Live long and prosper. NBC Television via Wikimedia Commons It's not often you hear a scientist praise the virtues of failure, but this week's guest on the Inquiring Minds podcast is no ordinary scientist. Stuart Firestein, who previously wrote a book about the value of ignorance, tells host Indre Viskontas that "science is really about the stuff we don't know." The professor and former chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University explains that failure is often what leads to new discoveries. To illustrate his point, Firestein describes the discovery of two new planets.