How can you do something that you have never done, or discover something that no one has ever known? Read below for some help. 

Discovering things previously unknown is one of the most important, and most enjoyable, things that anyone can do. Most people do it every day, whether as simple as finding a new restaurant they love or discovering a new comet in the heavens. Fundamentally, new discoveries come from observation, analysis, and experimentation. A husband looking for a new restaurant to try with his wife might observe something that in his experience resembles a restaurant on a street corner. He then analyzes the available information to decide if he wants to try it; what kind of food they, the opening hours, and whether it is clean and inviting. Finally he and his wife try it out, completing the process of discovery.

New discoveries are often far more difficult than finding a great new place to eat. Identifying a new comet can require expensive equipment and uncommon expertise, while sequencing the human genome, learning about subatomic particles or curing cancer are some of the slowest and most resource intensive discoveries of all. The discovery that smoking causes lung cancer followed the same observation-analysis-experimentation sequence. In the 1930s a few surgeons noticed that they seemed to be performing lung cancer surgeries on a lot of smokers. Some published their observations and that induced others to analyze the existing information and hypothesize that smoking is associated with lung cancer. Researchers then developed experiments to test the hypothesis and in 1956 the British Doctors Study provided the first convincing evidence that smoking increased the risk of lung cancer.

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