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Comment by Karellen | Hacker News Reader

> The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..."

-- commonly attributed to Isaac Asimov

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As a one-time scientist, I think Asimov may have been tricked by extreme selection bias on "That's funny..." utterances. It almost always precedes a crushing realization that you have fucked something up and probably wasted a lot of time.

You're probably days down exploring that explanation before the eventual "holy shit" (that I never really had the benefit of experiencing).

The most exciting phrase that heralds a new discovery is not "eureka!" but "holy shit!"

The legend of “eureka” is that a fellow who had a specific problem in mind noticed something specific to his problem. Discoveries like sticky notes are not the same thing.

Yes. The "eureka" legend refers to the ancient Greek scholar Archimedes. He was tasked with determining if a gold crown commissioned by the king was pure gold, or if the goldsmith had substituted some silver. While taking a bath, Archimedes noticed that the water level rose as he got in, and he suddenly realized that the volume of water displaced must be equal to the volume of the submerged object. This gave him the insight that by measuring the volume of water displaced by the crown, and comparing it to the volume displaced by an equal weight of pure gold, he could determine the purity of the crown. Excited by his discovery, Archimedes supposedly leapt out of the bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting "Eureka!" which means "I have found it!" in Greek.

To date, nobody has found the quote among Asimov's publishing writings [1]. Similar (but not as succinct) wordings have been identified in earlier sources, but nobody has been able to identify the exact origin of the quote.

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/03/02/eureka-funny/?amp=1

Mid-1900s science fiction writers really seemed to like just randomly saying stuff and having people believe them. This isn't as bad as "Pournelle's Iron Law", but it's just as fact free, and I don't think it's good to believe fiction writers.

Since then, we've moved on and now instead believe cynical standup comedians or late night TV hosts are the ones who know the truth about everything.

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