As the first technique to reach out beyond the visible spectrum, radio astronomy uncovered a wide range of previously unknown phenomena that has transformed astronomy. Quasars, pulsars, radio galaxies, gravitational lensing, solar radio bursts, extra-solar planets, the cosmic microwave background, interstellar molecules, super-luminal motion, dark matter, cosmic evolution, fast radio bursts, electrical storms on Jupiter, the greenhouse effect on Venus, non-thermal radiation, cosmic molecular masers, and many other phenomena were all unknown until they were discovered by radio astronomers using a wide range of innovative new techniques and instrumentation. Mostly, this new breed of astronomers were young, had little or no training in astronomy with backgrounds in physics or radio engineering, and often worked outside of the traditional academic environment. Their discoveries were largely serendipitous; that is, they were accidentally the result of looking for something else or just plain looking. Theory played no role, and sometimes incorrect theory delayed a discovery. The chapter concludes with discussion of the changing sociology of modern astronomical research and speculation on the prospects for new discoveries.

Chapter 7 returns to a key issue from the previous chapter: should Cantor’s diagonal construction (CD) be considered a genuine real number? To answer, we need first to clarify the distinction underlying Wittgenstein’s take on Cantor’s proof, between ‘intensionalism’ and ‘extensionalism.’ The main message here is, again, ultimately therapeutic-liberatory, and not revisionist (only reluctantly so): we are not forced to accept that CD is a genuine real, and hence to say that there are more reals than naturals. We may say this, and introduce a new concept of a real, but we don’t have to. That CD is a genuine irrational is not an epochal discovery, but an invention, a technical stipulation. A background difficulty in this chapter concerns the overarching philosophical problem Wittgenstein grapples with in RFM II. I propose that this is the question, ‘What is the significance of Cantor’s discovery of the hierarchy of infinities?’ – and I argue that he saw it as ill-posed. Since mathematicians are inventors and not discoverers (RFM I-168), Cantor did not discover anything; so, the question is based on a confused presupposition and should be discarded.

Diagrams are essential for interpreting complex datasets and making discoveries. This chapter examines how diagrams in use make private thoughts, models, and phenomena accessible intersubjectively and complex datasets surveyable. When designed and used conventionally, diagrams are bearers of tradition and culture. This chapter shows that they can also be resources for scientific understanding, pruning and cultivating datasets, and achieving social accountability. Diagrams are the ground on which scientists can play and experiment with data: researchers suspend sequential courses of action for explorations in which they gain insights into possible interpretations and their work’s robustness as they decide which action among alternatives to make consequential. This chapter describes this play in the making of a discovery. As diagrams are standardized and used at many places, the resistance that their users experience can be ascribed to their efforts to be accountable to researchers elsewhere.

Sex – phenotypically different males and females making sperm or eggs which must fuse to make a new diploid individual – is almost ubiquitous in animals because there are big advantages in mixing gene variants to produce fitter progeny. The discovery of sex chromosomes, and the strange patterns of inheritance (sex linkage) of genes on the X, provided the first clues about how sex is determined. Meiosis, the specialized division that halves the chromosome number and separates the X and Y in males, ensures a 1:1 sex ratio in the progeny, which can be subverted. Here I discuss classical studies of the human X chromosome, and the diseases caused by mutations of X-borne genes, then the technical leaps that enabled construction of detailed genetic and physical maps of the human X chromosome, and the progressive compilation of its gene content. Early characterization of the human Y revealed a much smaller, gene poor and repeat-ridden little chromosome that pairs with the X at male meiosis only over a tiny terminal pseudoautosomal region.

The reawakening of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020 ignited a wave of racial and social consciousness that prompted many arts-based organizations to consider the larger implications of their programmatic visions. As a composer known to, but under-programmed in, the mainstream classical music establishment, the music of Florence Price was thrust into an even greater spotlight. This chapter considers what it means to meaningfully celebrate the rediscovery of Price’s manuscripts and her revival in the mainstream. It models discourse that ensures that more African American composers are recognized and that the communities that kept names and works alive are remembered in the historical record.

