EDITORIAL
Lamenting the Missed Signals
Science authors take pride in reporting successes to stated original objectives. Characteristically, a set of experiments also includes false starts, poor yields and miscellaneous contrarieties. Rarely is experimentation a go-no-go event and in the true spirit of scientific professionalism the negations to ideality are recorded, though sometimes not reported. There is no genuine compulsion to spot-light variants and sprouts to results which read to the primary purpose, thesis or first expectations. So it happens that another sometimes builds upon such by-product observations and establishes newly recognized priority to a manifestly earlier event. Missed signals are catastrophic in football, commodity trading, railroading and in highway traffic patterns. In research pursuits there is the habit of discarding what is unwanted or unanticipated at the moment-a common consequence of training in strict logical interpretation of what is taught as “nature’s laws.” Sound logic can betimes mislead. A disquieting extension to logic-in-the-extreme might be a conclusion, by reading the obituary columns, that all people in a metropolitan area die in alphabetical order. Observations which run oblique to the master game-plan should be regarded and reported without bias or penalty of poor planning. Reactions that follow an unanticipated course remind us that human expectations (even under the sometimes sacrosanct term of “scientific principles”) are fallible-and the divergencies can become disguised new opportunities. Indeed the core of progress in research is the skill in observing educed and derivative results and the courage to publish tentative conclusions. Sometimes experiments performed with schoolmarmish rectitude uncover nothing new; add fat but no muscle. Some research events have a seemingly improbable ingredient with targets of probable opportunity. A constructive attitude is to always believe in the promise of a new premise. Begirdled and blindered as we can be by chauvinistically focusing upon our own prized preconception and even when we are subject to habitforming reenactment of standardized and acceptable reasoning, we can also be trained to expect the unexpected. This journal through the Signals of Science Section is a forum to report what we observe, perceive and open-mindedly speculate may later be confirmed. 1
Crystal Lake, Michigan November 12, 1974
Ind. Eng. Chern., Prod. Res. Dev., Vol. 14, No. 1, 1975
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