Two cases of serendipity: Ross 614 and VW Cephei

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1986
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 450 KB
• Volume: 43
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0038-6308
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00190636

✦ Synopsis

Serendipity: from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, fourth edition 1951 "faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident" coined by Horace Walpole after The Three Princes of Serendip (Ceylon), a fairy tale.

Progress in science depends to a great extent on planed programs of research. However we must not ignore the role played by serendipity. Significant discoveries now and than are made unintentionally, as an unexpected byproduct, of a program planned for a different purpose. A classical example is the discovery of stellar aberration in 1726 by James Bradley. Intent on finding stellar parallax, which later proved to be below Bradley's attainable accuracy, he did find the yearly aberration effect, differeing 90 ~ in phase from parallactic displacement, with a total amplitude of 41" (Chapter 3).