A circumstantial discovery
At the conference in Bangalore last week, Jeremy Levy (U. Pittsburgh) gave a fascinating talk about a significant new discovery that allows one to fabricate nanoscale electronic circuits at the interface between two transition metal oxide materials. (as described in this Science paper ) There were several things that were circumstantial about this discovery. * Jeremy had tickets to the 2006 World Cup Final in Germany. This led to a visit to Augsburg that stimulated the original ideas. * As a kid, Jeremy had played with Etch A Sketch and understanding how it works inspired the basic idea on how to "write" the circuit onto the interface. * The original fabrication was not done under vacuum but in air. It turned out that the water vapour present was essential to inducing charge carriers into the interface. When I started writing this post I thought the discovery involved serendipity , but that involves more when one is looking for something different.