The world is various but the view from the laboratory bench is ever similar. Scientists speak different tongues and live in different places and worship different gods, but at any one time the array of available problems and techniques is limited and apparent to all. In consequence, discovery is a crowded business. “The pattern of independent multiple discoveries in science is in principle the dominant pattern,” wrote the sociologist Robert K. Merton, in a passage well known to historians of science. Look hard at individual cases, Merton argued, and you will find that “all scientific
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