Serendipity and Murphy's law are two sides of the same coin

摘要

In my professional life I happened to stand between a Murphy's Law strike and the most unexpected and unpredictable discovery. Discovery by serendipity is not as exceptional as you may think, in fact it has been reported that at least 30% of discoveries have been made with the serendipity assist (1). In my experience as a chemist - and I also believe in the experience of many colleagues - the distance between these two extremes - Murphy's law and serendipity - is sometimes very small. Moving toward one direction or the other depends on our capability to transform a disaster into a clever intuition and subsequent action, but as you can imagine the consequences of this move may have a remarkably different outcome.