Science and engineering usually create consistent results. Generally, when you figure out how to make something, you can repeat that at will to make more of something. But what if, one day, you ran the same process, and got different results? You double-checked, and triple-checked, and you kept ending up with a different end product instead?
Perhaps it wasn’t the process that changed, but the environment? Or physics itself? Enter the scary world of disappearing polymorphs.