Serendipity

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was discovered in 1993 thanks to a serendipia.

A serendipity is a lucky, valuable and unexpected discovery or finding that occurs accidentally, by chance, or when looking for something different. In the same way it can refer to the ability of a subject to recognize that he has made an important discovery even if it is not related to what he is looking for. Serendipities are frequent in the history of science.

There are also cases of serendipity in literary works, when an author writes about something he has imagined and that was not known at the time, and it is later shown that it exists as the writer defined it, with the same details. Not to be confused with anticipation or science fiction, where far more generic inventions are teased that almost everyone believes will probably exist one day.

Etymology and history

The term serendipity derives from the English serendipity, a neologism coined by Horace Walpole in 1754 from a traditional Persian tale called "The Three Princes of Serendip", in which the protagonists, some princes of Serendip Island—an ancient Persian name for the island of Ceylon, present-day Sri Lanka—solved their problems through incredible coincidences. The English versions of the story come from the book Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figluoli del re di Serendippo published in Venice in 1557 by Michele Tramezzino, according to a translation by Christoforo Armeno. The story is collected in the book of poems from 1302 Hasht Bihist (Eight Paradises) by Jursan Amir, known as Amīr Khusrow.

The word serendipity was used a lot in its origins, but it gradually fell out of use. It came to be used in the 1961 film The Parent Trap, to designate the cabin ("Serendipity") of the summer camp where the two characters, Sharon McKendrick and Susan Evers (both roles played by the same actress Hayley Mills), were confined as punishment for their embarrassing mutual loathing, and in which they discovered that their uncanny resemblance was not mere coincidence, but that they were twin sisters separated from the cradle by their parents' divorce and the complete lack of communication between them. them; and where they also hatched the plan to exchange their personalities to meet them and secretly encourage them to reconcile.

It has recently been rescued thanks to renewed interest in this type of issue and other cultural reasons (there is a 2001 film with this title, directed by Peter Chelsom and starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale).

Similarly the term "Serendipity" is used in a scene from the movie "An Angel in Love" City of Angels by Nathaniel Messinger's character Dennis Franz while lying in a hospital bed; recovering from surgery and lets "Seth" Nicolas Cage. "Serendipity" It is also the name of a character in the Kevin Smith movie Dogma, a muse specialized in inspiring artists.

The term chiripa, much more used in colloquial language, could also be considered as a synonym for serendipity, although it is considered an idiom not generally used in the Spanish-speaking world. It is used with a rather festive connotation and commonly refers to coincidences or fortuitous events in everyday life, even inconsequential events. The substantial difference between a fluke and serendipity is that a fluke implies sheer luck, while serendipity combines the chance of an initial chance event with the shrewdness of the person making the discovery to perceive its significance.

There is also sometimes talk of "pseudoserendipity", in which the researcher, after having investigated a lot about something without obtaining results, finally achieves his goal, but because of an accident or a revelation.

Examples

Serendipity in science and technology

• Louis Pasteur highlighted the importance of observation accompanied by ingenuity in science: «Dans le champ de l'observation, le hasard neise que les esprits préparés» («In the field of observation random only favors prepared minds»).
• The application of sildenafil (Viagra) as a drug against erectile dysfunction was discovered when it was found that males who tested the drug did not return the leftover product.

