The word serendipity is hard to define. From James Shulman’s Introduction in the book The Travels and Adventures of SERENDIPITY, he writes “Serendipity can be about finding something of value while seeking something entirely different or it can be about finding a sought-after object in a pace or a manner where it was not at all expected.” In our working knowledge, there are many examples of serendipity. Can you think of a few? If you need examples to get started, here are several: Archimedes discovering density while taking a bathing in Ancient Greece, Newton discovering gravitational force while sitting under an apple tree in England, and Alexander Fleming discovering the antibacterial effects of a drug now known as penicillin after leaving a petri dish to mold in the drawer. As we find more examples, it seems that most serendipity appears science.
Although products of scientific research like drugs and wireless devices undergo rigorous testing and analysis in order to observe all the positive and negative effects of them, numerous ideas for the research originate from serendipity. Perhaps this disproportional makeup of occurrences of serendipity is attributed to the advancement of knowledge. Since serendipity has unclear origins, we use the scientific method to rationalize it. For serendipity in science, they lay the groundwork for more developments on top. Since we use the scientific method to rationalize it, we tend to know more examples from science and technology such as many inventions and laws of nature. On the other hand, it’s hard to think of examples of serendipity in business or fine arts even though they are still under the technology category in the broadest sense. For instance, instead of buying shares of stock to own a company, share price rises and you sell the stock instead to make a profit. Although serendipity occurs in fields such as business and fine arts, serendipity from science and technology makes a more conspicuous impact so we tend to draw more examples from this category.
Sorry; this is just temporary. I need to get added as a contributor before I can post my own blogposts. Nevertheless, here you go:
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Serendipity is as much a part of life as we are—is that too rash of a statement? By Wikipedia’s definition, as reputable as it may or may not be, serendipity is “when someone finds something that they weren’t expecting to find.” In other words, serendipity is a chance event, but with a deeper implication—this chance event is the root of something great. Serendipity has helped usher along the development of the world to where it is today, most notably through the many scientific discoveries it has been a part of. We’ve all heard Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin; Fleming’s careless decision to leave a contaminated petri dish out in the open resulted in the discovery of the fungus Penicillium, and consequently, the antibiotic penicillin. Within the definition, though, gray area arises. Can we acknowledge Fleming as a pioneer in the world of pharmacology, or should we condemn him as a careless scientist?
With thoughts of serendipity running rampant in my mind, I decided to take a stab at serendipity. I played a game I had heard of—take two random topics, and on Wikipedia, go from one page to the other. I asked a few of my friends, and I finally got my words: dolphin and Halo. Surely enough, just 7 minutes and 35 seconds and 14 Google Chrome tabs later (dolphin and Halo) inclusive, I won my game. For sake of your boredom, I’ll refrain from typing out every page I went to, but it went something along the lines of the following: dolphins are popular in culture, culture is rooted in fine arts, fine arts are part of mass media, mass media is part of the Internet, the Internet is used on PCs, PCs play videogames, and Halo is a videogame. For what it’s worth, I was pretty astounded that the game would work. While I am still not totally sure how I feel about serendipity, I cannot deny that it is firmly rooted in all we do as humans. To keep your mind going on the topic, I’ll end on a quote from William Shakespeare: “All things are ready if our minds be so.” So go out, do things, and keep in mind that with a tiny bit of luck, you might just do something amazing.