2016 Open Assembly, Shenzhen, China.

1. 2016 Open Assembly, Shenzhen, China. Master class in Serendipity Serendipity, the Art of Making Unsought Findings. Theory & Practice: Origin, History, Domains, Traditions, Appearances, Patterns and Programmability of Serendipity by Pek van Andel, serendipitologist, Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Groningen, ` The Netherlands (= Holland). m.v.van.andel@umcg.nl & by Danièle Bourcier, CERSA, CNRS, Paris, France. daniele.bourcier@cnrs.fr

2. Look at the rattleback! Looking for the Stone of Wisdom, I did not search at random, I have found, on my own, a Serendipity Stone. Please look at this Celtic stone. Don’t ask, don’t tell, as if you are alone with this wonderful stone. Four practical jokes with a spoon and a coat alone. A black woodpecker, slinky, Frisbee, magical ring, Fiwihex, all examples of unsought findings.

3. The fairy tale The Travel of the Three Princes of Serendip is the second story of the Hasht Bihist (The Eight Paradises, 1302) of Amir Khusrau, a great poet in the Persian language. It has been translated in Italian, French, German, English and Dutch. The German Joseph Schick wrote more than thousand pages about the history and the roots of this Scharfsinnsproben (also a theme in Hamlet), in his Corpus Hamleticum (1934 -1938).

4. The three Princes of Serendip were educated & trained in hunting. Thus also in the art of tracking. The art to find and interpret the tracks of the invisible animals they are hunting. Louis Liebenberg, from,South-Africa, regards the art of tracking as the origin of science, about twohundred years ago.The published a superb book on his original idea. The sagacity of the Princes of Serendip, as experienced hunters, is to discover what they could not see, by finding signs they could see and by interpreting those signs correctly. These signs, these clues, were for Carlo Ginzburg the roots of what he called an evidential paradigm, now known as his ‘indices paradigm’ or ‘traces paradigm’.

5. The word serendipity, for the talent to see and read signs, was coined by a ‘genial dilettant’, the British letter writer Horace Walpole, in London, in 1754. It was printed for the first time in 1833 and then only used by bibliomanes. In 1945 the term serendipity was imported in science by Walter Cannon, an experimental physio- logist at Harvard Medical School. And the American godfather of the sociology of science Robert K. Merton introduced the word serendipity in the social sciences in the forties. His book The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity,about the history of the word serendipity, was published by the Princeton University Press, in 2002, fifty years after he wrote it, with Elinor Barber.

6. Serendipity is a surprising observation, fact or relation, followed by a correctabduction, by definition. An abduction is what we now call a hypothesis. The correct translation from the Greek apagwgh would have been retroduction. Aristotle mentions the different faces of the moon, and the reflection of sunlight as an example of an abduction, to explain the different faces. An induction is a consequence of a hypothesis. A deduction is a proof that a hypothesis really ‘works’.

7. Umberto Eco (†) described four kinds of abduction: 1. Overcoded abduction: from a surprising fact to a another fact, based on a given rule, f.e. the discovery that Walpole was a basterd might have happened this way: He looked and behaved like his mother’s lover, a strong sign. He was also homosexual: twice the personification of unsought finding. 2. Undercoded abduction: from a surprising fact to a possible rule, f.e. Jenner’s ‘vaccination’ was found this way. 3. Creative abduction: from a surprising fact to a possible new rule, f.e. Kandinsky’s ‘abstract art’. 4. Meta-abduction: from surprising fact to a revolutionary rule, f.e. Newton’s ‘universal gravity’. Nota bene: the word fact comes from the Latin factum: i.e. something ‘has beendone’ to test it.

