Scientific experiments don’t always go as planned, but that’s the point of the exercise. An experiment is a kind of question. If you knew in advance what was going to happen—if you already had the answer—you could skip the whole thing and go get ice cream.

But sometimes experiments take spectacularly unexpected turns and humanity ends up with life-changing discoveries, like penicillin or Post-It Notes, neither of which anyone was looking for until they turned up in very surprised labs.