A METHOD
The life force,
is action.
You cannot feel warmth
if you do not create it,
cannot experience great pleasure
before playing,
cannot know serendipity
before taking risks.
Joan Erikson
SERENDIPITY
DEFINITION
20th century. Borrowed from the English word "serendipity," a term coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, based on the title of the oriental tale *The Three Princes of Serendip* (1557).
The ability to discern the interest and significance of observations made by chance and outside the initial scope of a search (fortuitousness is a better term). The discovery of Teflon is an example of serendipity.
The concept of a lucky year in the humanities is a word impossible to remember. "Serendipity" doesn't even appear in French dictionaries. Derived from "serendipity," it means "the gift of making discoveries." The term, coined by the collector Horace Walpole in 1754, was part of the jargon of English bibliophiles.
It has gradually migrated as a concept to science and technology, law and politics, but also to art and, like Monsieur Jourdain who "serendipified" without realizing it, to everyday life. Unknown in France, this concept was analyzed by the sociologist Robert Merton (1958). It is a modern version of "when you're not looking, you'll find."
Christopher Columbus is a perfect "serendipiter," but not Isaac Newton, whose apple story is a legend.
A serendipitizer is someone who knows "at a certain moment how to take advantage of unforeseen circumstances," and above all, doesn't let themselves be dominated by chance (a false synonym), explains Danièle Bourcier, CNRS research director and co-author of the first book on the subject in France.
Serendipity is a mindset to cultivate in order to make discoveries, but it is often suppressed by researchers who don't want to be seen as researchers by chance.
The other author of the book, Pek van Andel, a medical researcher at the University of Groningen (Netherlands), praises this approach:
In his country, researchers are entitled to Fridays to meditate and indulge in the delights of serendipity.
Pek van Andel and Dominique Bourcier,
On Serendipity: Lessons from the Unexpected,
L’Act mem, 2008.
The irony is that the royal method for experiencing discoveries is an anti-method, one that we cannot master. Serendipity, or the art of bouncing off happy coincidences, cannot be controlled any more than chance itself can be predicted.
Serendipity is looking for a needle in a haystack and finding the farmer’s daughter there.
Pek Van Andel
The chance encounter is like a hole in the social net, which frees us, offers us a passage.
Lewis Hyde
WHAT CAN BE FOUND NEXT TO
WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR?
Serendipity, or the art of using fortunate coincidences, cannot be controlled any more than chance.
On the other hand, an attitude which allows chance to bear fruit, one which
1) agrees to expose himself,
2) notice the unusual.
In other words
Availability
There is no shortage of opportunities. We are the ones who miss them.
Tibor Fischer
Active
There is an intermediate degree between “the act” and “the occasion”, that where we provoke, where we attract the opportunity.
Franz Kafka
Mill
Welcoming errors does not contradict chance but corroborates it. Jorge Luis Borges
Necessary
Even the fortuitous elements were made necessary by the action they exerted after the fact on the whole. Franz Kafka
Prepared
In the field of observation, chance only favors prepared minds. Louis Pasteur
Cascade
If I don't understand Einstein, it doesn't matter. That will make me understand something else. Pablo Picasso
Unexpected
I like to have the actors rehearse with scenes that are not in the script or that will not be in the film because we are trying to establish their characters and for me a good interpretation is knowing how to react. Jim Jarmusch
AND THIS HAPPENS
EVERYWHERE,
EVERY DAY.
By Paul Qwest
In March 2006, the Antares underwater telescope, deployed at a depth of 2,400 meters off the coast of Toulon, was connected for the first time. Its purpose is to detect very high-energy neutrinos coming from the sky in the Southern Hemisphere. These neutrinos pass through the Earth like a sieve, except for a few extremely rare collisions.
The nine hundred photomultiplier tubes of Antares, arranged like spaced beads on thick cables anchored to the seabed, wait for certain neutrinos to collide with a water molecule, producing a muon, a charged particle that emits a photon – and it is this photon that must be captured.
Deep darkness is the essential condition for these photons to have any chance of being seen by one of the detectors. Imagine the strangeness of this giant device deployed on the ocean floor, a kind of cubic fly's eye spread across 13 million cubic meters, attempting to capture neutrinos emanating from the seabed. It is very dark at 2,400 meters, but not completely.
Very small abyssal organisms can emit tiny sparks of light, sometimes to attract prey, sometimes to entice a mate. There are also deep-sea bacteria capable of emitting light continuously. The background light noise is generally between 40 and 200 kHz and does not interfere with the telescope.
But in 2009 and 2010, two bursts of bioluminescence at 9,000 kHz suddenly dazzled Antares. What was it? A party among the mollusks? A flurry of activity ensued to understand the phenomenon. Checks, hypotheses, related measurements. It became clear that the peak coincided with a change in water temperature and salinity. This indicated a relationship between bioluminescence and large-scale convection currents.
It was eventually understood that, during a dry, cold winter, large quantities of surface water can sink, carrying nutrients and oxygen to the bottom, and that this sudden change triggers a surge in biological activity.
It was quite a party down there! As a result, bioluminescence itself became an object of study. Its measurement could become the best method for continuously monitoring biomass activity in deep waters.
The first step: to identify all the organisms responsible for the two light discharges observed by Antares. Then, to develop specific instrumentation to continue observing this light from the abyss. It is not yet known whether the Antares telescope will work miracles with neutrinos from distant galaxies, but it has revolutionized the detection of biological activity. It's like holding up a butterfly net and collecting earthworms.
If the painter Miquel Barceló had simply thrown away the piles of drawings he found in a corner of his studio in Mali, claiming they were riddled with termites, he would have continued painting what he had decided to paint.
But he looked at them, looked at them closely, and concluded that the drawings were better with the holes than without. Afterward, he placed piles of paper on the floor, hoping the termites would help him. Ironically, the royal method for making discoveries is an anti-method, one that cannot be controlled.
Serendipity, or the art of using happy accidents, cannot be controlled any more than chance itself. However, there is an attitude that allows chance to flourish: that of
1. accepting exposure,
2. noticing the unusual.
From there, it is possible to see the course of one's day, or even one's life, change. Embracing the brilliance of chance, accessing coincidence, gliding into the orbit of the event, seizing the unexpected, keeping one's nose to one's luck, seeing the event as a pearl, sensing the essence of the opportunity, following the pinball, accompanying what invites itself, playing blind man's bluff with the unknown—this is to find without further delay.