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2016 SmartConnected.World, Novotel Amb. Suwon, S-Korea,
Anatomy of the Unsought Finding. Serendipity: Origin,
History, Domains, Traditions, Appearances,
Patterns and Programmability
by Pek van Andel,
serendipitologist
Medical Faculty,
University of Groningen,
The Netherlands (= Holland)
Blackout, from the left, a figure enters,
dressed in a traditional professor’s
robe, carrying an oil-lamp, which will
be the only light during the
performance. As soon as he has settled
himself on the pulpit, he speaks:
Dear Ladies,
Gentle man, etc,
(the long version of 19 pp)
Look at the rattleback!
Looking for the Stone of Wisdom,
I did not search at random,
I have found, on my own,
a Serendipity Stone.
Please look at this Celtic stone.
Don’t ask, don’t tell, as if you are alone
with this wonderful stone.
Four practical jokes with one spoon and one coat.
And a black woodpecker, Slinky, Frisbee, magical
ring, Fiwihex, all examples of unsought findings.
I just recited a fairy tale The Travel of the Three
Princes of Serendip , in the longer storytellers version,
written by my son, a theater maker. It is the second
story of the Hasht Bihist (The Eight Paradises, 1302)
of Amir Khusrau, a great poet in the Persian language.
It has been translated in Italian, French, German,
English and Dutch. And if not yet in the Korean
language, I will help you to organise that translation.
The German anglicist Joseph Schick wrote more than
thousand pages about the history and the roots of this
Scharfsinnsproben (‘proof of sagacity’, also an item in
Hamlet), in his Corpus Hamleticum (1934 -1938).
The three Princes of Serendip were educated & trained
in hunting. Thus also in the art of tracking. The art to
find ánd to interpret the tracks of the invisible animals.
Louis Liebenberg, from South-Africa, regards the art
of tracking as the origin of science. It started about
two hundred million years ago. He published a superb
book on his original hypothesis. The sagacity of the
Princes of Serendip, as experienced hunters, is to
discover what they could not see, by finding signs and
by interpreting them correctly. These signs, these
‘clues’, were for Carlo Ginzburg the roots of what he
called himself an evidential paradigm. It is now known
as his ‘indices paradigm’ or ‘traces paradigm’.
The word serendipity, for the talent to see and to
interpret signs, was coined by a ‘genial dilettant’, the
British letter writer Horace Walpole, in London, in
1754. It was printed for the first time in 1833 and then
only used by bibliomanes. In 1945 the term serendipity
was imported in science by Walter Cannon, an
experimental physiologist at Harvard Medical School.
And the American godfather of the sociology of science,
Robert Merton, introduced the word serendipity in the
social sciences, also in the forties. His book The Travels
and Adventures of Serendipity, about the history of the
word serendipity, was published by the Princeton University
Press, in 2002, 50 years áfter he wrote it with Elinor Barber.
Serendipity is a surprising observation, fact or relation,
followed by a correct abduction, by definition.
An abduction is what we now call a hypothesis. The
correct translation from the Greek apagwgh would have
been retroduction. Aristotle mentions the surprising
different faces of the moon, and the reflection of
sunlight by the moon as an example of a coorrect
abduction, to explain the different faces of the moon.
An induction is a consequence of a hypothesis.
A deduction is a proof that a hypothesis really ‘works’.
Umberto Eco described four kinds of abduction:
1. Overcoded abduction: from a surprising fact to a another
fact, based on a given rule, f.e. the discovery that Walpole was a basterd might have happened this way: He looked and
behaved like his mother’s lover, a strong sign. He was also
homosexual: twice the personification of an unsought finding!
2. Undercoded abduction: from a surprising fact to a
possible rule, f.e. Jenner’s ‘vaccination’ was found this way.
3. Creative abduction: from a surprising fact to a possible
creative rule, f.e. Kandinsky’s ‘abstract art’.
4. Meta-abduction: from surprising fact to a revolutionary
rule, f.e. Newton’s ‘universal gravity’, and its ‘laws’.
Nota bene: the word fact comes from the Latin factum:
i.e. something ‘has been done’ to tést it.
Serendipity is the observation of an unanticipated, abnormal and
crucial datum: an enigma, an anomaly or a novelty. Cave: the
datum càn sometimes emerge as a marginal and minimal ‘triviality’.
The new and unknown can not be extrapolated logically from the
old and known. If thát would be possible, it wouldn’t be really new.
