It is a charming story that Sir Horace Walpole recounted in a letter to Horace Mann of
January 28, 1754, coining serendipity
as he made a passing observation on a sociopolitical event of the day: “this
discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very
expressive word.” He derived it from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka, where
it was part of the title of a “silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip; as their highnesses travelled, they
were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they
were not in quest of … One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental
sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this
description) was of my Lord Shaftesbury, who happening to dine at Lord
Chancellor Clarendon’s, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs.
Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table.”
Now, this is not the kind of serendipity that interests me much, but it
may have captured the imagination of the 4th Earl of Orford. Yet,
the role of serendipity in all things human remains underrated to an almost
shocking extent, and so I encountered with great interest the posthumous oeuvre
of Robert King Merton
& Elinor Barber, The Travels and
Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology
of Science (2004). It was penned by two great Columbians: while Barber
gave early thought to scholarly diversity, Merton,
a founding father of modern sociology, put sociology of science on the map,
for which he received the National Medal of Science. My fascination with the
topic, prodded along with a Times
Higher Education review bringing up Helga Novotny’s memories of Sir
Karl Popper Memorial Lecture at LSE in 2013, brought me to her The Cunning of Uncertainty (2015).
Alexander Fleming was one of those who could not complain about
disfavor by Lady Luck. In 1928, the Scottish bacteriologist noticed that his
staphylococci cultures had been contaminated by fungal mold spores of the genus
penicillium notatum that happened to
kill the germs he had cultured to study causation of pneumonia. Fleming’s
discovery was, of course, just one of several possible outcomes: the spores
could not have entered or not have taken hold in his culture. He could have
found a different method to attack bacterial germs. Or another scientist could
have ventured across mold spores in due time.
Sir Isaac Newton saw an apple fall from a tree and started thinking
about gravity, perhaps the single most serendipitous use of this fruit since
Eve.
And serendipity’s cornucopia is not without conditions and demands:
fortuitous accident serves us only if we recognize its significance – and here,
Walpole made a major point: “for you must observe that no discovery of a thing
you are looking for comes under this
description,” and there are many who are all too obsessed with what they are
looking for so they neglect solutions of equal or greater value outside their
current focus. High-temperature superconductivity was discovered by a French
team before Johannes Georg Bednorz and Karl Alexander Müller did at IBM Labs
and fetched the 1987 Nobel Prize in Physics – but they had failed to notice its
significance.
In 1922, an unhealthy habit of inhaling strong cigar smoke enabled
Otto Stern and Walter Gerlach to make quantum spin observable: as the German
scientists channeled silver atoms through a magnetic field, the chain smokers
continued to chuff cigars. Sulphur in cigar smoke reacted with the silver
atoms, enabling them to make directional spin of particles visible for the
first time. Bretislav Friedrich and
Dudley Herschbach, then at Harvard, proved in a 2003 paper “Stern
and Gerlach: How a Bad Cigar Helped Reorient Atomic Physics.”
As foundational research is increasingly under pressure by governments
and research funding to produce applied results, open innovation and
distributed innovation are breaking new ground for serendipity that remains
indispensable to pure science.
But for almost any area of policy, even more essential than
serendipity – if closely related to it conceptually (as outcomes not foreseen
and intended by purposeful action, as, again, Merton described them) – are
unintended consequences, a seriously neglected aspect in any area of research
and development. They include unexpected
benefits, unexpected detriments (“blowbacks”), and what may be described as “perverse results,” virtuous
as well as vicious circles of complex chains of events that reinforce
themselves through feedback loops. I plan to write more here about these
phenomena in the coming year, as part of a more generalized theory of rational
choice, Black Swan events, diverse priorities, and the influence of probability
and randomness on different branches of logic.
