We asked Pek Van Andel to review the world’s most provocative book about serendipity. Pek is an Ig Nobel Prize winner (for leading the team that took the first MRI images of a couple’s sexual organs while those organs were in use.) Here is his review.
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Serendipity: the Prince?s Road
This Begriffsgeschichte, this funny, superb, long expected, instructive, entertaining, ludique, lyrical, unique text about the birth, use, diffusion, reconceptualisation of serendipity ?in the market of words? is fortysix years old! Merton & Barber had finished their typescript in 1958, but didn?t publish it in fortyfour years! In the nineties I got a copy of it, after writing Merton four times. I got so enthusiast about it that I asked Umberto Eco twice to use his poids to get it anyhow published. Il Mulino (The [Paper]Mill), in Bologna, did it, in 2002, in Italian. The American edition was an initiative of the social sciences editor at Princeton.
Merton, born as Meyer R. Schkolnick, became a grand old man of sociology, and died as Robert King Merton. Elinor Barber was historian and specialised in the 18th century in France.
The royal road was the way taken by a king on visit. In scientific research the ?royal road? is chosen by an investigator who finds what looks for. The ?prince?s road? is the path of a searcher who finds what he was not in quest of. The term for such an ?unsought finding? and/or the gift to find the unsought is serendipity. The word is two-hundred-fifty years old.
It was coined in 1754 by a British letter writer, Horace Walpole, who was inspired by The Three Princes of Serendip, in origin a Persian fairy tale of Amir Khusrau (Hasht Bihist, ?Eight Paradises?, 1302). According to Walpole, the princes were ?always making discoveries, by accidents & sagacity, of things they were not in quest of?. The word serendipity was first only used in literary circles. Then Harvard physiologist Walter B. Cannon, launched it in 1945 in exact sciences with his book The Way of an Investigator. Merton defined serendipity in 1948 as the observation of an unanticipated, anomalous and strategic datum that becomes the occasion of a new theory. He described it shortly as a surprising observation followed by a correct abduction (hypothesis). And h? imported the word serendipity in behavioral sciences.
Original scientific search progresses on two legs, one royal leg to test a hypothesis, and one prince?s leg to explain an anomaly (serendipity). These two methods do not exclude, but alternate, complement, reinforce each other. As the sophists said, you can?t look for the unknown, because then you don?t know were to look for. What is really new can?t be derived from the old (if so it shouldn?t be really new), it can only be found by surprise: by serendipity!
The book is: The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. A study in sociological semantics and the sociology of science, Robert K. Merton & Elinor Barber, Princeton University Press, 2004, 313 pp, 29.95 $. ISBN 0691117543.