For something really new and unknown an unpredictable element is
needed: A surprising observation or idea. For a patent a surprise is
even required by law, although it may an unsought finding. Even if an
invention’s useful properties are discovered by ‘accident’, it does not
affect its patentability, as stated éxplicitly in British law.
Reason is logical thinking, as taught at school, in maths, f.e.
Intuition is to anticipate withóut being able to make that explicit, in
prospect, and even in retrospect.
Serendipity is únanticipated and therefore beyónd intuition, and then
it becomes intuition in the making. Intuition and serendipity can also
be taught and learned in theory ánd in practice! Leeuwenhoek: pepper.
In science, technique, art and daily life there are grosso
modo four ways to find something new:
1. Non-serendipity: one finds what one searched without ány crucial ‘accident’, f.e. Yersin’s discovery of the cause of black death: the Yersinia pestis as it is now called.
2. Pseudo-serendipity: a sought finding on an unsought way
f.e. penicillin. Fleming: “The spores didn’t stand up on
the agar and say: ‘I produce an antibiotic, you know?’ ’’
3. Positive serendipity: one finds what one did nót search,
X-rays, f.e. ‘X’ = ‘unknown’ in Arab: ش = ‘sj’ = ‘a thing’.
4. Negative serendipity: one does the surprising observation,
but that observation is nót, or not corréctly, explained, f.e.
Columbus spoke about Indians, as we still do, because he
thought himself, that he had landed in India, until his death!
Serendipity can start as:
1. Enigma: there is no theory to describe, explain and/or
predict the surprising observation, f.e. amber (= ελεκτρον, in Greek) = elektron) can attrack dust, but why?
2. Anomaly: the surprising observation cónflicts with
accepted theories, f.e. ‘nuclear fission’ was serendipitously,
created and discovered when ‘atoms’ were still regarded as
‘unsplittable’. Well, that dogma appeared a wrong idea.
3. Novelty: the surprising observation is néw but nòt in
conflict with accepted theories, f.e. Drais’ surprising
‘vélocipède’ and Kandinsky’s surprising ‘abstract art’.
In original technical, scientific and artistic research, i.e. search,
a searcher limps, walks, jumps with two legs, one leg for:
1. Hypothesis testing: he goes from hypothesis to observation
(provoked or not) for its verification (i.e. confirmation or falsification), f.e. Yersin, as mentioned: the pest appeared indeed to be an infection, as he hypothesized before,as pupil of Pasteur.
and - in opposite direction - the other leg for:
2. Anomaly explaining: he goes from a surprising observation
to a hypothesis, f.e. from ‘nuclear fission’ to the new hypothesis
that atoms cán be split. This hypothesis was then tested and
confirmed. But we still speak about ‘a-toms’, although we now
know ‘better’.
Of course not every surprise emerges by testing of a
new hypothesis. And the test of a new hypothesis offers not
always a surprise. And a surprise gives not always a
fresh hypothesis. And a fresh hypothesis emerges not
always from a surprise.
It is well known that an experimenter, who tests a
hypothesis and observes a surprise, normally asks himself
first: “What went wrong? Did I do something wrong? And if
so: what?” After having excluded that possibility, his
second rational reaction will be to invent another
hypothesis for the surprising observation, test it, et cetera.
So when you think to be wrong you might have found
gold! That is extremely rare of course, but it happens, so
néver exclude it!
Claude Bernard, first a dramatist, later an experimenter:
“We must never neglect anything in our observation of
facts, and I consider it an indispensable rule of
experimental criticism never to admit the existence of an
unproved source of error in an experiment and always
to try to find a reason for the abnormal circumstances
that we observe. Nothing is accidental, and what seems
to us accident is only an unknown fact whose
explanation may furnish the occasion for a more or less
important discovery.”
(Cl. Bernard, Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865),
translated by H.G. Green, Dover, New York, 1957, p. 166.)
“In science, conjecture drives both experiment and
theory for it is only by forming conjectures that we can
make the direction of our experiments and theories
informed. If such and such is true, I should be able to
do this experiment and look for this particular result or
I should be able to do this theoretical formulation.
Conversily, experiment and theory drive conjecture.
One makes a startling observation or has a sudden
insight and begins to speculate on its significance and
implications and to draw possible conclusions. How-
ever, not all conjectures are equally valid or useful.” (Robert Curl, co-discoverer of the ‘Bucky ball’, in his acceptance speech after his
(share in the) Nobelprize for the serendipitous creation and the serendipitous discovery
of this spheric molecule, in 1996)
There are six traditions or sources of serendipity stories:
1. Fairy tales, f.e. roasted pig (Ch. Lamb). My pet sin, etc.
2. Apocryphal, f.e. coffee by Kaldi & the imam.
3. Exaggarated, f.e. Newton’s apple. Paul Valery: “Il
faut être Newton pour aperçevoir que la lune tombe,
quand tout le monde voit bien qu’elle ne tombe pas.”
