SERENDIPITY - THE UNEXPECTED IN SCIENCE

Scientific curiosity disturbs networks of connections that we know little about. Accidents, mistakes, wrong turns, negligence, stubbornness, and by-products disrupt organised protocols. The unexpected, the unplanned, the novel and strange will sometimes appear. For those who enjoy the disruption, the deviation offers a chance to investigate. Will the investigators have the wisdom, courage and persistence to make sense of the anomalies?

Stories of surprising, highly useful discoveries and inventions abound in this enthusiastically written condensation of the adventures of serendipity, beginning in Athens in about 445 BCE to the amazing mathematical coincidences of the near present. In between, Piani categorises most of the serendipities into either weak or strong. Weak serendipities are defined as looking for something and finding it in an unexpected way. Strong serendipities involve not looking for anything specific and then finding something of value. The strong variety is rarer and, with extra-context, can sometimes be seen as weak.

The term serendipity was invented by member of Parliament Horace Walpole who loved new words and other oddities. Coined in a letter to his diplomat friend in 1754, the word is based on a Persian tale called the Three Princes of Serendip, a previous name for Sri Lanka. The three princes solved questions using clues and abduction to discover the origin of the clues, much as palaeontologists can reconstruct the entire bodies of extinct animals from skeletal fragments. This process is NOT serendipity. The princes did not use serendipity. They used logical induction and abduction. Walpole must have just liked the name. He defined serendipity in the weak form, something he claimed to do regularly—find what he was looking for in unexpected ways.

Nobel Laureates repeatedly credit luck, accidents, and mistakes in their ability to claim the prize. These claims are humble brags. Two other central elements include sagacity—the wisdom to recognise the potential in the anomaly AND the persistence to carry out the investigation that demonstrates that potential. Without sagacity and persistence, the prize would have been unlikely.

The book stands on the shoulders of a previous serendipity giant, a book by Merton and Barber, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. What is new here is the full emphasis on science, the enthusiastic prose and the many additional eye-opening serendipities. What is startlingly unique is contained in the last chapter, Painting a Landscape and Only Then Opening the Window which could also have been titled The Smile without the Cat as in the Cheshire Cat of Alice in Wonderland. This chapter elucidates the remarkable ongoing coincidences between theoretical mathematics and subsequent applied physics. "For reasons of audacity and an appreciation of beauty, mathematicians and physicists invent concepts such as complex numbers that are in no way natural, without receiving even the faintest of suggestions from their observations of physical nature." (p. 186). For the purity of the game, pure mathematicians generate concepts that have no relevance to the known physical world. The results of some of these mental games subsequently become highly applicable to the physical world. The smile finds the cat.

For example, non-Euclidian geometry and noncommutative algebra, once thought of as pure fictions, have been found necessary for describing the general facts of the physical world. (p. 189) (I have a weak understanding of these mathematical concepts.)

This mirroring of mind and physical reality characterises synchronicity which like serendipity is a subset of meaningful coincidences. Pievani offers an explanation for "synchronization of mind and world." To explain these remarkable coincidences between mind and physical reality he suggests that our mind-brains evolved within the reality it investigates, so it reflects that reality. The same idea could be applied to the Schumann resonance and the frequencies of the human brain. Studies have found similarities in the spectral patterns and strengths of electromagnetic fields generated by the human brain and the Earth-ionospheric cavity, where the Schumann Resonance occurs.

We humans confront a vast ignorance. The more we learn, the more we realise how much we do not know. Serendipity (and synchronicity) are like blips in the matrix within which we are functioning. They signal new information about our reality. To become familiar with the serendipities that have created modern science, read this delightful book. Perhaps reading it will increase your readiness to find what you are looking for in unexpected ways.