8. Serendipity is the observation of an unanticipated, abnormal and crucial datum: an enigma, an anomaly or a novelty. Cave: the datum càn sometimes emerge as a marginal or minimal ‘triviality’. The new and unknown can not be extrapolated logically from the old and known. If it would be possible, it wouldn’t be really new. For something really new and unknown an unpredictable element is needed: A surprising observation or idea. For a patent a surprise is even required by law,although it may an unsought finding. Even if an invention’s useful properties are discovered by accident, it does not affect its patentability, as stated explicitly in British law. Reason is logical thinking, as taught at school, in maths, f.e. Intuition is to anticipate withóut being able to make that explicit, in prospect, and even in retrospect. Serendipity is únanticipated and therefore beyónd intuition, and than it becomes intuition in the making. Intuition and serendipity can also be taught and learned in theory ánd in practice! Leeuwenhoek, pepper.

9. In science, technique, art and daily life there are grosso modo four ways to find something new: 1. Non-serendipity: one finds what one searched without any crucial ‘accident’, f.e. Yersin’s discovery of the cause of black death: the Yersinia pestis. 2. Pseudo-serendipity: a sought finding on an unsought way f.e. penicillin. A. Fleming: “The spores didn’t stand up on the agar and say:‘I produce an antibiotic, you know?’’’ 3. Positiveserendipity: one finds what one did not search X-rays, f.e. ‘X’ = ‘unknown’ in Arab: ش=‘sj’= ‘a thing’ 4. Negative serendipity: one does the surprising observation, that observation is nót or not corréctly explained, f.e. ` Columbus spoke about Indians, as we still do, because he thought he had landed in India, until his death!

10. Serendipity can start as: 1. Enigma: there is no theory to describe, explain and/or predict the surprising observation, f.e. amber (ελεκτρον (in Greek) = elektron) can attrack dust, but why? 2. Anomaly: the surprising observation cónflicts with accepted theories, f.e. ‘nuclear fission’ was found, when ‘atoms’ were still regarded as ‘unsplittable’, so that dogmaappeared wrong. 3. Novelty: the surprising observation is new but nòt in conflict with accepted theories, f.e. Drais’surprising ‘vélocipède’ and Kandinsky’s surprising ‘abstract art’.

11. In original technical, scientific and artistic research, i.e.search, asearcher limps, walks, jumps with two legs, one leg for: 1. Hypothesis testing: he goes from hypothesis to observation (provoked or not) for its verification (i.e. confirmation or falsification), f.e. Yersin, as mentioned: the pest appeared indeed to be an infection, as he hypothesized (as pupil of Pasteur). and - in opposite direction - the other leg for: 2. Anomaly explaining: he goes from a surprising observation to a hypothesis, f.e. from ‘nuclear fission’ to the new hypothesis that atoms cán be split. This hypothesis was then tested and confirmed, but we still speak about ‘a-toms’, althoug we now ‘better’.

12. Of course not every surprise emerges by testing of a New hypothesis. And the test of a new hypothesis offers not always a surprise. And a surprise gives not always a fresh hypothesis. And a fresh hypothesis emerges not always from a surprise. It is well known that an experimenter, who tests a hypothesis and observes a surprise, normally asks himself first: “What went wrong? Did I do something wrong? And if so: what?” After having excluded that possibility, his second rational reaction will be to invent another hypothesis for the surprising observation, test it, et cetera. So when you think to be wrong you might have found gold! That is rare of course, but it happens, so never exclude it!

13. Claude Bernard, first dramatist, than experimenter: “We must never neglect anything in our observation of facts, and I consider it an indispensable rule of experimental criticism never to admit the existence of an unproved source of error in an experiment and always to try to find a reason for the abnormal circumstances that we observe. Nothing is accidental, and what seems to us accident is only an unknown fact whose explanation may furnish the occasion for a more or less important discovery.” (Cl. Bernard, Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865), translated by H.G. Green, Dover, New York, 1957, p. 166.)