4. Hidden, f.e. McLean’s discovery of heparin.
5. Probable, f.e. the discovery of the first signs, traces of
what we now call electricity and magnetism. (The Art of
Tracking: The Origin of Science, Louis Liebenberg, 1990)
6. Authentique, Columbus & Vespucci’s New World, f.e.
The four main domains of serendipity are:
1. Science: one discovers what exists, but had not yet been described, explained and/or predicted, ‘X-rays’, f.e.
2. Technique: one invents (in-veno = I come on) something
new, that did nòt yet exist, f.e. Drais’ vélocipède, the
prototype of áll bicycles, to replace horses after an ‘absent
summer’, 1816, after a vulcanic eruption in Indonesia.
3. Art: one creates something fascinating that did nòt
yet exist. Strongly linked to one artist, f.e. Picasso, he wrote:
“Je ne cherche pas, je trouve” (Lettre sur l’art, 1928).
4. Daily life: to ‘fall’ in love, f.e., and the success of the
Honda 50 cc motorcycle, the ‘Supercup’, in the US: aclassic
example of ‘an emerging strategy’ (as Henri Mintzberg, the
management guru, described it correctly).
My study of serendipity makes ten points clear:
1. ‘Serendipity’ does exist. ‘Accidental’ surprising
observations cán sometimes lead to ‘accidental’
discoveries, inventions, creations. Here
‘accidental’ has nót the mathematical meaning
at random, but the psychológical connotation of
an surprising
observation that ‘fálls to’ (ad-cadere) you, ‘sine
anticipatio mentis’, as Francis Bacon wrote, i.e.
‘without hypothesis beforehand’. Explain: Bacon’s
‘The hunt of Pan’ -> Ceres -> Walpole, who
called this well known phenomenon serendipity.
2. In strongly empirical scientific disciplines such
as chemistry, astronomy, physics, drug research,
medicine, technique, serendipity appears to be
most frequent. In those fields it is also much
easier to test whether a ‘finding’ is really a
finding or not. A chemist wrote ‘serendipity at
work’, as a modern version of animism. The old
Greek called magnetic stones and amber ‘stones
with a soul’, because of their enigmatic character.
Did the Celts put their Celtic stones apart, because
of the ‘soul’, or ‘the hand of God’ in them?
3. Serendipity plays a supporting but essential role, that
should not be underestimated or exaggerated. The
astronomer Harwit studied 43 observational discoveries of
cosmic phenomena and he found that about half of them
took place in a more or less serendipitous manner:
“This does put into some some doubt the normal criteria for
the peer review, because the normal criteria tend to request
a theoretical justification for the work you are going to be
doing. Whether you are asking for telescope time or
whatever you are going to do.”
(K. Kellerman & B. Sheets, Serendipitous Discoveries in Astronomy, Radio Astronomy
Observatory, Green Bank, W.V., USA, 1983, p. 206-7)
4. Systematic, directed (re)search and serendipity
do not exclude each other, but complement and
even reinforce each other. In theory ànd practice
innovation proceeds not by design òr by serendipity,
but rather by design ànd by serendipity. And they
influence each other also, as in Goodyear’s
vulcanisation of natural latex: by mixing and heating
it with sulfur, and than spilling it - by error - on
his hot stove. Goodyear explained the resulting
vulcanisation as not as ‘an accident’ but as the result
of ‘God’s will’, because Goodyear worked so hard!
5. The practical role of serendipity is mainly underestimated
by the way we rationalize a posteriori about theoretical and
experimental research and its results when we publish. The
not strictly rational, chronological or searched components
(like chance, fortuna (luck), accident, error, surprise,
unsought, never thought or dreamt of, unknown), which
have led to the results are then underestimated and
sometimes even banned from the theater and hidden behind
the decor. Pure rationality then becomes the norm, regarding
the results, ánd regarding everything that has led to the
results: such as the insight story, the how it really happened
story and the story behind the story. And a scientific article
becomes then a ‘retrospective prophecy’, or even a
‘scientific fraud’.
