In the 1960s, Gay Talese, then a young reporter, declared that “New York is a city of things unnoticed” and delegated himself to be the one who noticed.
What an inventor “finds” is always an expression of him- or herself.
Some scientists even embrace a kind of “free jazz” method, he said, improvising as they go along: “I’ve heard of people getting good results after accidentally dropping their experimental preparations on the floor, picking them up, and working on them nonetheless,” he added.
an incredible 50 percent of patents resulted from what could be described as a serendipitous process.
capable of seeing “patterns that others don’t see.”
That’s why we need to develop a new, interdisciplinary field — call it serendipity studies — that can help us create a taxonomy of discoveries
A number of pioneering scholars have already begun this work, but they seem to be doing so in their own silos and without much cross-talk.