The fragments on the ancients and the moderns are continued. Arguments are presented for and against the role played by the ancients in establishing a modern culture of genius and taste. The effect of writing on oral poetry is discussed together with the invention of paper, printing, and copper engraving. These had an important effect on poetic expression and public culture, and the advantages and disadvantages are weighed. The Middle Ages ended with the Reformation, the discovery of new lands, changes in the financial system, in war, and class relationships. German literature is discussed in relation to other European traditions, and its shortcomings and merits are considered. In conclusion, it is argued that comparison of the national poetic traditions is difficult, perhaps futile, and that every nation should value its own tradition.

This chapter lays out the metatheoretic approach of the book. The focus is on how scientists use experimental work to support compositional hypotheses. It sets aside questions of how scientists might reason in the lab or how scientists might support hypotheses in review articles or textbooks. It brackets questions of the warrant of scientific reasoning. It addresses some of the challenges facing the use of case studies.

Voyages of discovery and their accounts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have rarely been considered in the context of periodising ideas of ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’. Though once such voyages are read not with the hindsight of the twenty-first century but from within the tradition of prior travel, the newness of the New World emerges as a modern construct with limited historical purchase. Texts and maps that verbalise voyages beyond the boundaries of what was known are situated as much in individual experience as in collective perspective; they are often more invested in their own reception than in measurable objects and dateable events.

This chapter aims to layout, more in detail, how Giambattista Vico weaved the different conceptual threads he gathered from such tradition to further his ambitious humanistic agenda. Vico’s philosophy of knowledge is an eclectic chimaera with many shortcomings and productive confusions. The chapter also focuses on Vico’s immediate context and intellectual references and explores four fundamental issues that surrounded and inspired the formulation of this seminal praxis epistemology: the relation between ancient and modern conceptions of knowledge; the idea that we know as makers of concepts and things; the relationship between ‘scientific’ discoveries and their conceptual criticism and the Vichian connection between the philosophy of knowledge and history as framed in his New Science.

Using the Tarasoff case as an exemplar, this chapter identifies and discusses a number of specific ways in which modern instrumentalist legal analysis is burdened and compromised when conducted within the structure, and according to the procedures, of current appellate adjudication. This is the case because this structure and these procedures are, in large part, vestiges of the earlier formalist period, unchanged for well more than a century.

The selection of appellate judges on an assertedly merit basis, and not by popular election, is a means of appointing judges far more in harmony with a formalist jurisprudential paradigm than with an instrumentalist one. The exceptionally limited number and kind of inputs that are involved in appellate adjudication are far more in line with formalism than instrumentalism. The kind of empirical information that is routinely excluded from the record of a case at trial, and thus denied to appellate courts, by various rules of evidence and privilege is often information that would be useful and valuable to the appellate courts when engaging in instrumentalist common law analysis. These are procedural rules that made sense within a formalist framework that operated far more problematically in the modern instrumentalist era.

It is commonly held that Darwin discovered natural selection in a flash of insight after reading Thomas Robert Malthus’ Essay on Population in September 1838. Additionally, most people think this was the missing piece that completed his theory of evolution. However, the Eureka moment is a myth, as is the claim that its purported insight finalized his theoretical understanding. Darwin not only slowly worked out his idea of natural selection over many months but he also took another twenty years to formulate the theory presented in On the Origin of Species. Most notably, his thinking changed radically in 1856 with the introduction of the principle of divergence. Analyzing this history demonstrates that there are a variety of misunderstandings about what exactly Darwin’s theory was, how it was structured, and whether it changed over time. Overall, this casts doubt on the claim that Darwin’s theory was ever “essentially complete,” even after contemplating several different meanings for this phrase. Rejecting this myth yields a richer understanding of the way scientific inquiry operates, especially how its methods and outcomes are justified, while augmenting our confidence in the importance of natural selection for explaining adaptive evolution.

