How Does Serendipity Spark Unexpected Breakthroughs in Science?

What Are the Best Examples of Serendipity and Accidental Scientific Discoveries?

Discover how serendipity shapes scientific history and learn how accidental discoveries like penicillin and X-rays led to some of the world’s greatest breakthroughs.

Ready to uncover the surprising role of luck and chance in scientific progress? Keep reading to explore Telmo Pievani’s fascinating examples of serendipitous discoveries and learn how a prepared mind can turn an accident into a massive breakthrough!

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The concept of serendipity traces back to a medieval Persian fairy tale. Sometimes significant breakthroughs in science, technology, and even criminal investigations occur as a result of what 18th-century British writer Horace Walpole called “serendipity” — details you run into more or less by accident that lead to connections and insights you weren’t pursuing. No one takes advantage of serendipity randomly; you must mentally prepare to capitalize on unexpected good fortune. Examples include the invention of Post-it notes, the discovery of penicillin, and the esoteric mathematics that makes modern physics viable.

Take-Aways

• Archimedes made an important discovery — while lounging in a bath.
• A medieval Persian poet wrote a masterpiece that influenced generations of Western thinkers.
• Voltaire explored reason and the unexpected in an Oriental tale — and anticipated scientists.
• Serendipity is finding what you’re not looking for.
• Anticipating the unexpected can lead to dazzling discoveries.
• Some circumstances favor taking advantage of serendipity.
• Nature is more vast than any sum of human knowledge.
• The relationship between physics and mathematics is the ultimate serendipity.

Summary

Archimedes made an important discovery — while lounging in a bath.

In ancient Greece, an Athenian tyrant entrusted gold to a craftsman to create crowns. The tyrant suspected the craftsman was cheating him and asked the mathematician Archimedes whether an objective way to check existed. The solution came to Archimedes as he observed the changing level of the steaming water of the bath he was lounging in: The quantity of displaced water equaled the volume of the submerged object, whether that was a human body or a gold crown. Archimedes had his “Eureka!” moment while relaxing in a bath, his mind probably wandering. He proved that the craftsman had mixed less dense silver into the gold. Archimedes’ intuitive revelation and insight enabled Galileo, many years later, to measure the density of bodies.

“Archimedes did not accidentally find something he had not been looking for. On the contrary, he received a specific assignment from his king. Archimedes had received a specific task; in short, he had to solve a practical problem.”

Some dispute how Archimedes came up with his solution. The 5th-century CE Latin Grammarian Priscianus, for example, suggested that Archimedes submerged a scale in water, and placed in it the disputed crown and a pile of gold, comparing their relative balance. Still, Archimedes found what he was looking for. In solving a specific problem, he ended up confirming more general principles.

A medieval Persian poet wrote a masterpiece that influenced generations of Western thinkers.

In what’s now India, at the beginning of the 14th century, Amir Khusrau wrote in Persian. A contemporary of Dante, scholars regard him as the greatest Persian poet of that era. Khusrau’s masterpiece is Eight Tales of Paradise. Containing quotations from Plutarch and Virgil, Eight Tales of Paradise offers a version of the conniving goldsmith tale familiar from Archimedes. Khusrau’s version of the tale involves a purportedly pure gold elephant — and the craftsman swindles the king out of a significant amount of the gold by replacing it with copper. The king discovers the deception, and condemns the craftsman to starve atop an obelisk.

“The ruler is so impressed by his cunning and experience that he decides to be lenient and hires him as an assistant. The moral is that ‘he who is endowed with a spirit of endeavor, earns half a kingdom.’ All of Khusrau’s novellas, in an atmosphere of sensual eroticism, are heaped in subterfuge, magic, a search for clues, stratagems, and intelligence tests.”

Khusrau’s tales eventually involve the Kingdom of Serendip and its three princes, who wander the world seeking wisdom and meaning. Khusrau’s stories concern the accidents and contingencies of observation and travel. Khusrau’s tales emerge from Arabic, Persian, and Indian oral traditions. Their underlying themes invariably involve the value of open, free investigation and how people attempt to interpret the world — especially aspects of the world that elude the senses. Much later, European incarnations of Khusrau’s masterpiece depict Serendip’s princes as detectives. The world is complicated and confusing, full of signs and symptoms and wonders.

