The word Serendipity was coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole. In a letter to his friend, Sir Horace Mann, Walpole wrote that he found a Persian fairy tale about three princes in Serendip (the ancient name for Sri Lanka) who found unexpected gifts, fortune and valuables they were not looking for. . Therefore, serendipity means unexpected blessings and unsought gifts.
Such things happen occasionally to everyone. Sometimes events begin with the onset of calamity and we may not recognize that pleasant surprises are on the way. Let me cite a few examples of chance events in scientific research to illustrate my point.
In science, we think of discoveries as being made through logical, systematic experimentation. However, many discoveries are the product of a fortuitous accident. It’s impossible to give hundreds of them, I know, but I’ll record just a few to prove my point.
One of them is that of Archimedes. When Hiero, king of Syracuse, suspected that the goldsmith who had received pure gold to make a crown had substituted base metals for the gold, he asked Archimedes to find out. In public baths, when he stepped into a bathtub filled to the brim, the water overflowed. Instantly Archimedes realized that the water that he overflowed was equal to the volume of his body submerged in the water. It occurred to him that by immersing the crown in water he could find out the volume and by comparing the volume displaced by the crown with the volume displaced by an equal weight of gold he could determine if the gold had been adulterated. Archimedes was so taken with the idea that he ran home through the streets of Syracuse shouting “Eureka, Eureka” without realizing that he was naked. It was pure chance.
Hilaire de Chardonet spilled collodion on his laboratory bench. He didn’t clean it up immediately. After a while, he went to clean it up. The liquid had partly evaporated into a gummy mass that broke off in fibers that to him were reminiscent of the silk fibers he had observed while helping Pasteur study pebrin, a silkworm disease. This is how lightning was discovered.
French chemist Edouard Benedictus inadvertently dropped a bottle containing a solution of cellulose nitrate (cotton dissolved in nitric acid) that had completely evaporated. The glass shattered but remained stuck. This accident resulted in the production of laminated safety glass.
Charles Goodyear was trying to coat mail bags with rubber to make them waterproof, but found that in heat the rubber would melt and become rubbery and in cold it would become stiff as a board. One day a mixture of rubber and sulfur accidentally fell on a hot stove and when the mixture cooled, it was as dry and supple as leather. This discovery resulted in the process of vulcanizing rubber.
Joseph Von Mering and Oscar Minkowski’s servant saw flies swarming in the urine of a dog whose pancreas had been removed. This resulted in the discovery of insulin by Frederick Banting.
Mendel went on to test peas for seven characters and it turned out that peas have only seven genes. If he had selected more or less, he would have found it difficult to formulate his theory of heredity.
Pasteur left a culture of fowl cholera on his windowsill, exposing it to sunlight while on vacation. Upon his return, when he injected this culture to the chickens, contrary to his expectations, none of them died. He then injected those chickens with a large dose of a fresh culture and found that they still did not die. He then injected them with a fresh culture and used a group of fresh chickens as controls. All controls died but none of the group that had received the culture were left on the windowsill. He realized that when cultures were attenuated they became vaccines.
Another very interesting story is that of Richard Bach, the author of “Jonathan Livingstone Seagull”. He was killing it in 1966 with a 1929 Detroit-Parks P-2A Speedster biplane. His friend took the plane for a test drive and damaged it while landing. They repaired everything except one strut. They searched for the part in many places but couldn’t find any. The repair seemed almost impossible. At that time, a neighbor who owned old planes and had a hangar full of bits and pieces came up and talked to them. Bach explained the situation to him. The man walked over to a pile of junk and pointed at the piece. Richard Bach wrote the following on page 118 of the August 1979 Reader’s Digest, under the headline “Nothing by Chance.” “The odds that we would break the biplane in a small town that happened to be the home of a man with the 40-year-old part to repair it; the odds that he was on the scene when the event occurred; the odds that we would push the plane right next to his hangar, ten feet from the part we needed, the odds were so high that coincidence was a dumb answer.”
Are these accidents, luck or divine order? There is no coincidence or luck. Are they divinely ordained? Let’s look at the idea that serendipity is divinely ordained.
The universe exists because of attraction. We rarely find individual elements in nature. They appear as compounds, that is, as a mixture of various elements joined together. This attachment is through attraction or love which is that nature of the creator’s substance with which the universe was created. It is the activity of this love that events happen without any spectacle of divine presence or display of benevolence, just like our gifts to our children.
To teach our children mathematics, we give them exercises. Some of them are tough. We let them sweat with it so they learn. Similarly, infinite love shares all its knowledge and powers with its creation. The nature of love is sharing.
Love cannot give more than what the receiver can receive. The only creation that can receive knowledge and power are human beings, not plants and animals. There is no time limit. We can learn in one life or in many. When we have learned, we will move on to the next level until we reach the top and become partners with God or become one with Him. Therefore, all of this is a function of Love.
All seemingly unconnected events jointly impact our lives. They fall together of their own accord. It’s so scheduled. Like a mother guiding her son across a busy street, we are led without help. Love will not take credit for the help it provides.
To what extent are we guided through life? Everything is provided, but it is up to us to use what is provided. Life is like a buffet dinner. It is up to us to take what we want. There is no compulsion. There is no time limit. If we don’t get it right this time, we’ll do it the next time or the next. Once we understand the purpose of creation and the nature of the creator, everything flows smoothly and, like the princes of Serendeep, we will find many unexpected gifts and delights.
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