It has been estimated that 2–3% of all hospital admissions in Australia are medication-related and 50% are preventable (1, 2). A recent review of data from 44 general medical practices in New Zealand demonstrated that 10.8% of patients experienced medication-related harms over a 3-year period. Most were deemed minor; however, one in five harms were moderate or severe and three patients died due to medication harm (3). The almost 2 million Australians that suffer an adverse event from medicines each year (4) are not all due to an adverse drug reactions (ADR), but are also caused by human and systemic medication errors (Table 3.1). Patients claiming a history of drug allergy are a daily occurrence in dental practice, so this chapter includes a description of allergy physiology, various adverse reactions due to drugs, with detail regarding immune-mediated allergic reactions, focussing on Type 1 and 4 reactions. As many claimed allergic reactions by patients are false, how to correctly diagnose and manage actual drug allergies will also be discussed.

Maggie B. Gale explores ways of both framing and structuring the beginnings of a research project, and finding what might be called a ‘research niche’. She uses the case study of an emerging research project to articulate different possible approaches to conceptualizing the starting point, direction, and shape of a project, as well as working practices which might be useful in research design and method. The chapter also explores a series of working principles for avoiding the pitfalls of research distractions, without missing out on the serendipitous discoveries which a more unstructured process might allow. Gale’s own research on Elsa Lanchester illustrates the principles.

Chapter 5 links practice to theory with a discussion of the range of formal and informal teaching approaches that can be used with young children to enhance their science learning. It outlines the importance of such strategies as scaffolding and targeted explorations. Using illustrative case studies, attention is paid to process skills, guided discovery, the interactive approach, inquiry learning, problem-based learning and project-based learning. Whether through the processes of science, such as the development of observation, or through the skilful questioning of the EC professional, the approach used should enhance children’s science learning. The chapter includes a discussion on the importance of children’s prior knowledge in terms of the teaching and learning of science.

Thinking is an activity that has a trajectory. Through the previous chapters, five modalities of pleasure of thinking have been identified: (i) a core and fundamental curiosity; (ii) a semiotic activity of binding experience in more or less complex wholes, or functional pleasure; (iii) the occasional joy of finding a solution thanks to our background capacity to engage in relatively free semiotic explorations, that is, the pleasure of discovery; (iv) the dialogical pleasure of the shared activity of thinking; (v) the awareness of the activity and its pleasure, a meta-pleasure. These five aspects can be experienced in a more or less playful way and lived more or less bodily – in modulations that partly depend on the actual setting as well as on cultural norms and guidance. Chapter 5 proposes a model of the person to account for such trajectories of thinking. It first emphasises four principles we need to hold about mind based on our exploration; it then proposes an integrated model of mind; and it finally qualifies trajectories of thinking and their pleasures.

The chapter examines the efforts of a group of veterans from earlier expeditions to capitalize on their knowledge of Asia and/or routes between the Indies, while grappling with their relatively modest position within the hierarchy of meritorious. The chapter argues that such a hierarchy became increasingly clear during the 1540s, due to the viceregal authorities’ efforts to identify and hierarchically order New Spain’s conquistadores, primer pobladores, and other beneméritos who had served the Crown. Against the background of these initiatives, it considers the efforts of men such as Andrés de Urdaneta, Guido de Lavezaris, García de Escalanate Alvarado, Castaneda de Nájera, and Juan Pablo de Carrión – who all fell within this third category of meritorious – to stand out among those included in the register by presenting themselves as veterans. Analyzing their interactions with the viceregal authorities and referring to reports produced during the 1550s and 1560s, the chapter reveals how the men’s drive for social advancement inspired them to fuel interest in Spanish expansion into the Pacific. In the process, they presented various visions of the Pacific and the potential benefits of New Spain’s connections to Asia.

The chapter explores how the production of cosmographical knowledge and acts of self-fashioning interacted in negotiations over royal capitulaciones, which were contracts between the Crown and private individuals that permitted the latter to act on the Crown’s behalf in matters such as exploration. After a brief discussion of prior Spanish efforts to reach Asia, the chapter then concentrates on the legal cases that were argued and decided during the 1530s and early 1540s concerning the right to explore the regions in the Pacific Northwest and who was to be recognized as the discoverer (descubridor) of this part of the world. The analysis presented here shows how the efforts of Hernán Cortés, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, and others to prove they deserved to be recognized as discoverers had an impact on the mapping of the Pacific Northwest and left deep marks on the laws of the Indies.