BOOK REVIEW
The Accidental Scientist
Steve Shapin
The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in
Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science. Robert
K. Merton and Elinor Barber. xxviii + 313 pp. Princeton University
Press, 2004. $29.95.
A paradox lies close to the heart of scientific discovery. If you
know just what you are looking for, finding it can hardly count as a
discovery, since it was fully anticipated. But if, on the other
hand, you have no notion of what you are looking for, you cannot
know when you have found it, and discovery, as such, is out of the
question. In the philosophy of science, these extremes map onto the
purist forms of deductivism and inductivism: In the former, the
outcome is supposed to be logically contained in the premises you
start with; in the latter, you are recommended to start with no
expectations whatsoever and see what turns up.
As in so many things, the ideal position is widely supposed to
reside somewhere in between these two impossible-to-realize
extremes. You want to have a good enough idea of what you are
looking for to be surprised when you find something else of value,
and you want to be ignorant enough of your end point that you can
entertain alternative outcomes. Scientific discovery should,
therefore, have an accidental aspect, but not too much of one.
Serendipity is a word that expresses a position something like that.
It's a fascinating word, and the late Robert King
Merton—"the father of the sociology of
science"—liked it well enough to compose its biography,
assisted by the French cultural historian Elinor Barber.
The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity opens with an
account of the word's origin. Writing on January 28, 1754, to the
British diplomat Sir Horace Mann, Horace Walpole—an
antiquarian and son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole—boasted
about a recent discovery he had made in an old book of Venetian arms:
This discovery I made by a talisman, . . . by which I find
every thing I want, a pointe nommée [at the very
moment], whenever I dip for it. This discovery, indeed, is almost of
that kind which I call Serendipity.
As Walpole himself was the author of the term, he felt obliged to
give Mann its derivation:
I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three
Princes of Serendip [the ancient name for Ceylon, or Sri
Lanka]: as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making
discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were
not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule
blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because
the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than
on the right—now do you understand Serendipity?
The word did not appear in the published literature until the early
19th century and did not become well enough known to use without
explanation until sometime in the first third of the 20th century.
Antiquarians, following Walpole, found use for it, as they were
always rummaging about for curiosities, and unexpected but pleasant
surprises were not unknown to them. Some people just seemed to have
a knack for that sort of thing, and serendipity was used to express
that special capacity.
The other community that came to dwell on serendipity to say
something important about their practice was that of scientists, and
here usages cut to the heart of the matter and were often vigorously
contested. Many scientists, including the Harvard physiologist
Walter Cannon and, later, the British immunologist Peter Medawar,
liked to emphasize how much of scientific discovery was unplanned
and even accidental. One of Cannon's favorite examples of such
serendipity is Luigi Galvani's observation of the twitching of
dissected frogs' legs, hanging from a copper wire, when they
accidentally touched an iron railing, leading to the discovery of
"galvanism"; another is Hans Christian Ørsted's
discovery of electromagnetism when he unintentionally brought a
current-carrying wire parallel to a magnetic needle. Rhetoric about
the sufficiency of rational method was so much hot air. Indeed, as
Medawar insisted in The Art of the Soluble, "There is
no such thing as The Scientific Method," no way at all of
systematizing the process of discovery. Really important discoveries
had a way of showing up when they had a mind to do so and not when
you were looking for them. Maybe some scientists, like some book
collectors, had a happy knack; maybe serendipity described the
situation rather than a personal skill or capacity.
Yet what Cannon and Medawar took as a benign nose-thumbing at Dreams
of Method, other scientists found incendiary. To say that science
had a significant serendipitous aspect was taken by some as
dangerous denigration. If scientific discovery were really
accidental, then what was the special basis of expert authority?
In this connection, the aphorism of choice came from no less an
authority on scientific discovery than Louis Pasteur: "Chance
favors the prepared mind." Accidents may happen, and things may
turn up unplanned and unforeseen, as one is looking for something
else, but the ability to notice such events, to see their potential
bearing and meaning, to exploit their occurrence and make
constructive use of them—these are the results of systematic
mental preparation. What seems like an accident is just another form
of expertise. On closer inspection, it is insisted, accident
dissolves into sagacity.
