Findings: Hidden Stories in First-hand Accounts of Scientific Discovery

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Findings examines the announcement of a key breakthrough for each decade of the 20th century to reveal the scientists’ true feelings and motivations at the moment of discovery.

1900: Max Planck communicates the first intimations of the quantum effect, a phenomenon that profoundly disturbs the conservative physicist. His discomfiture is apparent from the way he phrases his announcement.

1929: Given the cosmic magnitude of his discovery that the universe is expanding, Edwin Hubble is remarkably circumspect in his report—for good reason, as his data are patchy and he must not enrage jealous colleagues.

1953: James Watson and Francis Crick pretend a grand rivalry with Linus Pauling in order to distract attention from the dirtier struggle they are really engaged in. By weaving together descriptions of real DNA and their model of it, they cleverly persuade their readers.

1973: Passion and advocacy take the place of objectivity in papers on the ozone layer, biodiversity, animal behaviour and more when scientists become environmentalists.

1996: NASA scientists claim to have found evidence of fossil life on Mars, but their uneasy prose suggests they aren’t so sure, as they unintentionally recapitulate the century-old argument that Mars’s ‘canals’ were evidence of civilization.

In these and other examples, Hugh Aldersey-Williams shows that scientific papers are far from the dispassionate, objective accounts they are supposed to be. Their authors are human—often all too human—breaking into their narratives with unexpected emotions of joy or envy, trepidation or hubris. Just beneath the surface of their texts lie intriguing alternative stories of personal and national rivalry that reveal a refreshing alternative history of science in the 20th century.