Is it? How would anyone make money or fame out of it?
The way our scientific establishment works now is that you are rewarded for discovering things which fit into and shed new light on our existing web of understanding, not for things which are completely new and unconnected. I don't think this is entirely bad - science is useful because it's a densely connected web rather than a bag of unrelated facts. But it does mean that very little value is attached to observations of weird new things that don't fit in anywhere.
Back when I was a scientist, I was studying a known structure in the cytoskeleton. By chance, some of the cells I prepared went funny, and produced a radically different structure that I hadn't seen before, and couldn't find any mention of in the literature. I showed my supervisor, who basically said "so what?". On their own, this new structure was useless to a career scientist, because you can't say anything about what it is, what it does, why it's important, or how it connects to what anyone else is publishing about.
(It turned out this structure had been seen before, and published a few times, but still, nobody really knows what it's all about)
> But it does mean that very little value is attached to observations of weird new things that don't fit in anywhere.
This surprises me (as a non-scientist). As the observation is clearly real and clearly fits in somewhere to the web (the human body works after all), so it is just not valuable because it cannot easily be published without additional work?
> because you can't say anything about what it is, what it does, why it's important, or how it connects to what anyone else is publishing about.
I guess I am mostly surprised that "it exists" is insufficient. Or that the discovery of this new thing wouldn't trigger further investigation rather than "so what?"
The way our scientific establishment works now is that you are rewarded for discovering things which fit into and shed new light on our existing web of understanding, not for things which are completely new and unconnected. I don't think this is entirely bad - science is useful because it's a densely connected web rather than a bag of unrelated facts. But it does mean that very little value is attached to observations of weird new things that don't fit in anywhere.
Back when I was a scientist, I was studying a known structure in the cytoskeleton. By chance, some of the cells I prepared went funny, and produced a radically different structure that I hadn't seen before, and couldn't find any mention of in the literature. I showed my supervisor, who basically said "so what?". On their own, this new structure was useless to a career scientist, because you can't say anything about what it is, what it does, why it's important, or how it connects to what anyone else is publishing about.
(It turned out this structure had been seen before, and published a few times, but still, nobody really knows what it's all about)