But the conjunction of chance and expertise was, indeed, part of
Walpole's original definition: The three princes made their
discoveries "by accidents and sagacity," and the example
of the mule was one that Sherlock Holmes, or Umberto Eco's William
of Baskerville, using what the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce
called "abductive inference," would have been proud of.
Some scientists using the word meant to stress those accidents
belonging to the situation; some treated serendipity as a personal
capacity; many others exploited the ambiguity of the notion.
Here, as in so many instances, it was the very equivocality of the
word that assisted its dispersal across the cultural landscape, just
as one can use the word noble to describe a status by birth
(whose members may behave ignobly) or a type of virtuous behavior
(which may be manifested by those of ignoble birth). The trade-offs
permitted by this ambiguity are useful: They allow all sorts of
claims and contests, criticisms and celebrations. Lots of
dictionaries got serendipity wrong too, if, indeed, one can
say that dictionaries do get it wrong: Some forgot the
"sagacity" bit; some subsumed the "accident" bit
into something like "genius"; many, less materially,
mangled the story about Walpole and his source.
The context in which scientific serendipity was most contested and
had its greatest resonance was that connected with the idea of
planned science. If you thought that scientific research could be
confidently planned—as many Marxists, and some corporate
capitalists and Pentagon functionaries, did—then you were
making a massive bet against serendipity. If, on the other hand, you
considered that efforts to organize, regiment and plan science were
ill-advised, then you could recruit serendipity to your cause. The
serendipitists were not all inhabitants of academic ivory towers. As
Merton and Barber note, two of the great early-20th-century American
pioneers of industrial research—Willis Whitney and Irving
Langmuir, both of General Electric—made much play of
serendipity, in the course of arguing against overly rigid
research planning.
Langmuir thought that misconceptions about the certainty and
rationality of the research process did much harm and that a mature
acceptance of uncertainty was far more likely to result in
productive research policies. For his own part, Langmuir said that
satisfactory outcomes "occurred as though we were just drifting
with the wind. These things came about by accident." If there
is no very determinate relationship between cause and effect in
research, he said, "then planning does not get us very
far." So, from within the bowels of corporate capitalism came
powerful arguments, by way of serendipity, for scientific
spontaneity and autonomy. The notion that industry was invariably
committed to the regimentation of scientific research just doesn't wash.
For Merton himself—who one supposes must have been the senior
author—serendipity represented the keystone in the arch of his
social scientific work. In 1936, as a very young man, Merton wrote a
seminal essay on "The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive
Social Action." It is, he argued, the nature of social action
that what one intends is rarely what one gets: Intending to provide
resources for buttressing Christian religion, the natural
philosophers of the Scientific Revolution laid the groundwork for
secularism; people wanting to be alone with nature in Yosemite
Valley wind up crowding one another. We just don't know
enough—and we can never know enough—to ensure that the
past is an adequate guide to the future: Uncertainty about outcomes,
even of our best-laid plans, is endemic. All social action,
including that undertaken with the best evidence and formulated
according to the most rational criteria, is uncertain in its
consequences. As Robert Burns put it, "The best-laid schemes o'
mice an' men / Gang aft agley, / An' lea'e us nought but grief an'
pain, / For promis'd joy!"
It is a humane vision, and this biography of serendipity is a
humane, learned and very wise book. It was finished in 1958 and lay
in Merton's files until just a few years ago. His explanation that
it was put aside as a mere prologue to another book doesn't carry
complete conviction. A plausible alternative is that American
academic sociology was then well on its way to taking a radically
different direction from that represented in this book: less humane,
more rationalistic, less concerned with the vagaries and
contingencies of concrete human action, less willing to attend to
voices speaking of unanticipated consequences, complexities and,
indeed, serendipity.
As his subsequent career illustrates, Merton himself must have had
ambivalent feelings about these differences in sociological
sensibilities: Scientism pulled him in one direction, humanism in
another; and in the subsequent decades, scientism exerted the
stronger pull. Perhaps Merton felt that the time for such a book had
passed. It is a pity that we had to wait so long for it, since
The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity is the great
man's greatest achievement.