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TopSerendipity And Spontaneity In The Context Of Discovery
Serendipity plays a notable role in the history of revelation, within the fields of criminology and science in general. In other words, any insignificant environmental incident carries the potential of inspiring a solution which can unexpectedly surface from the unconscious mind. This frequently happens when one takes things easy. Imagine Archimedes in his bathtub, finding the principle that can be shortly defined as ‘any object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object’, or Newton under an apple tree, with a falling apple that initiated the universal theory of gravity. Serendipity, however, hits only the willing mind. Both Archimedes and Newton had been working on their corresponding challenges for some time and were consequently ‘alerted’ to their resolutions. Not everybody sitting in bathtubs or under apple trees will find inspiration for invention without spending the prerequisite effort.
Ward, Finke and Smith describe this alertness through Archimedes’ experience: “Archimedes was the greatest mathematical and scientific thinker of the third century B.C., and King Hiero of Syracuse, his relative, knew it. Archimedes had proved this to the King when he built a machine that, powered by one arm, could move a fully loaded ship out of a dock, whereas the entire Syracusan crew, without the machine, could barely budge the ship. King Hiero asked Archimedes to determine whether a gold crown he had commissioned had been surreptitiously alloyed with cheaper (and less dense) silver. Archimedes attempted first to determine the volume of the crown, so that he could compare it with the volume of an equal weight of pure gold. The crown was such a complex shape, however, that Archimedes was initially thwarted. When he neglected his personal habits in his absorption in the problem, his friends carried him by force to the public baths. While in the bath, he noticed the water displaced by his body, and he realized that the crown would also displace an equal and measurable amount of water. Screaming ‘Eureka!,’ he is said to have run straight home in his excitement, without pausing to dress himself” (Ward, Finke, & Smith, 1995).