THE PRODUCTION OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE 197 



much time and effort will be required to get the process ready 

 for a pilot plant test. Nevertheless, all applied research of 

 this type can be planned and, to a considerable extent, should 

 be planned. 



W'hen, however, we go back still further and attempt to 

 discover an entirely new process, it is unlikely that any close 

 planning of the work will be of value. In practice, what is 

 done is to present the problem to a competent chemist and 

 leave him to study parallel syntheses in the literature and to 

 try one method after another which may lead to the result 

 that he requires. 



The chances of making discoveries that will advance a 

 branch of science can be increased simply by having more 

 men engaged in work in that field. Much of the recent ad- 

 vance in the science of astronomy has come from the accumu- 

 lation of facts by a considerable number of observers, these 

 facts being published and so made available for analysis by 

 a limited number of skilled mathematical analysts. Many 

 discoveries in astronomy have been made, as is said, "by ac- 

 cident," but the accident could only have occurred to an 

 astronomer who w^as working in that field. The discovery 

 of the sharp absorption lines produced by the scattered mole- 

 cules of interstellar space, for instance, could not have been 

 made unless astronomers had been photographing distant 

 galaxies with powerful spectroscopes, and even then their 

 detection depended upon the use of a comparatively fine- 

 grained and therefore relatively insensitive photographic 

 plate. Scientific discoveries of a basic type result, therefore, 

 not from an attempt to make a given discovery but from con- 

 centration upon a special field of work by men using instru- 

 ments of sufficient power and having sufficient skill to recog- 

 nize the discoveries when they appear. 



In the organization of scientific research, therefore, the 

 value of planning varies from the necessity for detailed plan- 

 ning by engineering experts when a discovery is to be applied 

 on a large scale to the most complete freedom of thought and 

 experiment when we do not know what to look for and have 



