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Serendipity

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This is a page for serendipity.

Serendipity is finding something unexpected and useful while searching for something else entirely. For instance, the discovery of the antibacterial properties of penicillin by Alexander Fleming is said to have been serendipitious, because he was merely cleaning up his laboratory when he discovered that the Penicillium mould had contaminated one of his old experiments.

The word was coined by Horace Walpole in the 18th century, from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip. (Serendip is an old Persian name for Sri Lanka.) The episode in the story is actually not a very good example of serendipity as the term is now understood; it was a case of spectacular deductive reasoning similar to the later literary feats of Sherlock Holmes.

Serendipity is used as a sociological method in Anselm L. Strauss' and Barney G. Glaserss Grounded Theory, building on ideas by sociologist Robert K. Merton, who in Social Theory and Social Structure (1949) claimed that serendipity was an Indian concept.