Stefan Krauss

Our powerful new methods and tools trigger breakthroughs by enabling us to see, measure and imagine the world in ways that were impossible before them. Microscopes and telescopes opened hidden worlds too small or too distant for the naked eye—revealing unexpected parasites, bacteria and...

This is the first book to systematically tackle the puzzle of what the engine of scientific discovery is. We analyse science's over 750 biggest discoveries—spanning across fields and history—and the broad range of traits of the discoverers, and provide a new lens on science's powerful methods and...

Discoveries transform our lives—through breakthrough medicines, technologies and completely new ways to understand the world. Yet one of science's greatest unsolved puzzles remains: how do new discoveries actually emerge? Despite their impact, there is still no general theory explaining how major...

or tool—that makes the breakthroughs possible Digging into the data and papers of science's major discoveries across fields and over time, we find a striking and consistent trend. Each discovery-making paper relied on a new method or tool—and the study, including usually experiments, could only be...

Scientific tools are our lenses, sensors, amplifiers, separators, accelerators, and dataprocessers—vast extensions of our eyes, hands and minds. Without them, most of the universe would remain invisible and unknown. With them, we can see living cells, weigh single atoms, edit genes, detect black...

the new enabling tools How long does it take for a new tool to spark a major discovery? The gap in time is getting shorter over time: in the 1800s, it was an average of 30 years; in the first half of the 1900s, it reduced to 21 and then in the second half to 10 years; and it finally fell to 6 years...

progress—across different fields and over time—than individual scientific discoveries Many discoveries are almost inevitable once we create a new tool that enables seeing and measuring further. These breakthroughs range from how we discovered capillaries in 1661, cells in 1665 and bacteria in 1674...

Uncovering how new tools trigger new breakthroughs leads us to explore the most puzzling and mysterious feature of discovery: serendipity. Many think breakthroughs are serendipitous—an unexpected and fortunate observation. From the discovery of x-rays to superconductivity. In fact, many believe...

What kinds of instruments uncover unintended discoveries? We find a striking pattern: most often serendipitous breakthroughs come from using tools that enhance our vision—and enable seeing what was previously invisible. Following these come tools designed to separate substances—like chromatography,...

we develop the tools of discovery There is another side to the coin: researchers have focused on exciting serendipitous moments in discoveries, but unexpected scientific tools used to spur them have not been studied. Here we explore all 149 nobel-prize-winning method discoveries— all major methods...

Understanding how powerful tool innovations unlock breakthroughs leads us to fundamental questions about how science evolves: do we abandon some major discoveries—including breakthrough tools? Is science best seen as a series of sudden paradigm shifts—or rather as deeply cumulative? In the landmark...

Examining science's major discoveries and methods across fields offers us a unique opportunity to probe the fundamental nature of scientific progress. This approach captures science's major theoretical, experimental and methodological breakthroughs—rather than just focusing on select theoretical...

While an individual hypothesis or theory of a scientist can be tested, challenged and even abandoned, the broader methods and scientific fields represent our extensive bodies of knowledge consolidated over time. We discard many of our ideas, hypotheses and even some theories, but we do not abandon...

With our expanding toolbox driving major discoveries and cumulative science, this opens an important question: how do our powerful tools connect to our broader environment? How do they interact with the demographics, institutions and resources that help support the scientific process—and develop...

Thomas Kuhn famously argued that ' Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm [or major breakthrough] have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. … for obviously these are the men who, being little committed by prior...

We explored the features and traits of the researchers behind history's biggest breakthroughs, enabling us to build a general profile of who science's greatest discoverers are and the basic environment they work in. These pioneering researchers have been D evolving, shifting towards greater...

Pioneering discoveries, such as the structure of DNA, the periodic table of elements and quantum theory, are embodied in our scientific fields, such as biology, chemistry and physics. A discovery captures an immediate advance, while a field captures our discoveries and methods—our ever-expanding...

disciplinary areas What are the most transformative tools across different disciplinary areas? New research domains cluster around key methods that trigger them. The methods and tools that acted as catalysts in opening most fields within physics-related disciplines are new mathematical techniques,...

The first step to understanding scientific progress is uncovering that new methods and tools consistently spark new discoveries and fields. The second step is now tackling the essential question: how do we actually develop our best tools of discovery? To answer this, we begin by tracing the...

