Most Breathtaking Discovery?

I had a fun thought: what’s the most impressive, mind-blowing, breathtaking discovery anyone has ever made?

Sure, it’s an impossible question to answer objectively, but it’s a fun one to consider. My mind immediately goes to the realm of physics, where reality is utterly incomprehensible to us mere humans.

There are some great candidates here.

The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR; it’s a mouthful) wasn’t something Penzias and Wilson were looking for.

No matter where the two men pointed the horn-shaped radio telescope, they kept hearing a static hiss. The only thing left to do was to climb up on top of the Holmdel Horn Antenna, to get a good look at the physical dish itself. And, there it was:

Pigeon poop.

After cleaning the poop, they still heard the hiss, and eventually they realized that this was the echo of the creation of the universe. #nobigdeal

Then, there’s Maxwell’s demon—that little fella who closes the little door on the fast-moving particles so they stay on the left side, while the slower particles end up on the right. By simply sorting particles by speed, you can produce heat from thin air!

It turns out that it costs energy to separate those particles. I’m not talking about whatever energy it takes to open and shut Maxwell’s Demon’s little trap door, but instead a different type of energy. This is the energy required to sort anything out, or to think about something.

There seems to be a fundamental equivalence between intelligence or reasoning or thinking and burning energy. This isn’t just metaphorical—it’s physical and measurable in the real world. That’s pretty wild when you burn a calorie or two to think about it.

Besides physics, ample examples of incredible discoveries abound in the realms of history, anthropology, technology—you name it, there is wonder out there in the world if you know where to look.

There’s the way human language is so complicated and diverse, and yet we keep finding ways to demystify it with incredible discovery after incredible discovery. Take the Rosetta Stone, which unlocked more than 3000 years of lost Egyptian history when Napoleon’s conquest left plenty of room for scholarship.

An ancient civilization that helped to invent the alphabet, monotheism, the 365 day calendar, and papyrus was opaque to us before, and now we could read what they were saying as writing was being codified for the very first time.

Is it the discovery of Göbekli Tepe? The Pyramids at Giza have sat there for almost 5000 years, but Göbekli Tepe had been there for 7000 years when Djoser began building his first stone pyramid complex, which would soon be the prototype for the pyramids. Monumental architecture is more than twice as old as we assumed it was. It changes everything.

That kind of discovery takes my breath away, and so do the things that truly help humanity, like the greatest American hero I wrote about yesterday:

While you may never have heard about Norman Borlaug, I bet you’ve heard of the Green Revolution. Borlaug’s wheat and his actions were foundational and central to the entire effort, which has been credited with saving around a billion lives.

Is it figuring out how to get enough nitrogen out of the ground to keep half of the people on the planet fed? Is it the discovery that simple mold that you can grow in a dish can be used to kill a bacterial infection and save hundreds of millions of lives?

I don’t have the answer today, but I do have a pretty fun question here.