Fortunate accident

Serendepity, serendipidiocity, serendipitous, and serendipaciousness are all good and related words nealy meaning fortunate accident, especially if one is looking for something else. A good movie in 2001 featuring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale. A good watch! One can repeat watching it or writing on it!

Something about the word 'Serendipity'from the wikipedia:(I hope it is not plagiarism):(

Etymology
The word derives from Swarnadip, the Sanskrit language name for Sri Lanka, and was coined by Horace Walpole on 28 January 1754 in a letter he wrote to his friend Horace Mann (not the same man as the famed American educator), an Englishman then living in Florence. The letter read,

"It was once when I read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a camel blind of the right eye had traveled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do you understand serendipity? One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for, comes under this description) was of my Lord Shaftsbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon's, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs. Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table."

Role in science and technology
One aspect of Walpole's original definition of serendipity that is often missed in modern discussions of the word is the "sagacity" of being able to link together apparently innocuous facts to come to a valuable conclusion. Thus, while some scientists and inventors are reluctant about reporting accidental discoveries, others openly admit its role; in fact serendipity is a major component of scientific discoveries and inventions. According to M.K. Stoskopf "it should be recognized that serendipitous discoveries are of significant value in the advancement of science and often present the foundation for important intellectual leaps of understanding".

The amount of contribution of serendipitous discoveries varies extensively among the several scientific disciplines. Pharmacology and chemistry are probably the fields where serendipity is more common.

Most authors who have studied scientific serendipity both in a historical, as well as in an epistemological point of view, agree that a prepared and open mind is required on the part of the scientist or inventor to detect the importance of information revealed accidentally. This is the reason why most of the related accidental discoveries occur in the field of specialization of the scientist. About this, Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD properties by unintentionally ingesting it at his lab, wrote

It is true that my discovery of LSD was a chance discovery, but it was the outcome of planned experiments and these experiments took place in the framework of systematic pharmaceutical, chemical research. It could better be described as serendipity.

The French scientist Louis Pasteur also famously said: "In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind." This is often rendered as "Chance favors the prepared mind." William Shakespeare expressed the same sentiment 250 years earlier in act 4 of his play Henry V: "All things are ready if our minds be so."

History, of course, does not record accidental exposures of information which could have resulted in a new discovery, and we are justified in suspecting that they are many. There are several examples of this, however, and prejudice of preformed concepts are probably the largest obstacle. See for example [1] for a case where this happened (the rejection of an accidental discovery in the field of self-stimulation of the brain in humans).