• According to Umberto Eco, Columbus's arrival in America would be a serendipia.
• In the mid-19th century, it was attempted to find a material to replace the ivory of the pool balls. In 1870, John Wesley Hyatt, a inventor from New Jersey, was pressing a mixture of sawdust and paper with tail, because he believed he would get the new material. But a finger was cut, and he went to his medicine cabinet. Unintentionally, a colodion bottle (cellulose nitrate dissolved in ether and alcohol). This caused a nitrocellulose layer to remain on his shelf. When she saw it, Hyatt realized that this compound would better unite its serrin and paper mixture instead of the tail. Thus the celluloid was invented.
• In 1922, Alexander Fleming was analyzing a bacteria crop, when he was told a bacterial plaque with a fungus. Later he would find out that around that fungus the bacteria didn't grow and imagined there was something that killed them. Although he was not able to isolate it, that episode began the discovery of penicillin.
• The chemist Friedrich Kekulé had been trying to find the huidized structure of the benzene molecule. Simply, a six-carbon structure that had the chemical properties it exhibited was not known. According to him himself in his memories, one afternoon, as he returned home by bus, he fell asleep. He began to dream of atoms that danced and collided between them. Several atoms joined, forming a snake that made those. Suddenly, the snake bit its tail and Kekulé woke up. No one had thought of it until that time that it could be a cyclic compound.
• The post-it notes emerged after an operator's oblivion, which did not add a component of a glue in the 3M factory. The whole set of glue went away and kept, for it was too valuable to throw it away even though it had little adhesive power. One of the engineers of the company, devoted man, was sick of putting paperwork in his psalm book to mark the songs when he went to church. The paperwork just dropped. He thought it would be ideal to have leaves with a little glue that wasn't too strong and that he resisted being glued and cleared many times. The old bad glue game came to his mind. Post-it notes were born.
• Niels Bohr had been working on the configuration of the atom for a long time. He had a dream in which he saw a possible model of that configuration, and when he woke up, he drew it on a paper, without giving it much importance. Shortly afterwards, he returned to that paper and realized that he had actually found the structure of the atom.
• The principle of Archimedes was discovered by entering a bathtub and observing how his body moved a mass of water equivalent to the submerged volume.
• Dr. Albert Hofmann accidentally discovered one of the most powerful hallucinogenic drugs, the LSD (diethylamide lysergic acid). According to his book LSD - Mein Sorgenkind, in the course of his research on the derivatives of lysergic acid obtained the LSD-25, which was proved to be uninteresting from the pharmacological point of view, so he stopped researching on it. Only five years later, and because, for no apparent reason, it could not forget that substance, it again synthesized it for further investigation, which was very exceptional since it was already initially discarded. When he proceeded to his crystallization he was affected by a mixture of excitement and dizziness, being forced to leave work in the laboratory. Presumably, despite its precautions, a minimum amount of LSD touched the tip of its fingers and was absorbed by its skin. Already in his house, awake, but in a dream state, he perceived an endless series of fantastic images with intense and caleidoscopic games of shapes and colors, which did not fade until after about two hours.
• The polytetrafluorethylene (known for its commercial name Teflon®) was discovered in 1938, while Dr. Roy J. Plunkett worked on the development of refrigerant substances and because of a malfunction during his experiments he made the finding.
• Osamu Shimomura recounts that managed to crystallize the luciferase enzyme by using chloric acid accidentally because it was tired. Time later while he was reflecting on a boat in Friday Harbor he remembered that moment and managed to isolate the bioluminiscent compound of Aequorea victory which led him to the discovery and development of the GFP fluorescent green protein, so he received the Nobel Prize in 2008.
• The French chemist Édouard Bénédictus devised in 1903 the laminated glass, after observing how a glass jar containing the remains of a celluloid solution, did not break after accidentally caeresele to the ground.
• Prussian blue is a pigment that was accidentally discovered by the chemical Heinrich Diesbach in Berlin in 1704, originally tried to paint with a pigment that represented a blue red but the final result was a dark blue substance, which is used in various areas.

Literary serendipities

• Jonathan Swift described two supposed natural Mars satellites in his book Gulliver's travels1726. Voltaire also mentioned in his fantastic story Micromegas1752, Mars had two moons. The discovery of the two Martian satellites, Fobos and Deimos, did not occur officially until 1877. The optics available during the life of Swift and Voltaire did not allow to see those celestial bodies so small and that they separated so little from the sphere of Mars.
• In the book Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan whose author is Morgan Robertson narrates the shipwreck of a ship called Titan. This book was written in 1898, 14 years before the shipwreck TitanicAnd coincidences are amazing. At the entrance, the name of both ships, Titan and Titanic, the fact that they have clashed with an iceberg, of mentioning a very quiet sea as a mirror, close to the island of Newfoundland. Its similar dimensions (75000 tons and 66000, 243 meters of length and 268) or the captain's last name in both cases (Smith), having few lifeboats and the number of people who died, many of them billionaires.
• The book Beyond the spectrum whose author is also Morgan Robertson, published in 1914, narrates the hypothetical war between the United States and the Empire of Japan, where he mentions the attack with flying machines in Pearl Harbor, the main naval base of the United States Pacific, with luminous bombs, when at that time the aviation was in diapers, which was in December and in the morning of a Sunday, without having declared war and originating thousands of dead among the marines and civilian population. This would happen 27 years later, in 1941, and there are many coincidences.
• In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe wrote that would be his only complete novel, The Story of Arthur Gordon Pym. In it, four people end up in a boat without food or drink after swimming. The youngest, a group named Richard Parker, proposes that one of them be killed and serve as food to others, which touches him after casting him into luck by the law of the sea. Forty-six years later, in 1884, the English ship Mignonettebuilt in 1867, shipwrecked with its four crew members on board. For about twenty days they are drifting in a lifeboat without water or supplies until one of them enters a coma, apparently for drinking salt water. Then they decide to kill him to eat him and thus have the chance to survive. The infaust body, a 17-year-old group named Richard Parker, fed the remaining three until they were rescued a few days later. The case was closely followed by the press of the time and set a criminal precedent of Anglo-Saxon law in the courts of justice, as it had not taken a previous draw.
• In 1981, American writer Dean Koontz published a horror novel called The eyes of darkness about a deadly virus unleashed in China in 2020 with the name of Wuhan-400. The coincidence is incredible, as at the end of 2019, the existence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that produces the infectious disease called COVID-19, which began its expansion in Hubei China Province, whose capital is precisely Wuhan, the city where the epidemiological outbreak began.