Strange patterns show up regularly in science, but perhaps one of the most curious is the one which Steven Johnson's intriguing Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation identifies as "'the multiple': A brilliant idea occurs to a scientist or inventor somewhere in the world, and he goes public with his remarkable finding, only to discover that three other minds have independently come up with the same idea in the past year." Here are various cases of this remarkable phenomenon. Let us know if you think of more!
1. Supersymmetry
Supersymmetry is a key concept in string theory, but has applications in other realms of theoretical physics as well. Between 1970 and 1973, supersymmetry was actually discovered four different times (although accounts vary a bit, depending upon what counts as a "discovery"). Since this was during a time when Western and Russian scientists did not communicate often, some of the physicists took a while to figure out that they weren't the first ones to come up with the theory.
2. Sunspots
In 1610 and 1611, sunspots were discovered by different scientists living in three different countries: Thomas Harriot in England, Johannes and David Fabricius in Germany/Netherlands, Galileo Galilei in Italy, and Christoph Scheiner in Bavaria/Germany.
3. Electrical Battery
Developed separately by Dean Von Kleist in 1745 and Cuneus of Leyden in 1746.
4. Oxygen
Oxygen was independently isolated by Joseph Priestley and Carl Wilhelm Scheele between 1772 and 1774.
5. Conservation of Energy
The law of conservation of energy was independently developed no fewer than four separate times during the latter part of the 1840s.
6. Genetic Mutation's Importance to Evolution
In 1899, S. Korschinsky in 1899 proposed the importance of genetic mutations to evolution, but the idea was independently offered by Hugo de Vries in 1901. In 1927, two separate researchers discovered the role played by X-rays in causing genetic mutations.
7. Calculus
In perhaps one of the most famous cases of independent discovery, Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz both developed the principles of differential and integral calculus. Newton claimed to begin work on calculus in 1666, though he didn't publish it for decades. Leibnitz began his work on the subject in 1674 and published a paper using it in 1684. This sparked a spirited quarrel that lasted for several years and still remains controversial to this day, in some circles.
