Serendipity35

"In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind."  - Louis Pasteur

Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely.

Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber coauthored The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity which traces the origins and uses of the word "serendipity"and their subtitle, "a study in sociological semantics and the sociology of science", hints at the idea of serendipity as scientific "method."

Most of us were trained in the scientific method starting in elementary school. Probably most of us would agree that a prepared and also an open mind is critical to the scientist.

Every student has encountered the tale of Isaac Newton's famous apple falling from a tree and leading him to ponder about the nature of gravitation. You probably remember the story of Archimedes' cry of "Eureka" when he realized that his body had displaced the water in the bathtub and that could be a way to measure the volume of any irregular body placed in water. True or not, they make nice examples for children about looking for new things in unlikely places.

There are a other good number of "documented" cases of serendipitous discoveries.

• German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz dreams about a snake chasing itself and forming a circle and it leads him the next day to his solution of the closed chemical structure of cyclic compounds, such as benzene.
• Christopher Columbus was looking for a new way to India in 1492 and wound up landing in The Americas.
• Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) was discovered by Albert Hofmann while trying to find medically useful derivatives in ergot, a fungus growing on wheat. The Swiss chemist discovered LSD's properties by unintentionally ingesting it at his lab. He wrote (hopefully after the trip): "It is true that my discovery of LSD was a chance discovery, but it was the outcome of planned experiments and these experiments took place in the framework of systematic pharmaceutical, chemical research. It could better be described as serendipity."
• The planet Uranus discovered by William Herschel while looking for comets. He thought it was a comet until he noticed the circularity of its orbit and its distance. It was the first new planet discovered since antiquity.
• Another one from your science book concerns penicillin and Alexander Fleming who just failed to disinfect cultures of bacteria when leaving for vacation. Back from holiday, he finds them contaminated with penicillium molds, which killed the bacteria.
• Let us not ignore James Wright trying to find a rubber substitute for the United States during World War II and ending up with Silly Putty. Many a product has come from the serendipity labs.
• After leaving a hot soldering iron by accident on his pen and noting the ink was ejected from the pen's point, a Canon engineer discovers the principle behind inkjet printers. It would take years for marketing people to discover they could make more money selling overpriced ink cartridges by giving away the printers at low costs.
• The vulcanization of rubber process by Charles Goodyear opped up when he accidentally left a piece of rubber mixture with sulfur on a hot plate.
• Continuing the trend of absent-minded professors is Percy Spencer testing a magnetron for radar sets at Raytheon and finding that the peanut candy bar in his pocket had melted when exposed to the radar waves. Hello, microwave popcorn.
• Hurrah to U.S. Navy engineer Richard T. James for clumsily knockeing a torsion spring off his work table and observing its unique motion AND for creating the Slinky!
• Hans Christian Oersted was setting up his materials for a lecture and noticed a compass needle deflecting from magnetic north when the electric current from the battery he was using was switched on and off. Eureka, it's electromagnetism!
• Of course, you need good, trained observers. If I had observed that milkmaids did not catch smallpox after exposure to benign cowpox, I probably would have been paying more attention to their milky skin and missed out on discovering vaccination like English physician Edward Jenner.
• I owe a genetic hat tip to Oskar Minkowski for paying attention to some dogs that had their pancreas removed for experiments. They urinated profusely and their urine attracted flies because of its high glucose content. He made the less serendipitous leap to see the role of the pancreas in glucose metabolism which led to studies of diabetics.

"...you don't reach Serendib by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere
and lose your bearings... serendipitously."  - John Barth, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

As much as I love serendipity, I might have called this blog Synchronicity53 if I had thought about where we were headed back in 2006.

I came upon synchronicity in a serendipitous fashion on a night in the Rutgers Alexander library as an undergrad looking for something to distract me away from the work at hand. On a cart to be shelved were three books by Carl Jung. (They were probably Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, and The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.) I paged through them the rest of that night and, though most of it was beyond me, I got the basics and was hooked.

Years later, I was teaching film and video in a secondary school in 1983 when Synchronicity by The Police was released. A student brought it in to use for a film project. On the front cover, bassist Sting is reading a copy of Jung's Synchronicity and there is a negative/superimposed image of the text of the synchronicity hypothesis. On the back of the cover (Perhaps not so visible on a little CD cover. Bring back albums!) is a close-up, mirrored, upside-down, image of Jung's book. There are two songs, titled "Synchronicity I" and "Synchronicity II" on the album.

And if you really want to go into the beyond, investigate the Dark Side of the Rainbow effect. That's the effect created by playing the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon simultaneously with the film The Wizard of Oz.  Also known as Dark Side of Oz or The Wizard of Floyd, when you mash up these two there are moments where the film and the album appear to correspond with each other. Coincidence, Carl?