By the 18th century, interest in England and France in these “Oriental” tales peaked, and translations were widely available. Among the enthusiasts was the eccentric British aristocrat and man of letters, Horace Walpole. Adept at languages, Walpole coined the term “serendipity.” According to Walpole, serendipity involves making new discoveries, partly through happenstance and partly through intelligence and wisdom.

Voltaire explored reason and the unexpected in an Oriental tale — and anticipated scientists.

In the mid-18th century, the French Enlightenment rationalist Voltaire became interested in a translation of the adventures of the princes of Serendip. Voltaire’s iteration of the tales and their themes doesn’t involve the kingdom of Serendip. Set in the 9th century, Voltaire’s Babylonian protagonist is “Zadig,” a name that derives from the Arabic and Hebrew word for “wisdom.” In his efforts to achieve happiness, and elude the vagaries and injustices of human life, Zadig adopts “Rules of Reason” and lives his life based on logical principles. And, like the princes of Serendip, Zadig has unusual investigative powers, which he deploys in his wanderings across the Middle East.

“In addition to the irony about ancient science and the sentimental misfortunes of the protagonist, we find throughout the story the ability to solve riddles, tests of quick wit, tales of mysteries revealed, and interpretations of minutiae, details, and ‘Thousand Variations’ where others see only uniformity.”

Walpole understood serendipity as finding something you weren’t looking for but were open to finding. Voltaire’s Zadig, by contrast, wasn’t really looking for anything, other than to bring order and meaning to an otherwise chaotic, unpredictable universe. Zadig observed the world in a refined, nuanced way, and reconstructed a world based on signs and traces. Voltaire’s tale is a prototype for detective stories. The distance between Zadig and Sherlock Holmes isn’t far. The distance between Zadig and scientific investigation isn’t far, either. The French paleontologist and anatomist Georges Cuvier claimed that his job as an investigator was exactly that of Voltaire’s Zadig.

Serendipity is finding what you’re not looking for.

Cuvier’s comment on Voltaire’s story made its way to the British evolutionary biologist Thomas H. Huxley, who suggested that “circumstantial knowledge” is crucial to understanding the natural world and its past. But by then, some version of serendipity had snaked its way through Western thought. Renaissance master Michel de Montaigne already claimed that medicine and effective diagnosis were mostly a matter of good fortune. Inveterate experimentalist Robert Hooke insisted that inventions are difficult to predict in advance and occur to some extent from accident and good fortune. Horace Walpole’s contemporary, Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen, insisted on the importance of chance in scientific research and discovery.

“Observations of events not yet understood attracted the scientist’s attention by chance, without any preconceived plan or known theory. A bit of mercury, the sun’s rays, a candle, and hence the discovery of a ‘new air’; oxygen, Priestley confessed in 1775, was completely unrelated to his initial hypotheses.”

By the mid-19th century, French chemist and biologist Louis Pasteur took the opposite position. You must take advantage of chance observations, he thought, but only when you already have a theory. Theory always takes precedence over chance. In the realm of serendipitous discoveries, Pasteur’s comments helped establish a tension between chance and the “prepared mind.” The founder of physiology and philosopher of science Claude Bernard insisted on the primacy of chance. New scientific observations can be fortuitous, and theories and hypotheses thus must adapt.

Anticipating the unexpected can lead to dazzling discoveries.

Serendipity can derive from pure accident. You might wander around without any specific aim, making discoveries more or less by chance. On the other hand, you might search for one thing but find something else, which has frequently happened to scientific researchers. In a sense, you find something you didn’t even know you were looking for. Or you might discover something you were already looking for by running across it inadvertently. You might find something you’re looking for by deploying systematic, rational principles, such as, for example, the scientific method.