6. As we learned from Heraclitus (“Expect the unexpected,
otherwise you will not discover truth.”), the sofists (“One
can not look for the unknown, because then you do not
know where to look for.”), Hooke, Priestley and other
great scholars, the notion of chance findings, i.e. unsought
findings is of course much older than the word
serendipity.
The old Greeks even had a ‘god for the unknown’. But
then, according to the bible at least, the Christians came,
saw and said that the Greek ‘unknown god’ was their
‘God’. That was of course a black page in history. But
that Hellenistic ‘god for the unknown’ can be restored
by cúltivating serendipity, instead of márginalizing it.
7. Most serendipitists are open minded, perceptive, curious,
intuitive, smart, flexible, artistic, erudite (e-rudite = not
rude [any more]), humorous & diligent. You first have to
learn and to know what you can expect, before you can
observe, know, discover, study and exploit the unexpected.
Pattle: “Some writers refer to a discovery based on
observation of something that was not actually being
investigated, as a ‘chance’ or ‘accidental’ discovery. This
is never true. Observations are made because the observer
is on the outlook of anything strange. The discovery of lung
surfactant came about as the result of a peculiar
concatenation of circumstances, but not as the product of
chance or accident.” (R.E. Pattle, as cited by J.H. Comroe, Retrospectroscope,
Menlo Park, Von Gehr, 1977, p. 177)
8. Serendipity is the art of ‘loose blinders’. Also a serendipi-
tist needs blinders, and he also must stay able to take them
off, after doing a surprising observation, in order to figure
out the right abduction and/or an optimal emerging strategy.
Time, space and freedom are needed for this ‘bootlegging’.
At Shell R&D there is 10% time for ‘personal research’, at
Dupont R&D 20%; at 3M R&D 30%. At universities 100%?
Yes, the so-called ‘drawer research’: you ask and get money
for a study that was already done with success, but not yet
published. In the then payed time you are totally free to
search what you want. When the financer asks your results,
you send your unpublished positive results. Communistic
countries filled their 5-year plans also with unpublished
successful research to created the crucial freedom of search.
9. Like all intuitive operating, serendipity can nót be
programmed or planned. If thát would be possible, it
wouldn’t be serendipity anymore. Á ll we can prógram is,
that íf a searcher stumbles on a surprising observation, he
géts and tákes the freedom, the time and the facilities to
explóre and eláborate it. The moral of my speech is that you
should always keep one eye open for sought findings and
the other eye for unsought findings. The freedom of
opportunity to profit from the unexpected, as Langmuir
called it, is an essential aspect of visionair research. Refering
to Heraclitus: “Expect álso the unexpected!” Because
serendipity is like “Looking for a needle in a haystack and
rolling out with the farmer’s daughter.” (As J.H. Comroe wrote)
10. Alexander Fleming said, in 1959: “The researcher must be at
liberty to follow wherever a new discovery may lead him. Every
researcher should have a certain amount of time for himself, so
as to be able to work out his own ideas without having to give an
account of them to anybody - unless he wants to.
Momentous things may happen in a man’s free time.
Thirst for immediate results is by no means uncommon, but it is
extremely harmful. Really valuable research is a long-term
affair. It may well that nothing of practical utility will emerge
from a laboratory for years on end. Then all of a sudden
something will turn up, very different perhaps from what was
being looked for, which will cover the cost of the lab for a
hundred years.” (A. Maurois, La vie de Sir Alexander Fleming, 1959; The life of Sir Alexander
Fleming, tr. G. Hopkins, Pinguin Books, 1963, p. 310)
Claude Bernard had an “extraordinary capacity for noting in the
course of an experiment a fact that was somewhat marginal and
did not accord with the prevailing theory.’’ (M.D. Grmek, ‘Bernard,
Claude’ Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Ch.C. Gillespie, Ch. Schribner’s Sons,
New York, 1981, p. 32) To underline the crucial importance of this
talent, research communities, should decide to give serendipity
prizes for their best unsought findings. This way mavericks are
cultivated instead of marginalized, as still happens, to often, and
more and more. And to bring the crucial role of ‘Friday afternoon
experiments’ under the lime light and its possible results also. If
they decide to do so, it will attract not only a lot of free publicity,
but, more importantly, it optimalises the initiation and creation of
original knowledge! And don’t be afraid that the result will be, that
“We get then even more people, who start to fumble around!”, as a
micromanager complained, when the first serendipity prize was
awarded in the Netherlands, at my suggestion.
The forty types of serendipity I found show how
polymorphous the phenomenon serendipity is.
