Ahmad Gamal Saad-Eddin

In a letter dated 1754, the English politician Horace Walpole wrote to a friend recounting the unexpected discovery of a lost painting he never thought he’d find. For the first time, at least as recorded, Walpole used the term serendipity to describe the event. The word, with a touch of liberty, can be translated as a “happy accident” that one encounters without seeking or searching.

But aren’t all accidents like that? That’s where the confusion inherent in the term lies. It’s meant to refer to a specific kind of coincidence, one that defies the ordinary or the expected. Like someone going out to hunt and instead finding the love of their life, or stopping at a café and stumbling upon a theory in astrophysics. That’s serendipity.

In his letter, Walpole was referencing a Persian folktale titled The Three Princes of Serendip, where the recurring theme is precisely that: one of the princesses repeatedly discovers strange and delightful things purely by chance, without ever setting out to look for them.

The word quickly spread into various contexts and languages, carrying with it this exact meaning. Over time, the term made its way into the realm of science and discovery and has remained there ever since. It came to describe many scientific breakthroughs where luck played a more central role than the traditional scientific method. Typically, a series of events is cited to illustrate this idea.

Think of X-rays, the telephone, dynamite, and penicillin—the first antibiotic in history. In all of them, serendipity, or “chance,” played a vital role in their realization.

Archimedes submerges his body in water, notices the displacement, and runs out naked yelling “Eureka!”—I’ve found it. Fleming returns to his lab after an absence to find that his Petri dishes have been contaminated with mold. He hesitates before discarding them, wondering why the mold seems to kill bacteria, and so penicillin is discovered. Wilhelm Röntgen is tinkering with a cathode-ray tube when he notices a shadowy image in his darkened lab, which eventually leads him to discover X-rays.

But how close is that image to the truth?

Isaac Asimov, one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time, is famously quoted as saying that the true moment of scientific discovery doesn’t begin with “Eureka!” but rather, quite the opposite, with “That’s funny…” The implication here is that the image of a scientist combining a few things in a lab and being surprised by a new result is not just inaccurate, it may, in fact, be the opposite of how science actually works.

We can say, then, that the major scientific discoveries humanity has reached over the centuries were not the result of random accidents. In fact, it may be dangerous to think or promote that idea. Quite the contrary, as Louis Pasteur put it when speaking about chance and luck: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

Fleming’s mind was fully prepared when he discovered penicillin. He was a skilled laboratory scientist, known for his rigorous methodology, respected by his peers.

Before discovering anything related to that antibiotic, Fleming had already identified lysozymes, enzymes found in many bodily fluids such as saliva and mucus, and most clearly in tears. Lysozymes have the ability to break down bacteria, which explains, by the way, why the eye, a delicate and sensitive organ, is far less prone to infection than other parts of the body.

Fleming was the one who discovered these substances, specifically, through a series of carefully controlled experiments. In one of them, he placed eye secretions in a medium full of bacteria and observed that the bacteria died. It was for this very reason that he paused when he saw the mold-contaminated Petri dish—he didn’t throw it out.

I always like to think, by the way, that we owe everything to that moment of hesitation. I believe that anyone else, any other scientist, I mean, under different circumstances, with different interests, and a different perspective on their surroundings, would likely have tossed those dishes in the trash. But that specific moment of hesitation, and no other, is what made him stop and ask: What exactly is going on here? As for the coincidence itself, the event itself, it has no real value on its own.

shapes and forms

In a 2017 research paper, scholar Ohid Yaqub attempted to explore this space—how much of the major scientific discoveries of the last century can truly be attributed to chance?

Yaqub identified four types of scientific discovery:

The scientist searches in one area and ends up making a discovery in a completely different one, like the development of chemotherapy for cancer emerging from research into mustard gas. The discovery arrives with no prior planning or intention. The second form is when expected solution comes, but via a different route than the one the scientist was pursuing, like Fleming’s discovery. and the third is when a solution appears before the problem even becomes apparent. think of discovering laser before knowing what to do with it.

All of that is compelling, but the truth remains that the nature of scientific discovery treats chance very differently than the everyday use of the term suggests. Chance in this context is not the same as chance in the other.

From here, we might say that everything happens by chance, and yet, at the same time, there is no such thing as chance in this world. Because chance, like all the important things in life, disappears the moment it’s grasped by the hand. It transforms into something else.

Perhaps it’s not entirely proper to end such an essay with poetry—but in this case, these lines capture the essence so powerfully, they deserve to be seen.

“I have no role in the poem unless inspiration is cut off

And inspiration is the fortune of skill when it strives”

— Mahmoud Darwish