Herschel, IR radiation and the 3 steps of science

I came across a nice article on the discovery of Infra-red (IR) radiation by William Herschel. It has some information on how he detected the IR part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

It was interesting to note that Herschel’s viewpoint after writing a few papers on this topic was to conclude with uncertainty on the interpretation of his own result.

One may argue that he was not confident in his work, but to truly discover something new, one will have to be at the boundary of the unknown. At such an inflection point, uncertainty and self-criticism are so important, and I don’t blame Herschel for being circumspect.

Nevertheless, his work received attention in spite of his doubts and motivated other researchers, such as Ritter and Röntgen, to explore the extended spectrum of electromagnetic radiation.

Scientific progress is two steps forward and one step backward. The backward step (as in questioning new findings, verification, clarification and debate) is one of the hallmarks of scientific thinking, without which we may take many forward steps, albeit in a totally wrong direction.