These types don’t exclude each other, they
overlap and reinforce each other, and do help to
expect the unexpected and to find the unsought.
Serendipity, like stupidity, is an intrinsic aspect of
human behavior and an universal comic post hoc
phenomenon. It is ‘l’imagination au pouvoir (Paris,
1968) for the individual searchers and groupes, in
its most democratic form. Planning is a must, but a
plan is not holy. Dare to follow your own track. As
Hamlet said: ‘‘Readiness is all.’’ FIN
And you? Are you serendípity prone, or nót serendipity prone?
Sanda Erdelez, grew up in Croatia and is now an ‘information scientist’
at the University of Missouri. She sees serendipity as something that
people do, and interviewed about hundred people to find out how they
created their own serendipity, and she found these three groups:
1. Non-encounters. They followed their to-do-lists when searching
information, rather than wandering off into the margins.
2. Occasional encounters. They stumbled sometimes on serendipities.
3. Super-encounters. They reported that happy surprises popped up
wherever they looked. They loved to browse, say, in a Victorian journal
on cattle breeding, in part, because they counted on finding treasures in
the oddest places. They were so addicted to prospecting that they would
find information for friends & colleagues, and became super-encounters,
in part because they possess special powers of perception, like an
invisible set of antennas that leads to clues.
Pagan Kennedy, 'How to cultivate the Art of Serendipity', The New York Times, Sunday Review, Jan 2,
2016.
I found forty patterns of serendipity:
1. One single surprising observation is done and correctly
explained, f.e. Buchner preserved fresh yeast juice with sugar: it produced CO2 + alcohol! Not the intact yeast cell, but the enzymes ín it, did it! And, in 1907, he got a Nobel Prize for his discovery of ‘enzymes’.
2. ‘Heaping of cases’: one single and identical surprising
observation is repeatedly done, before it gets correctly
explained, f.e. Softenon babies; Aids; ketons in urine (nose!)
3. Several different surprising observations reveal the
same surprising phenomenon, f.e. Agassiz’ glacial
periods theory; Wegener’s continental drift theory.
4. One surprising observation of an analogy in the sàme
context, f.e. Darwin & Wallace > Malthus; Semmelweis.
5. One surprising observation of an analogy in a
different context, f.e. the stethoscope (ears!); percussion
(ears!); Pilkington’s floating glass.
6. Bionics: a surprising observation of a structure in the
living nature ‘asks’ for an application, f.e. flying birds
plane; wasps’ nest > paper; bur > Velcro: hoop & loop.
7. Inverted bionics: the observation of a technical device
was crucial to understand the function of an organ
in the living nature, f.e. the heart as a ‘pump’; the eye as
a camera obscura. Transformator > enzym function.
8. A surprising observation through ‘personal analogy’,
f.e. Archimedes’ method to test the purity of the gold in
the crown of King Hero. And your arm in a full bath?
9. A surprising observation thanks to a crucial new
scientific instrument, f.e. Van Leeuwenhoeck’s discovery
of ‘bacteria’ in pepper corns in water; radioastronomy;
my iconoclastic MRI-scan and -video of the human coitus.
10. A surprising observation with a control, f.e. Vesalius
with a human skeleton and a monkey’s skeleton; Fleming:
local signs of ‘penicillin’, with a negative control around?
11. A surprising observation in a control, f.e. ‘natural
radioactivity’; rinsing ears with cold, warm & hot water;
Cade’s lithium.
12. A surprising observation done by A, correctly explained
by B, f.e. Columbus &Vespucci; Rosetta Stone explained by
Champollion; Valentin & Purkinje; Mitscherlich & Pasteur.
13. Predicted by A, and independently ànd surprisingly
found by B, f.e. Brown’s movement discovery &
Einstein’s prediction; Bell’s ‘pulsars’; the ‘bucky ball’.
14. Two different surprising observations made by two
different observers lead to the same finding, f.e.
Rumford & Mayer; Isoniazide against TBC by Huant &
Chorine in 1954.
15. Successful error, f.e. ‘maatjes’-herring); V-style
ski jump.
16. Successful error of an assistant f.e. Ringer’s
solution by an intentional (Sic !) mistake; Chanel 5
(nose!); electricity conducting polymers.
17. Successful accident, f.e. Daguerreotype; penicillin;
‘Post-its’; ink-jet-printing.
18. From side-effect to main effect, f.e. valproic acid;
Zyban; Viagra (surprising effect on corpora spongiosa!).
