Literature review

\label{sec:literature-review}

In this section, we give a short overview covering the etymology of the term “serendipity” and trace its development in order to pin down the key commonalities from many definitions and instances. In particular, we point out key conditions of serendipity, their components and general characteristics, including environmental factors. The structure of this section follows and updates an earlier survey from , drawing connections with the new formal model described above.

Etymology and selected definitions

\label{sec:overview-serendipity} The English term “serendipity” derives from the 1302 long poem Eight Paradises, written in Persian by the Sufi poet Amīr Khusrow in Uttar Pradesh.¹ In the English-speaking world, its first chapter became known as “The Three Princes of Serendip”, where “Serendip” represents the Old Tamil-Malayalam word for Sri Lanka (Cerantivu), “island of the Ceran kings.”

The term “serendipity” is first found in a 1757 letter by Horace Walpole to Horace Mann:

“This discovery is almost of that kind which I call serendipity, a very expressive word …You will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their Highness travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents & sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of[.]” \cite[p. 633]{van1994anatomy}

The term became more widely known in the 1940s through studies of serendipity as a factor in scientific discovery, surveyed by Robert Merton and Elinor Barber in their 1957 analyis “The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, A Study in Historical Semantics and the Sociology of Sciences”. Merton and Barber define the term as follows:

“The serendipity pattern refers to the fairly common experience of observing an unanticipated, anomalous and strategic datum which becomes the occasion for developing a new theory or for extending an existing theory.” \cite[p. 635]{van1994anatomy}

In 1986, Philippe Quéau described serendipity as “the art of finding what we are not looking for by looking for what we are not finding” \cite{eloge-de-la-simulation}, as quoted in \cite[p. 121]{Campos2002}. Pek van Andel describes it simply as “the art of making an unsought finding”.

Roberts records 30 entries for the term “serendipity” from English language dictionaries dating from 1909 to 1989. Classic definitions require the investigator not to be aware of the problem they serendipitously solve, but this criterion has largely dropped from dictionary definitions. Only 5 of Roberts’ collected definitions explicitly say “not sought for.” Roberts characterises “sought findings” in which an accident leads to a discovery with the term pseudoserendipity \cite{chumaceiro1995serendipity}. While Walpole initially described serendipity as an event, it has since been reconceptualised as a psychological attribute, a matter of sagacity on the part of the discoverer: a “gift” or “faculty” more than a “state of mind.” Only one of the collected definitions, from 1952, defined it solely as an event, while five define it as both event and attribute.

However, there are numerous examples that exhibit features of serendipity which develop on a social scale rather than an individual scale. For instance, between Spencer Silver’s creation of high-tack, low-adhesion glue in 1968, the invention of a sticky bookmark in 1973, and the eventual launch of the distinctive canary yellow re-stickable notes in 1980, there were many opportunities for Post-its not to have come to be \cite{tce-postits}. Accordingly, Merton and Barber argue that the psychological perspective needs to be integrated with a sociological one.² Large-scale scientific and technical projects generally rely on the “convergence of interests of several key actors” \cite{companions-in-geography}, along with other supporting cultural factors. Umberto Eco focuses on the historical role of serendipitous mistakes and falsehoods in the production of knowledge.

It is important to note that serendipity is usually discussed within the context of discovery, rather than creativity, although in typical parlance these terms are closely related \cite{jordanous12jims}. In our definition of serendipity, we have made use of Henri Bergson’s distinction:

“Discovery, or uncovering, has to do with what already exists, actually or virtually; it was therefore certain to happen sooner or later. Invention gives being to what did not exist; it might never have happened.” \cite{bergson2010creative}

As we have indicated serendipity would seem to require features of both; that is, the discovery of something unexpected and the invention of an application for the same. We must complement analysis with synthesis \cite{delanda1993virtual}. The balance between these two features will differ from case to case.

In the next subsection we will review several historical examples. First, one further point should be made with reference to the “The Three Princes of Serendip”. Prior to Walpole’s coinage, this story had been adapted by Voltaire into an early chapter of Zadig, and in turn “the method of Zadig” informed subsequent approaches both to fiction writing and natural science. This method is rooted firstly in discovery:

“[Zadig] pry’d into the Nature and Properties of Animals and Plants, and soon, by his strict and repeated Enquiries, he was capable of discerning a Thousand Variations in visible Objects, that others, less curious, imagin’d were all alike.” \cite[pp. 21--22]{zadig}

Secondly, from disparate observations, Zadig is often able to assemble a coherent picture:

It was his peculiar Talent to render Truth as obvious as possible: Whereas most Men study to render it intricate and obscure. \cite[p. 54]{zadig}

Similarly, but in reverse, a coherent picture may be reduced to fragmented pieces each of which may tell a very different story from the whole. This is illustrated in Zadig’s misadventure with a broken tablet, in which one fragment of a poem of praise reads as treasonous provocation. In describing the various features of serendipity below, we will draw connections with the schematic diagram presented in Section \ref{specs-overview}, in order to unfold the multifaceted notion of serendipity.

