Pasteur’s Observation
In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.
Source: Louis Pasteur, address December 7th 1854
Pasteur was still a young man, just thirty-two, when he made this observation in his inaugural address as professor of chemistry and dean of the faculty of sciences at the university in Lille. He already had done important work in explaining the differences between isomers - compounds with identical compositions and molecular weights but different chemical or physical properties - and he had a long and productive career ahead of him, including development of the process named for him - pasteurisation. (Being French, Pasteur naturally had wine and beer in mind not milk when he devised it.) Pasteur himself left little to chance, however, supplementing his powers of keen observation with long hours in the lab. “Work always work” was his motto. His dying words were Il faut travailler It is necessary to work.
The prepared mind that makes a discovery by chance or accident usually is said to do so through ’serendipity’ - a word coined by Horace Walpole. He explained in a letter of January 28th 1754 that he based the term on a children’s story, The Three Princes of Serendip, whose protagonists “were always making discoveries by accidents and sagacity of things they were not in quest of.” (Serendip is an old word for Ceylon, itself an old word for Sri Lanka.)
The classic example of serendipity is that of Alexander Fleming who was slightly dismayed one morning in 1928 to find that something had contaminated an experiment with staphylococcus cultures, killing some of the bacteria overnight. Instead of tossing out the petri dishes with the ruined specimens and proceeding with his experiment, Fleming investigated to see what had destroyed the bacteria. It turned out to be penicillin.
Whitehead’s Amendment Familiar things happen and mankind does not bother much about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious (Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World 1925).
Discussion of Pasteur’s Observation
Post your comment here