19. From byproduct to main product, f.e. aniline > mauve.
20. ‘Experiment of nature’, f.e. Beaumont’s walking
lab (a soldier with a fistle to his stomach, which
appeared to be a ‘fermentation vessel’). (W. Beaumont,
Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and on Physiological
Digestion, Boston, 1834), Koch’s cooked potatoes with moulds
on it; Fleming’s penicillin.
21. Alternative use, f.e. the condom, Guthenberg’s
use of a wine press to print; gloves to protect a nurse;
A ‘Diners Card’ became a ‘Credit Card’; container
transport started to avoid tax when passing frontiers
between every two states of the U.S.
22. ‘Wrong’ hypothesis offers a surprising
observation, f.e. phosphor; radar; Cade’s lithium.
23. Inversion: one finds the opposite of what one
searches, f.e. superconductivity; heparin; Linear B.
24. Enigma: no hypothesis, f.e. amber attracts dust:
why?; meteorites: why?; nuclear fission: why?
25. ‘Folklore’ as source of surprises, f.e. cow pox
vaccination, by Jenner; asperin; thé pill; copper bracelets
against rheuma.
26. Animal, child, student, outsider, f.e. Daguerre; Bell;
Gregg’s mothers of pqtients; Ridley; Lascaux; Altamira.
27. A crucial chance encounter between experts, f.e. soft
contact lens; interferon; Goretex.
28. Disturbance as source a surprising observation, f.e.
Méliès’ ‘jump cut’, Janski’s radio-astronomy: a new
scientific discipline!; the discovery of the ‘fossil
radiowaves’ of the Big Bang.
29. Quantitive anomalies, f.e. Kepler’s ellipsoid
orbit, his 19th hypothesis!; ‘Invar’; argon.
30. Scarcity, f.e. Paré; cigaret; Senefelder’s
lithography; expresso coffee; 6H>HB>6B pencils.
31. An improvisation becomes eternal, f.e.
Struwwelpeter; tapis de caniveaux; ‘microcredit’.
32. Interruption of work, f.e. Cognac (nose!); Port>
Madeira (nose!), Aqualinea (nose!); Spätlese
(nose!); Eiswein (nose!); glycogenesis;
Malinowski’s ‘participant observation’;
Worcestershire Sauce; Helicobacter pylori.
33. Play leads to the surprise, f.e. telescope; Reuters-
värd’s ‘impossible triangle’; terre armée; ‘Frisbee’.
34. Joke leads to novelty, f.e. the railway álmost to the
point of the Matterhorn; ‘love between the magnets’.
35. ‘Hasard intime, de lecture, et de la plume’, f.e.
Descartes’ dream; Darwin & Wallace reading, or
having read Malthus’ book On population (1798) .
36. The surprising finding appears revolutionary, f.e.
Wöhler’s ureum (1828); Buchner’s ‘zymase’ (1897), X-
rays (1895), natural radioactivity (1895), nuclear fission
(1938), Laborit’s chlorpromazine (1952).
37. An unexpected effect of a wanted intervention, f.e.
the clock; class education; Rosa Parks, from 1955 onwards
the ‘Mother of the Modern Day Civil Rights Movement’.
38. Supposed serendipity, presented as true, f.e.
Ø rsted’s electromagnetism; Nobel’s dynamite.
39. Fabricated serendipity, f.e. Newton’s apple;
Kékulé’s benzene; the clock tower of Bern; ‘Vacuvin’.
40. Serendipity applied, but nòt noticed as such by the
finder himself, f.e. Albert van Giffen’s application of the
botanic x-, y- and z-parameters in open air archeology.
Again: These forty types show how polymorphous the
phenomenon serendipity is. These types don’t exclude
but overlap and reinforce each other, and dó help to expéct
the únexpected and to find únsought & sóugh findings.
Citations: “Chance favors only prepared minds.” (L. Pasteur, 1854)
“Someone who finds what he is looking for generally does
a good job of a student; thinking of what he desires, he
often neglects signs, sometimes minimal, that bring
something that differs from the foreseen object. The true
researcher must know to give attention to signs that will
unveil the existence of a phenomenon that he does not
expect.” (L. Leprince-Ringuet, Des atomes et des hommes, Fayard,1945, p. 57-58)
“When you run into something interesting, drop every-
thing else and study it!” (B.F. Skinner, Am. Psychol. 1956, 11, p. 221)
Which means to me: “When you stumble on an enigma,
an anomaly or a novelty, invent an optimal abduction and
test it!” I wish you serendipity at your wórk ánd at hóme.
