Types of Scientific Discovery

A discovery is not one kind of event. It helps to place any breakthrough on two axes at once: which stage of inquiry it belongs to, and what it does to the surrounding framework. The stage runs from noticing a signal, to building a mechanism, to deriving new consequences. The framework can stay fixed, be stretched with a patch, or be replaced outright.

Read across the grid and the same three historical episodes recur at different intensities: elliptic-curve murmurations (a hidden pattern seen once the representation changed), the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction (a compensating patch that preserves the old picture), and general relativity (a new generative program that makes the anomalies unsurprising). The cell you land in tells you whether you are polishing a map, redrawing part of it, or replacing the projection.

The interactive grid below lets you move through all nine cells.