14. “In science, conjecture drives both experiment and theory for it is only by forming conjectures that we can make the direction of our experiments and theories informed. If such and such is true, I should be able to do this experiment and look for this particular result or I should be able to do this theoretical formulation. Conversily, experiment and theory drive conjecture. One makes a startling observation or has a sudden insight and begins to speculate on its significance and implications and to draw possible conclusions. How- ever, not all conjectures are equally valid or useful.” (Robert Curl, co-discoverer of the ‘Bucky ball’, in his acceptance speech after his (share in the) Nobelprize for the serendipitous creation and the serendipitous discovery of this spheric molecule, in 1996)

15. There are six traditions, sources of serendipity stories: 1. Fairy tales, f.e. roasted pig (Ch. Lamb). My pet sin, etc. 2. Apocryphal, f.e. coffee by Kaldi & the imam. 3. Exaggarated, f.e. Newton’s apple. Paul Valery: “Il faut être Newton pour aperçevoir que la lune tombe, quand tout le monde voit bien qu’elle ne tombe pas.” 4. Hidden, f.e. McLean’s discovery of heparin. 5. Probable, f.e. the discovery of the first signs of what we now call electricity and magnetism. (The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science, Louis Liebenberg, 1990) 6. Authentique, Columbus & Vespucci’s New World,f.e.

16. The four main domains of serendipity are: 1. Science: one discovers what exists, but had not yet been described, explained and/or predicted,‘X-rays’, f.e. 2. Technique: one invents (in-veno= I come on) something new, that did nòt yet exist, Drais’vélocipède, the prototype of all bicycles, f.e. 3. Art: one creates something fascinating that did nòt yet exist. Strongly linked to an artist, f.e. Picasso, he wrote: “Je ne cherche pas, je trouve” (Lettre sur l’art, 1928). 4. Daily life: to‘fall’ in love, f.e., and the success of the Honda 50 cc motorcycle, the Supercup, in the US: a classic example of ‘an emerging strategy’ (as Henri Mintzberg, a management guru, described it).

17. My study of serendipity make ten points clear: • ‘Serendipity’ does exist. ‘Accidental’ (= surprising observations cán lead to ‘accidental’ discoveries, inventions, creations. Here ‘accidental’ has not the mathematical meaning at random, but the psychological connotation of an surprising observation: that ‘falls to’ (ad-cadere) you, ‘‘sine anticipatio mentis’’, as Francis Bacon wrote, i.e. ‘without hypothesis beforehand’. Explain now: Bacon -> Walpole : The hunt of Pan -> Ceres!

18. 2. In strongly empirical scientific disciplines such as chemistry, astronomy, physics, drug research, medicine, technique, serendipity appears to be most frequent. In those fields it is also much easier to test whether a ‘finding’ is really a finding or not. A chemist wrote ‘‘serendipity at work’’, as a modern version of animism. The old Greek called magnetic stones and amber ‘‘stones with a soul’’, because of their enigmatic character. And did the Celts put their Celtic stones apart, because of their soul, or ‘the hand of God’ in them?

19. 3. Serendipity plays a supporting but essential role, that should not be underestimated or exaggerated. The astronomer Harwit studied 43 observational discoveries of cosmic phenomena and he found that about half of them took place in a more or less serendipitousmanner: “This does put into some some doubt the normal criteria for the peer review, because the normal criteria tend to request a theoretical justification for the work you are going to be doing. Whether you are asking for telescope time or whatever you are going to do.” (K. Kellerman & B. Sheets, Serendipitous Discoveries in Astronomy, Radio Astronomy Observatory, Green Bank, W.V., USA, 1983, p. 206-7.)

20. 4. Systematic, directed (re)search and serendipity do not exclude each other, but complement and even reinforce each other. In theory ànd practice innovation proceeds not by design òr by serendipity, but rather by design ànd by serendipity. And they influence each other also, as in Goodyear’s vulcanisation of natural latex, by mixing and heating it with sulfur, and than spilling it - by mistake - on his stove. Goodyear explained the resulting vulcanisation as not as ‘an accident’ but as the result of ‘God’s will’, because he worked so hard!

21. 5. The practical role of serendipity is mainly underestimated by the way we rationalize a posteriori about theoretical and experimental research and its results when we publish. The not strictly rational, chronological or searched components (like chance, fortuna (luck), accident, error, surprise, unsought, never thought or dreamt of, unknown), which have led to the results are then underestimated and sometimes even banned from the theater and hidden behind the décor. Pure rationality then becomes the norm, regarding the results and everything that has led to the results: such as the insight story, the how it really happened storyand the story behind the story. And a scientific article becomes then a ‘retrospective prophecy’, or even a ‘scientific fraud’.

