The science that never was

Abstract

The last two decades have certainly given physicists plenty to get excited about – from the observation of the first extrasolar planet to the discovery of the top quark and from the Hubble Space Telescope to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). But what about the things we might prefer to forget? Many ideas that scientists spend time investigating eventually turn out to be dead ends, while funding shortfalls, politics or simple bad luck can prevent major breakthroughs from happening as soon as they might. By the time the textbooks get written, however, these blind alleys, wrong turnings and missed opportunities have usually evaporated in favour of a straightforward “linear” history of scientific discovery.