually pushing out the horizon of our knowledge. However, there
are other reasons for being interested in whether life exists elsewhere. For
example, we have had civilisation on Earth for perhaps only a few thousand years,
and the threats of nuclear war and pollution over the last few decades have told
us that our survival may be tenuous. Will we last another two thousand years or
will we wipe ourselves out? Since the lifetime of a planet like ours is several
billion years, we can expect that, if other civilisations do survive in our galaxy,
their ages will range from zero to several billion years. Thus any other civilisation
that we hear from is likely to be far older, on average, than ourselves. The mere
existence of such a civilisation will tell us that long-term survival is possible, and
gives us some cause for optimism. It is even possible that the older civilisation
may pass on the benefits of their experience in dealing with threats to survival
such as nuclear war and global pollution, and other threats that we haven’t yet
discovered.
B - Assumptions underlying the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence
In discussing whether we are alone, most SETI scientists adopt two ground rules.
First, UFQs (Unidentified Flying Objects) are generally ignored since most
scientists don’t consider the evidence for them to be strong enough to bear serious
consideration (although it is also important to keep an open mind in case any
really convincing evidence emerges in the future). Second, we make a very
conservative assumption that we are looking for a life form that is pretty well like
us, since if it differs radically from us we may well not recognise it as a life form,
quite apart from whether we are able to communicate with it. In other words, the
life form we are looking for may well have two green heads and seven fingers,
but it will nevertheless resemble us in that it should communicate with its fellows,
be interested in the Universe, live on a planet orbiting a star like our Sun, and
perhaps most restrictively, have a chemistry, like us, based on carbon and water.
C - Likelihood of life on other planets
Even when we make these assumptions, our understanding of other life forms is
still severely limited. We do not even know, for example, how many stars have
planets, and we certainly do not know how likely it is that life will arise naturally,
given the right conditions. However, when we look at the 100 billion stars in our
galaxy (the Milky Way), and 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe, it
seems inconceivable that at least one of these planets does not have a life form
on it; in fact, the best educated guess we can make, using the little that we do
know about the conditions for carbon-based life, leads us to estimate that perhaps
one in 100,000 stars might have a life-bearing planet orbiting it. That means that
our nearest neighbours are perhaps 100 light years away, which is almost next
door in astronomical terms.
D - Seeking the transmission of radio signals from planets
An alien civilisation could choose many different ways of sending information
across the galaxy, but many of these either require too much energy, or else are
severely attenuated while traversing the vast distances across the galaxy. It turns
out that, for a given amount of transmitted power, radio waves in the frequency
range 1000 to 3000 MHz travel the greatest distance, and so all searches to date
have concentrated on looking for radio waves in this frequency range. So far there
have been a number of searches by various groups around the world, including
Australian searches using the radio telescope at Parkes, New South Wales. Until
now there have not been any detections from the few hundred stars which have
been searched. The scale of the searches has been increased dramatically since
1992, when the US Congress voted NASA $10 million per year for ten years to
conduct a thorough search for extra-terrestrial life. Much of the money in this
project is being spent on developing the special hardware needed to search many
frequencies at once. The project has two parts. One part is a targeted search using
the world’s largest radio telescopes, the American-operated telescope in Arecibo,
Puerto Rico and the French telescope in Nancy in France. This part of the project
is searching the nearest 1000 likely stars with high sensitivity for signals in the
frequency range 1000 to 3000 MHz. The other part of the project is an undirected
search which is monitoring all of space with a lower sensitivity, using the smaller
antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network.
E - Appropriate responses to signals from other civilisations
There is considerable debate over how we should react if we detect a signal from
an alien civilisation. Everybody agrees that we should not reply immediately.
Quite apart from the impracticality of sending a reply over such large distances
at short notice, it raises a host of ethical questions that would have to be addressed
by the global community before any reply could be sent. Would the human race
face the culture shock if faced with a superior and much older civilisation?
Luckily, there is no urgency about this. The stars being searched are hundreds of
light years away, so it takes hundreds of years for their signal to reach us, and a
further few hundred years for our reply to reach them. It’s not important, then, if
there’s a delay of a few years, or decades, while the human race debates the
question of whether to reply, and perhaps carefully drafts a reply.
Questions 28-31
The Reading Passage has five paragraphs, A-E.
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B-E from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, I-VII.
List of Headings
(I) Seeking the transmission of radio signals from planets
(II) Appropriate responses to signals from other civilisations
(III) Vast distances to Earth’s closest neighbours
(IV) Assumptions underlying the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence
(V) Reasons for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence
(VI) Knowledge of extra-terrestrial life forms
(VII) Likelihood of life on other planets
Example Answer Paragraph A - (V)
28. Paragraph B
29. Paragraph C
30. Paragraph D
31. Paragraph E
Questions 32-34
Answer the following questions
Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER for each
answer.
32. What is the life expectancy of Earth?
33. What kind of signals from other intelligent civilisationsare SETI scientists
searching for?
34. How many stars are the world’s most powerful radio telescopes searching?
Questions 35-40
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading
Passage?
YES If the statement agrees with the views of the writer
NO If the statement contradicts the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN If it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
35. Alien civilisations may be able to help the human race to overcome serious
problems.
36. SETI scientists are trying to find a life form that resembles humans in many
ways.
37. The Americans and Australians have co-operated on joint research projects.
38. So far SETI scientists have picked up radio signals from several stars.
39. The NASA project attracted criticism from some members of Congress.
40. If a signal from outer space is received, it will be important to respond
promptly.