Historians and sociologists have remarked the occurrence, in science, of "multiple independent discovery". Robert K. Merton defined such "multiples" as instances in which similar discoveries are made by scientists working independently of each other.[1] "Sometimes," writes Merton, "the discoveries are simultaneous or almost so; sometimes a scientist will make a new discovery which, unknown to him, somebody else has made years before."[2]

Commonly cited examples of multiple independent discovery are the 17th-century independent formulation of calculus by Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and others, described by A. Rupert Hall;[3] the 18th-century discovery of oxygen by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier and others; and the theory of the evolution of species, independently advanced in the 19th century by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.

Multiple independent discovery, however, is not limited to only a few historic instances involving giants of scientific research. Merton believed that it is multiple discoveries, rather than unique ones, that represent the common pattern in science.[4]

Merton contrasted a "multiple" with a "singleton"—a discovery that has been made uniquely by a single scientist or group of scientists working together.[5]

A distinction is drawn between a discovery and an invention, as discussed for example by Bolesław Prus.[6] However, since the same phenomenon of multiplicity occurs in relation to both discoveries and inventions, this article lists both multiple discoveries and multiple inventions.

3rd century BCE [ edit ]

13th century CE [ edit ]

1242 – first description of the function of pulmonary circulation, in Egypt, by Ibn al-Nafis. Later independently rediscovered by the Europeans Michael Servetus (1553) and William Harvey (1616).

14th century [ edit ]

16th century [ edit ]

17th century [ edit ]

18th century [ edit ]

19th century [ edit ]

20th century [ edit ]

21st century [ edit ]

Quotations [ edit ]

"When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring." Farkas Bolyai to his son János Bolyai, urging him to claim the invention of non-Euclidean geometry without delay,

quoted in Ming Li and Paul Vitanyi, An introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications, 1st ed., 1993, p. 83.

"[Y]ou do not [make a discovery] until a background knowledge is built up to a place where it's almost impossible not to see the new thing, and it often happens that the new step is done contemporaneously in two different places in the world, independently." a physicist Nobel laureate interviewed by Harriet Zuckerman, in Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States, 1977, p. 204.

"[A] man can no more be completely original [...] than a tree can grow out of air." George Bernard Shaw, preface to Major Barbara (1905).

See also [ edit ]

Notes [ edit ]