Here's yet another illustration of how many things we don't know about the universe:
The silicon wafer looked black to the naked eye. But when Dr. Mazur and his researchers examined the material with an electron microscope, they discovered that the surface was covered with a forest of ultra-tiny spikes.
At first, the researchers had no idea what they had stumbled onto, and that is typical of the way many scientific discoveries emerge. Cellophane, Teflon, Scotchgard and aspartame are among the many inventions that have emerged through some form of fortunate accident or intuition.
“In science, the most exciting expression isn’t ‘Eureka!’ It’s ‘Huh?’” said Michael Hawley, a computer scientist based in Cambridge, Mass., and a board member and investor in SiOnyx.
Black silicon has since been found to have extreme sensitivity to light. It is now on the verge of commercialization, most likely first in night vision systems.
John Markoff, Intuition + Money: An Aha Moment, NY Times, Oct. 11, 2008 (emphasis added).
And of course, much of what we think we know could turn out to be wrong - see, e.g., Ulcer Docs' Nobel Prize Illustrates the Dangers of Dogma.
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