Serendipity

The word serendipity traces back to a Persian fairy tale about The Three Princes of Serendip who were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” (Wikipedia)

Inspired, here are a few meanings for serendipity I found.

• a “fortunate or happy unplanned coincidence” (Wikipedia)
   
• “The occurrence and development of events by chance in a satisfactory  or beneficial way, understanding the chance as any event that takes place in the absence of any obvious project (randomly or accidentally), which is not relevant to any present need, or in which the cause is unknown.”
  (New Oxford Dictionary of English/ Wikipedia)
   
• “Happy accident” is a phrase I especially like. It reminds me of comments actors made after working with David Lynch, who often incorporates mistakes that happen during filming into his work.
   
• the ability to make fortunate discoveries accidentally.
  (New York Times – an article that is a little ranty but has great gems like a moment with Tom Wolfe expressing late in life open-heartedness)
   
• a blend of chance and agency (The Economist)

And I was super surprised to find that serendipity has been taken as an object of serious inquiry by sociologists and business persons, even scientists.  But a key point in those focuses has to do with the effort and preparation of the seeker(s), in creating an atmosphere that includes possibilities for surprise.

• “Innovations presented as examples of serendipity have an important characteristic: they were made by individuals able to “see bridges where others saw holes” and connect events creatively, based on the perception of a significant link.” (Wikipedia)
   
• The history of scientific discovery is peppered with breakthroughs that came about by accident. The most momentous was Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928, prompted when he noticed how a mould that floated into his Petri dish killed off the surrounding bacteria.Spencer and Fleming didn’t just get lucky. Spencer had the nous and the knowledge to turn his observation into innovation; only an expert on bacteria would have been ready to see the significance of Fleming’s stray spore. As Louis Pasteur wrote, “In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.” >snip< These days, we tend to associate serendipity with luck, and we neglect the sagacity. But some conditions are more conducive to accidental discovery than others. (The Economist, 2012)

A few weeks later:

As happens to lucky individuals ;-), it only took a little while before my inquiry about serendipity began to yield results I was not actively looking for, like this fascinating Scientific American article (shared by Eos), “The Role of Luck in Life Success is Far Greater Than We Realized.”

The article is full of questions and a few very useful charts, pointing to potentially quite practical applications, such as reasons for even-handed and diverse distributions of funds contributing to the overall good of societies over time.  Happy alarm bells went off for me however, upon mention of a biochemist named Ohid Yaqub, who was recently awarded a grant of almost a million and a half dollars, to study serendipity’s role in science.

My earlier post mentioned serendipity as a serious inquiry in science for many years, which had surprised me when I did my light research on the topic; my main focus there had been the mere contemplation of serendipity in one’s personal life, and that as a worthwhile venture.  Underneath my questions were considerations of the way writing often happens, with disparate strings resonating from the end of a story backwards, or the way, if you’ve ever worked on a free-form mosaic or painting, a clear and meaningful picture often emerges.

That this is a current serious scientific inquiry at such a high level, tickles me like crazy.

An article in the  The Journal of Nature, “The Serendipity Test” (referenced in the Scientific American piece) states that Yaqub has zeroed in on 4 categories of serendipity:

First, he defines serendipity in a way that goes beyond happy accidents, by classifying it into four basic types (O. Yaqub Res. Policy 47, 169–179; 2018). The first type is where research in one domain leads to a discovery in another — such as when 1943 investigations into the cause of a mustard-gas explosion led to the idea of using chemotherapy to treat cancer. Another is a completely open hunt that brings about a discovery, such as with Röntgen’s X-rays. Then there are the discoveries made when a sought-for solution is reached by an unexpected path, as with the accidental discovery of how to vulcanize rubber. And some discoveries find a solution to a problem that only later emerges: shatterproof glass for car windscreens was first observed in a dropped laboratory flask.

He has also identified a few ways these seem to come about (please refer to the article), an intriguing one of which of which is ‘controlled sloppiness’, which I hear as PLAY and keep playing.  To me, play seems our natural inclination as humans, chicken-and-egg with imagination and expansion. We play with ideas and conduct tests and experiments to find our way around every day, if we stop to notice.

To go beyond the shore, one usually has to first see beyond the shore, and maybe lucky individuals are born with a wider range of reference points and ideas of options. Or maybe they experience lots of love and support, so life appears to have a very sturdy or bouncy net, which may give greater permission to leap.

Perhaps also, everyone has some spots of luck in their life, some bright cards to play.

So we keep playing.