Science has its more or less mythical tools. Two important tools are at the center of recently published books: “serendipity” – which makes you discover something almost by chance, but not too much – and Occam’s Razor, a method, or rather a mental attitude, to avoid artificial and misleading hypotheses. Although very different from each other, they are two fundamental junctions in the history of science. Forcing things a little, we can speak of bifurcations: between metaphysics and pragmatic realism for Occam’s Razor, between targeted research and research guided by curiosity for serendipity.
Telmo Pievani, philosopher of science at the University of Padua, comes to meet us with “Serendipità” (Raffaello Cortina, 254 pages, 15 euros). Johnjoe McFadden, professor of genetics at the University of Surrey, is the author of “Life is simple. How Occam’s Razor liberated science and modeled the universe ”, promptly translated by Susanna Bourlot for Bollati Boringhieri (450 pages, 25 euros).
Twisted events
Let’s start with serendipity. The word, esoteric until a few years ago, is now inflated and often misused. Pievani accurately reconstructs its twisted history. The origin dates back to 1301 and leads to a contemporary Persian-language writer of Dante who lived in India: Amir Khusrau. One of his stories concerns Bahran V, emperor of Persia from 420 to 438, and three princes of Sarandib “foreign travelers in search of the nourishment of fate” who are making wonderful discoveries entirely by chance. We leave out the details, note only the etymological connection Sarandib-serendip (above, to suggest the three Principles, an oil painting by the American painter Charles. M. Russell, 1864-1926).
Accidental sagacity?
With a leap of a few centuries we arrive at 1754, when the English writer Horace Walpole encounters the three princes of Sarandib reading a version of their story written in 1548 by Cristoforo Armeno. In a letter to his friend Horace Man, Walpole uses (coins?) The word “serendipity” with reference to an “accidental sagacity” that solves an embarrassment. Pievani observes: “So the word was born as a casual and playful derivation, like a whim (…). Sarandib or Serendippo, the ancient name of Sri Lanka, has nothing to do with its meaning. Walpole clearly chooses the word for its sound and for the effect it has: in the letter he appears pleased with the expressive, graceful, delicate, and at the same time bizarre and exotic as required ”. A little, I would say, as “superfragilistichespiralidoso” in the song of the film “Mary Poppins”. And he concludes: “serendipity, thanks to a misleading misunderstanding, was born in a serendipitous way (..) The theme of Armeno’s novel is circumstantial art, the abductive capacity that allows the three principles to successfully complete their voyage”.
From Joyce to Salvador Luria
Serendipity resurfaced from oblivion in 1833 with the publication of Walpole’s letters but entered science only a century later thanks to Walter B. Cannon of Harvard Medical School, inventor in 1926 of the term “homeostasis”. The omnivore James Joyce does not miss serendipity in “Finnegans Wake” (1939) and in 1955 Salvador Luria, one of the three Nobel laureates from Giuseppe Levi’s school in Turin, cites serendipity when speaking of his studies on the viruses that infect bacteria (phages), but by now the word had become a fad, and even slightly snobbish. Tonight I beat serendipity on Google with more than 54 million results.
Strong, weak, so-so
As an epistemologist, Pievani distinguishes between a “strong serendipity” – finding what was not looking for – (the first pulsar comes to mind, a neutron star, picked up by Jocelyn Bell and promptly converted by his baron Anthony Hewish on a trip to Stockholm) and a “weak serendipity” – finding something unexpected but having the mind “prepared” to notice it (Fleming and penicillin). More precisely, Pievani identifies four degrees of serendipity and outlines a taxonomy that puts order in a generic anecdotal, ranging from Roentgen’s X-rays to the cosmic background radiation of Penzias and Wilson, from Alfred Nobel’s dynamite to the amplification of DNA with the Polymerase Chain Reaction intuited by Kary Mullis while, “smoked” of Cannabis, he was driving on the hairpin bends of a mountain in California.
Dirac and antimatter
A less innocent methodological serendipity could be that of elaborating mathematical solutions for free and then recognizing them in physical realities, such as the antimatter predicted by Dirac and found by Anderson, implied in the fact that the square root of a number also admits a negative solution. As a philosopher of evolution, Pievani comes to wonder if being serendipitous does not have an evolutionary value useful for the advancement of knowledge. “If we can cultivate serendipity, fortuitous occasions will continue to happen to prepared minds and new answers will always generate new questions. As Heraclitus suggested (…) let’s expect the unexpected ”. Which is a magnificent oxymoron.
On a collision course
It was certainly unexpected for William of Occam that his razor would become a red thread running through the history of science from antiquity to the present day and beyond. A Franciscan friar accused of heresy, William escaped the justice of the pope of Avignon on the evening of May 26, 1328. Statements such as “multiplicity should not be placed without necessity” or “it is useless to do with more what you can do with less” on a collision course with Aristotle and the scholastic philosophy of St. Thomas.
Constructive skepticism
What descended from William is a rational and constructive skepticism. With razor strokes the crystalline skies of Ptolemaic astronomy crumbled, the Earth moved around its axis and around the Sun, the phlogiston disappeared and thermodynamics sprouted, the breath of life gave way to biochemistry, evolutionism replaced the idea that millions of species had been created one by one, Mendeleev’s Table unified tens of thousands of identifiable “substances” in nature into 92 elements, Einstein dispersed the ether in a new geometry, the Standard Model of physics put a barrier to the proliferation of elementary particles. Simplicity has become a guiding light to follow also to dominate complexity.
Economics of Thought
William introduced a principle of economics of thought, a new category of the mind. “Occam’s razor is everywhere – writes McFadden on the last page of his book – It has opened a path in the woods of errors, dogmas, bigotry, prejudices, beliefs, false beliefs and pure nonsense that have hindered progress in most ages. and places. It is not that simplicity has been incorporated into modern science; simplicity is modern science and, through it, the modern world ”.
Too dark energy?
As a tiny and cheeky heretic, I dare to ask myself whether Occam’s Razor cannot also be applied to entities such as dark matter and energy or super-symmetrical particles, which “must” exist according to undoubtedly coherent and reliable models, but seem to be made on purpose. for not being able to be observed. Who knows that one day, applying some principle of simplicity, they will not end up like the ether. Of course, even razor strokes need a serendipitous hand.