“Although distinguished works have titles that allude to the ‘logic of scientific discovery,’ in reality philosophers of science have often considered the context of discovery to be an almost elusive dimension, which is more psychological than methodological, and so within the domain of factors that are not entirely rational.”

Biochemist Ohid Yaqub received a grant to study how to anticipate improbable events and how to “find logic in the illogical.” Sometimes spectacular discoveries — and inventions — appear by a stroke of good luck and sudden insight. Alexander Fleming, for example, discovered penicillin through a chance observation. Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays while experimenting with electricity and gases. Scientists might call the presence of serendipity in scientific inquiry the “science of the unexpected.”

Some circumstances favor taking advantage of serendipity.

In the mid-1950s, two radio astronomers, one in France and the other in Ukraine, detected microwave radiation — evidence of the Big Bang. Faced with the possibility of a major breakthrough, they attributed it to a distortion caused by their instruments and moved on. While surprising and disappointing, this sort of incident isn’t uncommon. How many other important serendipitous discoveries have been cast aside?

“If we could understand the circumstances in which serendipity flourishes, we would be able to promote it by adopting the appropriate measures.”

What circumstances — what context and culture — best facilitate taking advantage of serendipity? Renaissance promoter of empirical investigation and the scientific method, Francis Bacon, insisted that only curiosity and a desire for truth should fuel experiment and inquiry. Perhaps a precondition for people being open to serendipity is that financial or political concerns should not influence scientific research. Can researchers plan in advance for serendipity and the unexpected? Perhaps the best approach is to avoid narrowly planning any specific form of research. Funding and promoting research is always a productive idea.

Nature is more vast than any sum of human knowledge.

Serendipity is all about luck, good or bad. Serendipity is a moment when the unpredictable and unanticipated suddenly emerge from the otherwise chaotic and irrational world — and ultimately help people impose order on that world. In the early 1960s, an American mathematician was working on a moderately complex atmospheric circulation model — it had 12 variables and 3 nonlinear differential equations. He plugged the model into a computer, took a break while the computer solved the values in his model, and when he got back he saw that the computer had done something he hadn’t anticipated. Instead of the current weather, it analyzed and predicted the weather a few days later.

“In nonlinear systems, where there are so many interconnected factors interacting, sometimes small local perturbations — small causes — can have large impacts on the whole system.”

The mathematician commented that, given the factors involved in systems as a whole, a butterfly moving its wings on one side of the world could, in principle, cause a hurricane on the other side. The world stabilizes itself and the “butterfly effects” don’t occur. Serendipity is a kind of butterfly effect. Researchers or even wandering travelers disrupt largely unknown systems in a world that’s overwhelming, and so discover something previously unknown. Serendipity enables people to discover aspects of the world that they didn’t know they didn’t know about.

The relationship between physics and mathematics is the ultimate serendipity.

Serendipity in science, such as the discovery of penicillin or oxygen, derives from stray observations and making a larger connection that proves significant. The relationship of physics to mathematics is similar, but for most people more difficult to grasp. Imagine you’re a mathematician and create a mathematical system with axioms, theorems, equations, and various proofs. For you, it’s an abstract, closed system with its own importance and beauty, and doesn’t describe anything in the physical world. But a generation or so later, a young physicist, working with an entirely different picture of the physical world, might rediscover your mathematical work and realize that he or she can apply it to some aspect of the physical world.

“How is it possible that the human mind can, in the privacy of its own contemplations, anticipate physical worlds that exist out there but have yet to be brought to light? Why do we sometimes find answers to questions that have yet to be asked?”

Scientists deal with a world that extends far beyond the limits of their knowledge. In some instances advanced mathematics, by contrast, actually anticipates reality. Mathematicians first create a vision of the world, and only later that mathematician — or someone else — relates the mathematical vision to the physical world. The relationship between mathematics and physics mirrors the relationship between the mind and the world. Scientists, and thinkers in general, always try to break free from a standard, conventional picture of the world. To do that, sometimes they must imagine a new world.

About the Author

Full Professor at the Department of Biology, University of Padua Telmo Pievani also wrote Imperfection: A Natural History.