Think of as bizarre and unlikely examples as you can to go along with these “discoveries”:
napalm
rock and roll
Zoroastrianism
cucumbers
St. Vitus Dance
4th of July
…there just have to be some weird ones 
I’m failing to grasp the question. There’s not a *lot *of difference between something “discovered” and something “invented” by “discovering a new property or assemblage of things.”
No question. It’s like stumbling upon some idea or device while wandering down a country lane, that I’m proposing.
Definitely NOT a serious endeavor. Just time killer sorts of things.
Well, all inventions are discoveries, but not all discoveries are inventions: from your list, cucumbers and St Vitus’ Dance are not inventions, although I suppose they were discoveries when somebody first noticed them.
Quite so, but the applying of a name to them might be construed as claiming some significance for them that wasn’t there before the name was “invented.” Otherwise they were just a vegetable of questionable value and a malady that was like other jittery things.
Again, this is not meant as a scholarly treatise or debate on the merits and distinctions of inventions and discoveries. Just a way of toying with words.
Compare, for example, the concept of a diesel typewriter…
I found my way to this forum hoping to hear intelligent and interesting ideas. So far I have found nothing of the kind.
i’m grateful that Joseph Priestley invented oxygen. where would we be without him.
Not really. When you discover something, you’re finding something that already existed before the discovery. When you invent something, you bring it into existence.
So you can invent a microscope and then discover bacteria.
The Great Inhalation of 1775 is one of history’s neglected events.
Just think of the Dark Ages before people could breathe!
Which was discovered first, the cucumber or the inflated pickle?
And thank you, Zeldar - today I learned there is a third variety of cucumber called the burpless. I had no idea, since I hate cucumbers and never buy them. I will, however, be using the burpless cucumber at some point in the Made-Up Lies game.
I think the rest of us are failing to see what the “game” is meant to be, however. Yes, all inventions can be characterized as discoveries (but not vice-versa). So what? Where is the fun in that?
It’s more like considering a different way of looking at the world. If you think of all inventions as discoveries then they already exist in some sense. All of the art and technology humanity has ever created was implicit in the universe long before we became aware of it. And that means all future art and technology is implicit in the universe now.
On the opposite end, consider the implications of equating discovery with invention in mathematics. Did humanity discover mathematics or invent mathematics? Are basic concepts like numbers and addition and probability implicit in the universe? Or is mathematics just a system we invented to model the universe? If so, might some other intelligent species on another world have invented a completely different system?
Beat me to it: I was just about to butt into this thread with something like this. And now I have!
In my own mind, I’ve philosophized about this a lot, and I think it’s something that ought to be philosophized aloud in introductory math classes (meaning, First Semester Algebra, in either secondary school or community colleges). Math is taught too much as a bunch of rules to learn, and not enough is taught about the philosophy of math, which would help students at that level get a feel for “what it’s all about”.
Myself, I go with “discovered”. We invent the notation for writing our observations, which also serves as a tool for solving problems and making more discoveries. But the basic “rules” of math (addition is commutative, etc.) as well as the more elaborate “derived” rules (like the Quadratic Formula) are as old as the Universe (as far as we can imagine), needing only to be discovered by the likes of Archimedes or al-Khwārizmī.
From time to time, I’ll notice that one textbook or another mentions of some formula or law or rule being “invented”. Did al-Khwārizmī “invent” the Quadratic Formula?
Many thanks to Little Nemo and Senegoid for offering a bit of expansion to the idea. As was said, it’s just an exercise in playing with the ideas behind the words invention and discovery and flipping the mental switches in our heads to allow one effort to be seen as a variation of the other.
I harken back to the 1960’s when a pair of brothers joined my brother and me in helping all four of us to dissolve some preconceptions of similar ideas. We were not unique in our approaches to such things, but the way the four of us fed off each other was a fun and enlightening experience that’s only been repeated in my life a very few times. I was just hoping the idea of this particular duality might appeal to some of you, the adventurous ones.
Consider a parallel concept. That of player versus operator of such things as pianos, violins, guitars and theremins. There’s a sort of mystique and other-worldly reverence attached to players, especially ones who have elevated their skills into the realm of art while an operator of a computer, locomotive, buzz saw, or xray machine is deemed as little more than a lackey.
What separates those activities can be seen as subjective and arbitrary if one allows the terms to be switched so that you consider Eric Clapton, Elton John, Jascha Heifetz and their ilk as nothing but instrument operators.
There’s still hope for this thread if more folks will break down whatever is keeping it from being a fun game of words. After all, it’s in MPSIMS and not Great Debates, for Satan’s sake!
There’s an interesting corollary with probability. Nowadays everybody sees it as quite routine but it’s actually a fairly recent discovery (invention?). The basic fundamentals of calculating probabilities weren’t laid down until the 17th century.
This surprisingly long delay occurred in a large part because it took a fundamental change in the way people thought about mathematics. The classical idea had always been that mathematics required you to produce a provably correct answer. If you couldn’t show which answer to a problem was the right one then what you were doing wasn’t math. So calculating chances seemed, by definition, to be outside of mathematics.
The notion of Fuzzy Logic also applies here. It may be worth noting that there seems to be a shift from that sort of thinking to a more conservative approach where “prove it” is the watchword. Little room for experimentation with concepts. Technology (even Engineering) vs. Science sort of thing.
Is there actually any content to this thread or is it some sort of goof/joke/prank?
It’s an epistemological discussion.
Perhaps the concept of inevitability needs to be considered.
Let’s put aside the study of the physical world. I think everyone accepts that things like hydrogen atoms and x-rays and amoebas and Pluto all had objective existences before humans first observed them. These are clearly discoveries.
So let’s focus on non-material things. Math and music, for example.
Did Beethoven invent or discover his Ninth Symphony? I think most would agree he invented it. If Beethoven had died as a child, it seems impossible that the Ninth Symphony would have existed without him. It wasn’t something that had its own existence and was merely awaiting Beethoven’s discovery of it. Beethoven created the Ninth Symphony out of nothing.
Now let’s consider negative numbers. There was clearly a time when nobody knew about negative numbers. They’re not natural objects that were found lying around. Somebody came up with the idea of negative numbers. But did this anonymous thinker invent the idea of negative numbers or discover it?
That brings me to the issue of inevitability. We can accept that when people begin looking in the right place they will discover material things like atoms and germs and exoplanets. So does the same inevitability exist in mathematics? Will anybody proceeding along in the study of mathematics inevitably arrive at certain concepts? Are all mathematical concepts inevitable or are some optional?
Consider Euclid’s parallel postulate. For centuries, people assumed it was an inevitable fact that parallel lines never met. But now mathematicians know about other geometric systems where this isn’t true. Are there perhaps other aspects of our mathematics that we consider axiomatic but which are actually just universal assumptions?