Accidental Discoveries

From my KMWorld NewsLinks e-mail this morning:

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
"A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind."
--Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi

For me, this speaks to the planning-to-experience-serendipity side of PKM, what I've been labeling as "environmental scanning," "awareness," and "filtering" on my end-to-end diagram, along with the notion of connecting the dots.

Comments

[Martin Lessard]

I like your quotation (see http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/27131.html )

When von Szent-Gyorgyi said "A discovery is said to be...", he is doing a reference to Pasteur who said so in 1854 : "The chance supports only the prepared spirits" ("Le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés")
See http://www-personal.umich.edu/~maxwelld/Pasteur.et.hasard.html"> source in french

It is what we call now serendipity.