Once you start noticing lucky links, when individuals stumble upon something that was completely unexpected, previously unimagined, and altogether novel, we begin to see how frequently they appeared in history. In fact, many recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics were just such individuals.
The first Nobel Physics prize winner was German professor Wilhelm Röntgen who accidentally discovered X-rays. Röntgen was researching cathode rays (aka electrons) using a fluorescent screen painted with barium platinocyanide, an early radiation detector. He was using a Crookes tube to generate the rays, and he had wrapped the tube in black cardboard to prevent the tube from emitting visible light into his lab.
However, Röntgen noticed something curious. He noticed his radiation detector was glowing, which led him to conclude that some of the rays were passing through the cardboard, though not visible as light. These mysterious rays also passed through papers and books. He called them X-rays, and later made a photographic picture of his wife’s hand using these mysterious rays. Upon seeing the picture, Mrs Röntgen allegedly exclaimed, “I have seen my death!” The professor won the first Nobel physics prize in 1901.
French physicist Henri Becquerel also journeyed into the world of mysterious X-rays to see if they were connected to the topic of his life’s work, phosphorescence. He had inherited a supply of uranium salts from his father who was also a physicist. He soon discovered that uranium salts could be made to affect photographic plates, and this new discovery was spontaneous radioactivity. He shared the 1903 Nobel prize with Pierre and Marie Curie who were also investigating Becquerel radiation.
Lucky links in physics abound. Percy Spencer was an American physicist and inventor working for the defense contractor Raytheon during World War II. His job was to make radar systems more efficient, a project that was the second-highest priority US war effort, just behind the Manhattan project. He used magnetrons, power tubes that manipulate electrons (remember Röntgen). One day he also noticed something curious: the candy bar in his pocket had melted. Yes, apparently WWII physicists used to carry around candy bars in their pockets. He investigated how the magnetron could be used to heat other foods including an egg (which exploded all over the face of his lab partner) and, what else, popcorn! Co-workers were soon lining up to heat their food with Percy’s new invention, the microwave oven. The Nobel committee did not give Percy an award.
Jump forward to the 1960s. Bell Labs had built a giant antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey to amplify radio signals for a satellite-transmission system. When radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson began working with the antenna, they were annoyed to discover some background noise interfering with their signals. They racked their brains to uncover the source of the noise, with possible explanations ranging from urban interference to extra-terrestrial radio signals to seasonal disturbances to bird shit in the hardware. None of these explanations were sufficient.
There was, however, a theoretical explanation: The Big Bang. If the universe had been created by The Big Bang, the theory suggested, there should be low-level background radiation everywhere. And this low-level background radiation would manifest in the exact type of noise that Penzias and Wilson were hearing in their Holmdel antenna.
This was the discovery of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, which tipped the scales of science away from the steady-state model of cosmic evolution (which essentially claims the universe is practically the same at all places and all times) and towards the Big Bang singularity model (which essentially claims the universe was at one time a singularly compact speck containing all matter and energy). Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel prize in 1978.
So, from microwaved popcorn (“Pop!”) to X-rays (“Zap!”) to the birth of the universe (“Bang!”), each of these lucky links involved scientists looking for one thing and then stumbling into something completely different that ended up changing the fundamental stock of knowledge.
In future posts we’ll discuss that each of these scientists had something in common with each other and with many others who work with Singular Links, a receptiveness to changing direction as new information came to light.