22. 6. As we learned from Heraclitus (“Expect the unexpected, otherwise you will not discover truth.”), the sofists (“One can’t look for the unknown, because then you do not know where to look for.”), Hooke, Priestley and other scholars, the notion of chance findings, i.e. unsought findings is much older than the word serendipity. The old Greeks even had a ‘god for the unknown’. But then, according to the bible at least, the Christians came, saw and said that the Greek ‘unknowngod’ was their ‘God’. That was of course a black page in history, but that Hellenistic ‘god for the unknown’ can be restored by cultivating serendipity, instead of marginalizing it.

23. 7. Most serendipitists are open minded, perceptive, curious, intuitive, smart, flexible, artistic, erudite (e-rudite = not rude), humorous & diligent. You first have to learn and to know what you expect, before you can observe and knowthe unexpected. Pattle: “Some writers refer to a discovery based on observation of something that was not actually being investigated, as a ‘chance’ or ‘accidental’ discovery. This is never true. Observations are made because the observer is on the outlook of anything strange. The discovery of lung surfactant came about as the result of a peculiar concatenation of circumstances, but not as the product of chance or accident.”(R.E. Pattle, as cited by J.H. Comroe, Retrospectroscope [..], Menlo Park, Von Gehr, 1977, p. 177)

24. 8. Serendipity is the art of ‘loose blinders’. Also a serendipi- tist needs blinders, and he also must stay able to take them off, as he does a surprising observation, in order to figure out the right abduction or an optimal emerging strategy. Time, space and freedom are needed for this ‘bootlegging’. At Shell R&D there is 10% time for ‘personal research’, at Dupont R&D 20%; at 3M R&D 30%; and at ASLM? There exists also the so-called ‘drawer research’: you ask and get money for a study that was already done with success, but not yet published. In the then payed time you are totally free. When the financer asks your results, you send your old unpublished positive results. Communistic countries filled their 5-year plans also with unpublished successful research: it created ‘freedom of search’.

25. 9. Like all intuitive operating, serendipity can not be programmed or planned. If that would be possible, it wouldn’t be serendipity any more. All we can program is, that íf a searcher stumbles on a surprising observation, he gets and takes the freedom, the time and the facilities to explore and elaborate it. The moral of my lecture is that you should always keep one eye open for sought findings and the other eye for unsought findings. The freedom of opportunity to profit from the unexpected is an essential aspect of visionair research. As Heraclitus wrote: “Expect álso the unexpected!”Because serendipity is like: “Looking for a needle in a haystack and rolling out with the farmer’s daughter.”(J.H. Comroe dixit)

26. 10. Alexander Fleming said, in 1959: “The researcher must be at liberty to follow wherever a new discovery may lead him. Every researcher should have a certain amount of time for himself, so as to be able to work out his own ideas without having to give an account of them to anybody - unless he wants to. Momentous things may happen in a man’s free time. Thirst for immediate results is by no means uncommon, but it is extremely harmful. Really valuable research is a long-term affair. It may well that nothing of practical utility will emerge from a laboratory for years on end. Then all of a sudden something will turn up, very different, perhaps, from what was being looked for, which will cover the cost of the lab for a hundred years.” (A. Maurois, La vie de Sir Alexander Fleming, 1959; The life of Sir Alexander Fleming, tr. G. Hopkins, Pinguin Books, 1963, p. 310)

27. Claude Bernard had an “extraordinary capacity for noting in the course of an experiment a fact that was somewhat marginal and did not accord with the prevailing theory.’’ (M.D. Grmek, ‘Bernard, Claude’Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Ch.C. Gillespie, Ch. Schribner’s Sons, New York,1981, p. 32) To underline the crucial importance of this talent, research communities, like ASLM, should decide to give serendipity prizes for their best unsought findings. This way mavericks are cultivated instead of marginalized, as still happens, to often, and more and more. And to bring the crucial role of ‘Friday afternoon experiments’ under the lime light and its possible results also. If they decide to do so, it will attract not only a lot of free publicity, but more importantly it optimalises the initiation and creation of Original knowledge! And don’t be afraid that the result will be, that “We get then even more people, who start to fumble around!” as a critic, a ‘micromanager’ complained to me, once in a corner.

