This is from an interview with Harvard sstronomy professor and department chair Avi Loeb, in which he advocates for the importance of anomalies:
I remember attending a seminar at Harvard about ‘Oumuamua and a colleague of mine was commenting to me: “This object ‘Oumuamua is so weird, I wish it never existed.” I was appalled by this because it is completely contradictory to the nature of science, where you’re supposed to search for anomalies because that’s the only way in which you make discoveries. If everything conforms with what you thought, if the future is the same as the past, then, frankly, I would retire very early. You don’t learn anything new. [“Avi Loeb interview: Could ‘Oumuamua be alien technology after all?” Leah Crane, NewScientist (13 February 2021)]
The anonymous colleague speaks to the humanity integral to scientists, doesn’t it? They’re not unemotional automatons, but people who are sometimes caught at a vulnerable moment. This colleague may have been building an elegant theory about the limits on the configurations of astronomical objects, and ‘Oumuamua more or less blew it out of the water. Or he may have just been expressing frustration at the unusual characteristics of ‘Oumuamua.
Which is not to dispute the importance of anomalies. They are, of course, of paramount importance; the resolution of same can lead to Nobel Prizes for physical scientists, or at least to the solution of irritating bugs for us software engineers. I suspect all good scientists love a good anomaly, at least on their non-bad days.
In this interview Loeb defended his suggestion that ‘Oumuamua might be an artifact of an alien civilization, based on its novel shape and how its trajectory didn’t precisely follow that projected by standard physics theories. This certainly makes some sense, at least in the absence of a credible theory for the natural formation of objects exhibiting what we seemed to be seeing from scans of ‘Oumuamua.
And, yes, I have fantasies that we’d actually gotten a good, closeup visual on ‘Oumuamua.