(Chapters 1–5) leads us to the next and equally important question of what the engine of new methods and tools is. But researchers studying scientific methods focus on a specific method—like statistical techniques or microscopy. (Or philosophers investigate scientific methodology abstractly from a...

scientific theories possible—beyond the role of theories Some of science's most celebrated discoveries are at times seen as purely theoretical masterpieces of the mind, developed by brilliant thinkers without using tools and experiments. Take the classic example of quantum theory—describing the...

strategy for innovation—beyond the more unpredictable role of creative intuition How we conceive reality—cells, molecules, galaxies, cosmic radiation—is largely shaped by how our tools let us see them. Scientific creativity and imagination expand not just by closing our eyes, but especially by...

through five key stages: • Method constraint: generally, we run into a practical problem we cannot solve when using a current method or tool to study a phenomenon. T • Method scanning: next, we need to scan our own field and related disciplines for a method or tool that can tackle that constraint...

global incubators of innovation Small, unexpected connections between method-curious researchers can prove important. Ernst Ruska, who created the groundbreaking electron microscope (Box 1.1), had interactions with Max von Laue, the inventor of x-ray diffraction (Box 1.2). Kary Mullis designed the...

policies needed to accelerate scientific progress What if we treated the design of scientific tools across science as a field of research in itself that speeds up discovery? Most scientists do not commonly focus on studying and extending the very methods that enable them to do research. But if...

If we were to adopt these seven reforms, we could trigger a method revolution in science—a deep transformation in how science progresses and at what pace. Implementing these reforms would break from the status quo: the era before the method revolution, where we until now commonly made advances in...

Is the engine of science today the same as it was in our past? What are the origins of science and our powerful methods? We find that the key turning point in scientific history came with the unexpected invention of tools that enhance human perception: the first microscope and telescope. They...

How did our species come to develop such a powerful toolbox that not only helps us survive but also enables us to do science—to study particles with accelerators and search for life on other planets with space telescopes? To survive and meet basic needs, all animals—including us—have to learn which...

This is one of the great unsolved mysteries in the history of science. Common explanations point to a mix of external factors: the role of Christian worldviews, the spread of capitalism and wealth, the printing press and greater political and social liberties—conditions that supported scholars like...

Newton is often seen as the greatest of 17th-century scientists—portrayed as a lone genius relying on mathematical methods for his transformational breakthroughs: the laws of motion, universal gravitation and optics. Yet his work was not a product of sudden insight. It emerged from the broader tool...

The key turning point in the history of science came with the invention of two remarkable tools: the microscope and telescope. Through their lenses, we saw extraordinary phenomena, for the first time, in the 1600s—from Saturn's rings and craters on the Moon to red blood cells and sperm cells—and...

Throughout history, we have continually refined our abilities, to invent navigation techniques using stars, apply medicinal plants to heal wounds, devise lunar calendars to track and predict seasons—and eventually develop farming techniques and early mathematical systems. Each method gave us a...

Current explanations of what makes our species unique and successful focus on factors like our ability for shared intentionality or cooperation or developing agriculture. Here we provide a new, overlooked explanation: what makes us H human is our extraordinary capacity to invent better methods and...

We cannot design an experiment to measure what our tools cannot detect. In science, the tools we use largely determine how and what we can study—and the very questions we can ask using them. Powerful new tools—from super-resolution microscopes to the gene-editing method CRISPR—unlock entirely new...

questions, problems and experiments Science is often imagined as a logical process—one that begins with an unsolved question or problem, then applies the traditional scientific method, and ends by uncovering new experimental findings or a theory. But in reality, we are not able to run an experiment...

by five different perspectives Can we reduce how we make discoveries and fields to a universal theory that we can test with evidence? Can we describe the discovery process in a way that holds up to evidence across fields? Equations like Einstein's E = mc 2 and Newton's F = ma formalise knowledge in...

Are we close to hitting the limits of what we can discover? Or can we keep pushing forward into the edges of the universe, atoms, genes and human societies? Are we nearing the boundaries in some fields like theoretical physics or macroeconomics? And what exactly shapes the current boundaries of...

Methods and tools Here we unpack the five factors that both hold us back and drive us forward as we try to break through the frontier of science. In most areas of science today, a powerful statistical method, cutting-edge x-ray scanner or super-resolution microscope can generally reveal more than a...

Science is a quest to push the boundaries of what we know and reveal fundamental mysteries of the universe, matter, human life and the mind. But how we break and redefine the limits of science is not with conventional methods that produce conventional research—it is with new tools that enable new...

The future of science is not just about finding answers to questions we already know to ask—questions about life and the universe that current theories may raise. The history of science shows that it commonly depends even more on uncovering entirely new, fundamental questions and answers that...

tools to accelerate science AI can be a powerful tool in a scientist's toolbox—amplifying how the world can be explored and predicted. AI systems can help scientists streamline the research process by automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks, making research faster and less prone to some human...

revolution in science Most people are familiar with big breakthroughs like Franklin, Crick and Watson's discovery of DNA's double-helix structure, Hubble's discovery that the universe is expanding and Einstein's theory of relativity. But who created the tools that made those surprising findings...