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4 articles
All articlesSamantha Copeland & Stuart Firestein
Koen Beumer’s narrative provides an interesting example of how surprise and expectations are inter-related in research, particularly when we branch into areas about which we may have assumptions but don’t have knowledge. A particularly rich context for this kind of surprise is in international…
Wendy Ross
This anecdote reports a discovery in the real time implementation of thermic biomass gasification made after an undergraduate student noticed an unanticipated consequence of taking a shortcut. It is a good example of the necessary combination of accident and sagacity in a serendipitous event. The…
Wendy Ross & Stuart Firestein
The paper describes a story, the pattern of which may be familiar to many scientists. A clear and well thought-out hypothesis which is grounded in the empirical literature – in this case that the better-than-average effect which has been robustly demonstrated across several domains would replicate…
Samantha Copeland & Stuart Firestein
This story exemplifies a typical understanding of serendipity, as ‘looking for one thing and finding something else’. The author and his team were looking for a way to mimic nature in their experiment to produce the results they wanted and learned something unexpected and completely new about that…
