CONCEPT
Accidental Configurations
The class of discoveries — Fleming's penicillin, Röntgen's X-rays, Goodyear's vulcanization — that could only have been reached by blind probes no directed research program would have generated.
An accidental configuration is a point in the possibility space of a domain that no directed search would have visited, produced by an event whose relationship to the eventual discovery was invisible until after the fact. Fleming did not set out to discover a mold that killed bacteria — the concept of antibiotics did not yet exist in a form that would have generated the hypothesis. Röntgen was studying cathode rays, not looking for a new form of radiation. Goodyear discovered vulcanization by accidentally dropping a sulfur-rubber mixture on a hot stove. In each case, the blindness of the event — its lack of direction toward the solution — is what allowed it to transport the discoverer to a region of the possibility space that directed search could not have reached, because directed search can only go where prior knowledge points.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Robert Merton and Elinor Barber's exhaustive study of serendipity in the history of science documented dozens of such cases