some time ago I made an off-cuff comment to a colleague that he "had been lucky".
He reacted badly to this, and rather curtly told me he resented being told he had been lucky, he had worked for his success and earned it.
At the time I shrugged it off - no big deal, he was being a bit oversensitive.
Sorry, dood, it was a bit of an asshole thing to say.
It also had some truth. There was luck involved.
There are several different modes of operation in science: there are astonishing brilliant breakthroughs, observational or theoretical, stuff that no one saw coming; there are timely breakthroughs in sub-fields ripe for success, usually due to technological developments reaching some key stage; and, there is bread'n'butter science, the stuff we all know needs doing but doesn't always get done because there are not enough people and some priorities have to be chosen.
My colleague had made a "time is ripe" breakthrough - a discovery observation that any of several teams could have made in the same time frame, and which was "lucky" in that the choice of sequence of targets was arbitrary and whoever got first to an actual hit, out of the possible initial targets, was going to get the discovery.
So, luck.
Well, yes, but. My colleague is very smart and very hard working - it is not just where to start on a list, it is also putting stuff together and getting started taking data, it is writing analysis software, calibrating and running the software in a timely manner, realizing you are onto something and then getting it published rapidly.
It is hustle.
You can be as lucky as you like, but if you don't hustle, you still come second.
Further, there is follow through - a discovery is nice, taking a lead in a new sub-field is an entirely different thing. Where my colleague went beyond luck, beyond hustle, was in leveraging the discovery into a series of further, different experiments and observations, pushing, pulling together collaborations coming up with new angles.
That is more than luck, that is just really great science.
Oh, the "brilliant breakthrough" - half the time we don't see it coming even after it is there... the "luck" there is timing also, be ahead of the rest, but not too far... ;-)
PS: no "guessing" who I am referring to, please. I'll delete any such comments.
Don't make me regret not choosing pseudonymity.
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The scientists who get lucky are the ones who do the very hard work of exposing themselves to risk in the appropriate way. Calling a scientist who makes an important discovery "lucky" is the same as calling a card counter "lucky" when he hits blackjack on a huge bet he placed because he knew that the remaining deck was rich with face cards and aces.
You can be as lucky as you like, but if you don't hustle, you still come second.
Bingo. Your friend may have been lucky to make the discovery first, but he took advantage of that luck by publishing quickly and moving on to follow-up experiments quickly. I'll let Tom Lehrer explain the alternative:
(from Lobachevsky)
Were the other teams similarly hard working, and was it bad luck that kept them from choosing the right point in the list to start?
There are lots of people that work hard enough to earn the opportunity for luck to possibly favor them. They deserve the chance at success.
Looked at another way: If the colleague predicted his breakthrough as an absolute certainty before he did the experiment, then no luck was involved, but then the real science was in making the certain prediction, not in the drudgework of confirming the certainty.
"time is ripe" breakthrough.
Technology development moved it into "yeah we could do that, but it is a long shot".
Then there were 18-24 months during which it went from "probably get something with large enough a sample" to "we can definitely do this with a sample of only k objects".
Groups that jumped in early in the second stage were in the running.
Who won depended partly on the ordering of the possible target choices, and partly on sheer hustle to get data gathered, calibrated and reduced.
So being the discoverer definitely required some "luck" in that a random re-order of the data collection might delay discovery long enough that another group would get there first.
While I dont know who you are talking about, I know plenty of people who you easily *could* be talking about.
People are waaaay too uptight.
Thomas Jefferson said
I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.