> Additionally, more than 50% of the articles of a 
> historical nature
> that I've read on all sorts of "discoveries", all seem to 
> have an
> element of "luck" involved in them, along with inordinate 
> amounts of
> stubbornness or persistence on the part of the 
> "researcher".

ALL new discoveries are happenstance.
EVERYTHING we do is stamp collecting.
Despite what a top NZ researcher once said :-).

We can systematise what we have learned, and we can learn 
about subsets of what stamp collecting has brought us by 
applying the knowledge to build models of the missing parts, 
but by definition, what is wholly unknown cannot be found by 
anything except intelligently guided  guesswork. We may 
discover an especially shiny pile of pebbles on Newton's 
beach and decide that there may be others nearby. We may 
stumble on 3 pieces of the jigsaw puzzle and deduce the 
shape of the top-quark piece that has to fit into one of the 
empty gaps, but we cannot leap into emptiness and demand 
that something be there as we wish it to be. To some extent 
the larger discovered frameworks of conservation of this or 
that (energy, momentum, ...) help us to fill in what appear 
to be the borders of the puzzle. But we will continue to be 
taunted by hints that the borders are but an illusion (eg by 
"dark matter" whenever we begin to conclude that we have 
gone about as far as we can go, that there is room in the 
world for maybe 6 (or 10 or ...) computers or that Quantum 
mechanics must make sense. Or mustn't.

None of which has especially much to do with Jack's thesis 
:-)


        Russell





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