An example would be a clinical drug trial approved by the Food and Drug Administration, in which researchers agree in advance on what will count as data, how many patients will be necessary for the data to be meaningful, and what will constitute a positive or negative outcome. At the edge of knowledge, however, method and logic are insufficient. Intuition and creative insight become just as important. Moreover, researchers frequently find themselves taking unplanned journeys to unexpected places, realizing only later just what it is that they have discovered. Because experimental conditions cannot be controlled completely, unexpected and important results sometimes occur, an aspect of research that Max Delbruck often called the principle of limited sloppiness.
Discovery begins as protoscience.
The researcher presents the work in highly stylized research publications. In those scientific short stories, which use the linear scientific method as plot, ambiguity and error disappear. The publication becomes the discovery. Because the linear model is the primary way in which scientists communicate, the public has come to believe that science works in a linear fashion, a misunderstanding of the nature of science and a source of disappointment when the results of research do not meet expectations. When high-school science teachers spend a summer working in my laboratory, they are amazed at how frequently experiments fail to work out as planned.