Connecting our formal definition to literature

\label{sec:connections-to-formal-definition}

Key condition for serendipity

• Focus shift: “After removing several of the burdock burrs (seeds) that kept sticking to his clothes and his dog’s fur, [de Mestral] became curious as to how it worked. He examined them under a microscope, and noted hundreds of ‘hooks’ that caught on anything with a loop, such as clothing, animal fur, or hair. He saw the possibility of binding two materials reversibly in a simple fashion, if he could figure out how to duplicate the hooks and loops.” \cite{wiki:velcro}

Components of serendipity

• Prepared mind: Fleming’s “prepared mind” included his focus on carrying out experiments to investigate influenza as well as his previous experience that foreign substances in petri dishes can kill bacteria. He was concerned above all with the question “Is there a substance which is harmful to harmful bacteria but harmless to human tissue?” \cite[p. 161]{roberts}.

• Serendipity trigger: The trigger does not directly cause the outcome, but rather, inspires a new insight. It was long known by Quechua medics that cinchona bark stops shivering. In particular, it worked well to stop shivering in malaria patients, as was observed when malarial Europeans first arrived in Peru. The joint appearance of shivering Europeans and a South American remedy was the trigger. That an extract from cinchona bark can cure and can even prevent malaria was subsequently revealed.

• Bridge: These include reasoning techniques, such as abductive inference (what might cause a clear patch in a petri dish?); analogical reasoning (de Mestral constructed a target domain from the source domain of burs hooked onto fabric); and conceptual blending (Kekulé blended his knowledge of molecule structure with his vision of a snake biting its tail). The bridge may also rely on new social arrangements, such as the formation of cross-cultural research networks.

• Result: This may be a new product, artefact, process, hypothesis, a new use for a material substance, and so on. The outcome may contribute evidence in support of a known hypothesis, or a solution to a known problem. Alternatively, the result may itself be a new hypothesis or problem. The result may be a “pseudoserendipitous” in the sense that it was sought, while nevertheless arising from an unknown, unlikely, coincidental or unexpected source. More classically, it is an unsought finding, such as the discovery of the Rosetta stone.

Dimensions of serendipity

Whereas the foregoing items are the central features of the definition, the following further characterise the circumstances under which serendipity occurs in practice.

• Chance: Fleming noted: “There are thousands of different moulds” – and “that chance put the mould in the right spot at the right time was like winning the Irish sweep.”

• Curiosity: Venkatesh Rao refers to a cheap trick that takes place early on in a narrative in order to establish the preliminary conditions of order. Curiosity with can play this role, and can dispose a creative person to begin, or to continue, a search into unfamiliar territory.

• Sagacity: This old-fashioned word is related to “wisdom,” “insight,” and especially to “taste” – and describes the attributes, or skill, of the discoverer that contribute to forming the bridge between the trigger and the result. In many cases, such as an entanglement with cockle-burs, many others will have already been in a similar position and not obtained an interesting result. Once a phenomenon has been identified as interesting, the disposition of the investigator may lead to a dogged pursuit of a useful application or improvement.

• Value: Note that the chance “discovery” of, say, a £10 note may be seen as happy by the person who finds it, whereas the loss of the same note would generally be regarded as unhappy. Positive judgements of serendipity by a third party would be less likely in scenarios in which “One man’s loss is another man’s gain” than in scenarios where “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” If possible we prefer this sort of independent judgement \cite{jordanous:12}.

Environmental factors

• Dynamic world: Information about the world develops over time, and is not presented as a complete, consistent whole. In particular, value may come later. Van Andel estimates that in twenty percent of innovations “something was discovered before there was a demand for it.”

• Multiple contexts: One of the dynamical aspects at play may be the discoverer going back and forth between different contexts, with different stimuli. 3M employee Arthur Fry sang in a church choir and needed a good way to mark pages in his hymn book; he happened to have been attending seminars offered by his colleague Silver about restickable glue.

• Multiple tasks: Even within what would typically be seen as a single context, a discoverer may take on multiple tasks that segment the context into sub-contexts, or that cause the investigator to look in more than one direction. The tasks may have an interesting overlap, or they may point to a gap in knowledge. As an example of the latter, Penzias and Wilson used a large antenna to detect radio waves that were relayed by bouncing off of satellites. After they had removed interference effects due to radar, radio, and heat, they found residual ambient noise that couldn’t be eliminated \cite{wiki:cosmic-radiation}.

• Multiple influences: The “bridge” from trigger to result is often found through a social network, thus, for instance Penzias and Wilson only understood the significance of their work after reading a preprint by Jim Peebles that hypothesised the possibility of measuring radiation released by the big bang \cite{wiki:cosmic-radiation}.