A surprising number of scientists believe in little green men

In 1928, a young physicist and engineer named Karl Jansky began working at Bell Telephone Laboratories, tasked with investigating any sources of static that could interfere with long-distance radio communication. Cobbling together a system of antennae on a merry-go-round, he successfully found that thunderstorms were annoying in just this way. But there was a small bit of noise left over, and he kept scanning the sky to locate the culprit. To his surprise, he eventually found it was coming from Sagittarius in the centre of the Milky Way. He christened it ‘star-noise’. We now know that he had correctly identified the emanations from a supermassive black hole; and, quite by accident, he had invented the new science of radio astronomy.

Chris Lintott’s book, an amiable advert for serendipitous wonders, is concerned in part to overturn a certain naive view of science: that it consists of forming hypotheses and then testing them.