Discovery

Staying on the same broad theme as yesterday, but this time around on discovery at the end of a purposeful pursuit, the following passage

On 4 November 1922, Carter found the steps leading to Tutankhamun’s tomb (subsequently designated KV62), by far the best preserved and most intact pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings.

He wired Lord Carnarvon (encoded telegram sent on November 5th: “At last have made wonderful discovery in valley — a magnificent tomb with seals intact; recovered same for your arrival. Congratulations Carter.”) to come, and on 26 November 1922, with Carnarvon, Carnarvon’s daughter — Lady Evelyn Herbert -, and others in attendance, Carter made the famous “tiny breach in the top left hand corner” of the doorway, and was able to peer in by the light of a candle and see that many of the gold and ebony treasures were still in place. He did not yet know at that point whether it was “a tomb or merely a cache”, but he did see a promising sealed doorway between two sentinel statues. When Carnarvon asked him if he saw anything, Carter replied: “Yes, I see wonderful things”.

Now, not all discoveries happen at the end of such patient quests. Sometimes, happenstance triggers lasting findings.

As a low-profile assistant professor in MIT’s department of meteorology in 1961, Lorenz created an early computer program to simulate weather. One day he changed one of a dozen numbers representing atmospheric conditions, from .506127 to .506. That tiny alteration utterly transformed his long-term forecast, a point Lorenz amplified in his 1972 paper, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”

And then there are the labors of writing, a very different type of discovery than most others.

ON the door to William Styron’s studio was a quotation from Gustave Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

At 60, when he gave up alcohol (“an invaluable senior partner to my intellect”),

Styron found the process of writing agonizing. “The main problem,” he complained, “narrows down to just one word — life.”

Finally, for generalists, there are epiphanies upon seeing something superficially unrelated

…a wonderful early nineteenth-century quote from Dr Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School, who, upon seeing a Victorian steam train travelling across the countryside, stated: ‘I rejoice to see it, and think that feudality is gone forever.’