28. The forty types of serendipity I found show how polymorphous the phenomenon serendipity is. These types don’t exclude each other, they overlap, and do help to expect the unexpected and to find the unsought. Serendipity, like stupidity, is an aspect of human behavior and an universal comic post hoc fenomenon. It is ‘l’imagination au pouvoir’ (Paris, 1968) for the individual searchers and groupes, in its most democratic form. Planning is a must, but a plan is not holy. Dare to follow your own track. As Hamlet said: ‘‘Readines is all.’’ FIN

29. My forty patterns of serendipity: 1. A single surprising observation is done and correctly explained, f.e. Buchner preserved fresh yeast juice with sugar: it produced CO2 + alcohol! Not the intact yeast cell, but the enzymes ín it, did it. In1907 he got a Nobel Prize for his discovery of ‘enzymes’. 2. ‘Heaping of cases’: one single and identical surprising observation is repeatedly done, before it gets correctly explained, f.e. Softenon babies;Aids; ketons in urine (nose!) 3. Several different surprising observations reveal the same surprising phenomenon, f.e. Agassiz’ glacial periods theory; Wegener’s continental drift theory. 4. One surprising observation of an analogy in the sàme context, f.e. Darwin & Wallace + Malthus; Semmelweis.

30. 5. One surprising observation of an analogy in a different context, f.e. the stethoscope (ears!); percussion (ears!); Pilkington’s floating glass. 6. Bionics: a surprising observation of a structure in the living nature ‘asks’ for an application, f.e. flying birds; wasps’nest material; Velcro hoop & loop fastener. 7. Inverted bionics: the observation of a technical device was crucial to understand the function of a structure in living nature, f.e.the heart as a ‘pump’; the eye as a camera obscura with a lens in it (Kepler). 8. A surprising observation trough ‘personal analogy’, f.e. Archimedes’ method to test the purity of the gold in the crown of King Hero.

31. 9. A surprising observation thanks to a crucial new scientific instrument, f.e. Van Leeuwenhoeck’s discovery of ‘bacteria’ in pepper corns, in water; radioastronomy; my iconoclastic MRI-scans of the human coitus. 10. A surprising observation with a control, f.e. Vesalius with a human sleleton and a monkey’s skeleton; Pasteur’s anaerobic fermentation. 11. A surprising observation in a control, f.e. ‘natural radioactivity’; rinsingears with cold, warm & hot water; Cade’s lithium. 12. A surprising observation done by A, is correctly explained by B, f.e. Columbus & Vespucci; Rosetta’s stone; Valentin & Purkinje; Mitscherlich & Pasteur.

32. 13. Predicted by A, and independently ànd surprisingly found by B, f.e. Brown’s movement discovery & Einstein’s prediction; Bell’s ‘pulsars’; the ‘bucky ball’. 14. Two different surprising observations made by two different observers lead to the same finding, f.e. Rumford & Mayer; Isoniazide against TBC by Huant & Chorine in 1954. 15. Successful error, f.e. ‘maatjes’-herring); V-style ski jump. 16. Successful error of an assistant f.e. Ringer’s solution by an intentional (!) mistake; Chanel 5 (nose!); electricity conducting polymers.

33. 17. Successful accident, f.e. Daguerreotype;penicillin; ‘Post-its’;ink-jet-printing. 18. From side-effect to main effect, f.e. valproic acid; Zyban; Viagra (corpora spongiosa!). 19. From by-product to main product, f.e. aniline> mauve. 20. ‘Experiment of nature’, f.e. Beaumont’s walking lab (a soldier with a fistle to his stomach, which appeared to be a ‘fermentation vessel’). (W. Beaumont, Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and on Physiological Digestion, Boston, 1834),Koch’s cooked potatoes with moulds on it; Fleming’s penicillin.

