"Discoveries in Radio Astronomy: Serendipity or Sweat?". Many famous discoveries in astronomy seem to have unexpectedly "fallen out of the sky" while others were clearly the product of years of hard, focused work. In this talk I'll examine a few discoveries in radio astronomy and ask: "Were they the result of lucky accidents (serendipity) or hard work (sweat)?"
I'll discuss the early pioneers (Jansky, Reber), and some well-known discoveries (pulsars, the cosmic black-body radiation, the 21-cm line, fast radio bursts, dark matter ...) in light of this question.