by Debbie Bourgeois

Created on: October 23, 2009

Serendipity is a fortuitous discovery, especially while looking for something entirely different. We owe the word to Horace Walpole, an English historian, who coined the word in one of his more than 3,000 letters that constitute most of his literary reputation. The word was formed from the old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip, which was part of the title of a fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip. As the three princes traveled throughout the country, proving their worthiness of the throne, they were always discovering things by accident and astuteness that were not related to that which they were in quest of.

The concept of serendipity can be very complex as some people would argue that events are never driven by pure luck, but always involves a certain amount of knowledge, intuition and forethought that is brought together in fortuitous circumstance. Others would say that our lives have a defined path with one event leading to the next, preordained destiny. Regardless of where one's thoughts may lie, serendipity does seem to involve three main principles; intuition, luck and revelation.

In most events of a serendipitous nature we can see how the combination of different aspects can all contribute to the eventual result. The initial instance causing a natural sequence of events is the temporal aspect, the unplanned construction of social or interpersonal relationship building, then finally the ideas and theories that produce the compelling discoveries.

Examples of serendipitous discoveries are the eventual development of penicillin when Alexander Fleming discovered that the staphylococci bacteria culture he had neglected to clean up before going on vacation would not grow around mold on a plate. X-rays were discovered when Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen was curious to see if cathode rays could escape a glass tube covered in black cardboard. Quinine, the anti-malarial drug, was accidentally discovered when a South American Indian suffering from malaria and desperately needing to quench his thirst, unknowingly ingested it from a small pool of water. Insulin was discovered as a treatment for diabetes, accidentally, as the result of removing a dog's pancreas to determine what role the pancreas played in the digestive system. Sir Isaac Newton's theories on gravity were an accidental discovery after watching an apple fall.

It would seem that there is another aspect of serendipity that comes into play, the ability to keep an open mind. It is through the readiness to accept new ideas and expose ourselves to a wider range of experiences that we create our own sense of living purposefully and gaining knowledge. We've all done this to some extent just by browsing the web in search of one thing, and accidentally discovering other bits of knowledge totally unrelated. In the words of American physicist Joseph Henry, "The seeds of great discoveries are constantly floating around us, but they only take root in minds well prepared to receive them."

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