34. 21. Alternative use, f.e. thecondom,Guthenberg’s use of a wine press to print; gloves to protect a nurse; A ‘Diners Card’ became a ‘Credit Card’; container transport started to avoid tax at frontiers between the states of the USA. 22. ‘Wrong’ hypothesisoffers a surprising observation, f.e. phosphor;radar; Cade’s lithium. 23. Inversion: one finds the opposite of what one searches, f.e. superconductivity; heparin; Linear B. 24. Enigma: no hypothesis, f.e. amber attracts dust: why?; meteorites: why?; nuclear fission: why?

35. 25. ‘Folklore’ as source of surprises, f.e. cow pox Vaccination, by Jenner; asperin; the pill; copper bracelets against rheuma. 26. Animal, child, student, outsider, f.e. Daguerre; Bell; Gregg; Ridley; Lascaux; Altamira; the human shit wine of Motomi Uchishior, discovered by pigs in 1977; 27. A crucial chance encounter between experts, f.e. soft contact lens; interferon; Goretex. 28. Disturbance as source a surprising observation, f.e. Méliès’‘jump cut’, Janski’s radio-astronomy: a new scientific discipline!; the discovery of the ‘fossil radiowaves’ of the Big Bang.

36. 29. Quantitiveanomalies, f.e. Kepler’s ellipsoid orbit; ‘Invar’; argon. 30. Scarcity, f.e. Paré; cigaret; Senefelder’s lithography; expresso coffee; 6H>HB>6B pencils. 31. An improvisation becomes eternal, f.e. Struwwelpeter; tapis de caniveaux; microcredit. 32. Interruption of work, f.e. Cognac (nose!); Port> Madeira (nose!), Aqualinea (nose!); Spätlese (nose!); Eiswein (nose!); glycogenesis; Malinowski’s ‘participant observation’; Worcestershire Sauce; Helicobacter pylori.

37. 33. Play leads to the surprise, f.e. telescope; Reuters- värd’s ‘impossible triangle’; terre armée;‘Frisbee’. 34. Joke leads to novelty, f.e. the railway almost to the point of the Matterhorn; ‘love between the magnets’. 35. ‘Hasard intime, de lecture, et de la plume’, f.e. Descartes’ dream; Darwin & Wallace reading, or having read Malthus’ book On population (1798) . 36. The surprising finding appears revolutionary, f.e. Wöhler’s ureum (1828); Buchner’s ‘zymase’ (1897), X- rays (1895), natural radioactivity (1895), nuclear fission (1938), Laborit’s chlorpromazine (1952).

38. 37. An unexpected effect of a wanted intervention, f.e. the clock; class education; Rosa Parks (1955-56), the ‘Mother of the Modern Day Civil Rights Movement’. 38. Supposed serendipity, presented as true, f.e. Ørsted’s electromagnetism; Nobel’s dynamite. 39. Fabricated serendipity, f.e. Newton’s apple; Kékulé’s benzene; the clock tower of Bern; ‘Vacuvin’. 40. Serendipity applied, but nòt noticed as such, by the finder himself, f.e. Albert van Giffen’s application of the botanic x-, y- and z-parameters in open air archeology. Again: These forty types show how polymorphous the phenomenon serendipity is. These types overlap, don’t exclude and often reinforce each other and do help to expect the unexpected and to find unsought & sough findings.

39. Citations: “Chance favors only prepared minds.”(L. Pasteur, 1854) “Someone who finds what he is looking for generally does a good job of a student; thinking of what he desires, he often neglects signs, sometimes minimal, that bring something that differs from the foreseen object. The true researcher must know to give attention to signs that will unveil the existence of a phenomenon that he does not expect.”(L. Leprince-Ringuet, Des atomes et des hommes, Fayard,1945, p. 57-58) “When you run into something interesting, drop every- thing else and study it!”(B.F. Skinner, Am. Psychol. 1956, 11, p. 221) Which means to me:“When you stumble on an enigma, an anomaly or a novelty, invent an optimal abduction and test it!” I wish you serendipity at your work and at home.