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Serendipity

© Copyright 2003, Jim Loy

Serendip is an ancient Arabian name for Ceylon or Sri Lanka. Horace Walpole had read a fairytale called The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the three princes made many wonderful discoveries by accident. And so, Walpole coined the term "serendipity," to mean a pleasant, accidental discovery. In science, this is often a discovery made while looking for something else. Here are a few:

• Buoancy principle: Hieron, the king of Syracuse, asked Archimedes to determine if his crown was pure gold, or if he had been cheated. But Archimedes had no way to accurately measure the volume of the crown (knowing the density of gold, the volume would show if the crown was pure gold or not). While getting into a bath tub, Archimedes saw that his body made the water overflow, and had the insight that the volume of the overflowing water was equal to the volume of his body, the buoancy principle. He is reported to have run naked through the streets of Syracuse, shouting "Eureka" (I've found it). It is said that the crown was not pure gold.
• Law of gravity: The story that Newton thought of the law of gravity after being hit on the head by a falling apple is false. But he said that he did see an apple fall from a tree, apparently while the moon was in the sky, and that he then got the idea that what was pulling the apple downward was the same force that held the moon in its orbit. And from that insight, he deduced the law of universal gravitation.
• Electro-magnetism: In 1820, Hans Christian Oersted made the extremely important discovery that electricity and magnetism were closely related, while lecturing to his students. In the experiment an electric current in a wire deflected a nearby magnetic compass needle. The unit of magnetic field strength is now called the oersted.
• Vulcanized rubber: In 1839, Charles Goodyear was experimenting with a heated mixture of rubber and sulphur, as others had done. The mixture boiled over onto his stove, and he discovered vulcanized rubber, a hardened rubber ideal for vehicle tires. He died more than a half-million dollars in debt trying to promote vulcanized rubber and fighting patent infringements.
• Chemical structure of benzene: In 1865, Friedrich August Kerkule von Stradonitz was trying to discover the chemical structure of benzene. While almost dozing on a bus, he dreamed of carbon atoms swirling around; then a chain of six of them formed into a spinning ring. He woke from his dream knowing the structure of benzene.
• X-rays: In 1895, Wilhelm C. Roentgen was experimenting with cathode rays (electron beams), when he noticed a glow from a fluorescent screen in another part of his laboratory. He had discovered x-rays (originally called Roentgen rays), for which he won the first Nobel Prize in physics, in 1901.
• Penicillin: In 1928, Alexander Fleming noticed that a culture plate containing bacteria had been contaminated by a mold, and further examination showed that the mold had killed the bacteria which were near it. The mold was Penicillium notatum, from which Fleming isolated the chemical penicillin. He shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology.
• Cosmic Background Radiation: In 1964-65, Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson were testing a very sensitive radio telescope antenna at Bell Labs, but they could not get rid of the background noise. They found that the radiation (their equipment was tuned to a wavelength of 7.35 centimeters) was coming uniformly from all directions, implying that the source was not on earth, or in the solar system, or even in the Milky Way galaxy. Then they heard that theoreticians had recently predicted that radiation at just about that same wavelength should be discovered, as a remnant of the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe, showing a black body temperature of about three Kelvin (three degrees above absolute zero). Penzias and Wilson won the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics.
• Pulsars: In 1967, Jocelyn Bell, using the radio telescope at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Laboratory in Cambridge England, detected a pulsed radio signal coming from the sky, which she reported to her employer Antony Hewish. An early joke was that this signal came from LGM (little green men). It turned out to be the first discovery of a pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star. For this discovery, Hewish shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in physics, but Bell did not.

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