One day in 1945, a man named Percy Spencer was touring one of the laboratories he managed at Raytheon in Waltham, Massachusetts, a supplier of radar technology to the Allied forces. He was standing by a magnetron, a vacuum tube which generates microwaves, to boost the sensitivity of radar, when he felt a strange sensation. Checking his pocket, he found his candy bar had melted. Surprised and intrigued, he sent for a bag of popcorn, and held it up to the magnetron. The popcorn popped. Within a year, Raytheon made a patent application for a microwave oven.
1945
年的一天，在马塞诸塞州沃尔瑟姆市雷神公司（一间为二战盟军提供雷达技术的供应商）所属的一个实验室里，一名叫培西·史宾赛的主管正在做例行检察。他当时站在一台磁控管旁边。磁控管是一种产生微波的真空管，用来提高雷达灵敏度。他突然有一种奇妙的感觉。在检查之后，他发现裤子口袋里的一块巧克力融化了。这件事让他感到很是惊奇，也激起了他的好奇心，他派人去买了一袋爆米花，把它放在磁控管旁边。结果这袋爆米花成功膨化了。一年之内，雷神公司就申请了微波炉的专利。
The history of scientific discovery is peppered with breakthroughs that came about by accident. The most momentous was Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928, prompted when he noticed how a mould that floated into his Petri dish killed off the surrounding bacteria. Spencer and Fleming didn’t just get lucky. Spencer had the nous and the knowledge to turn his observation into innovation; only an expert on bacteria would have been ready to see the significance of Fleming’s strayspore. As Louis Pasteur wrote, “In the field of observation, chance favoursonly the prepared mind.”
科学发现的历史充满了各种偶然的突破。其中影响最深远的要数
1928
年亚历山大·弗莱明发现青霉素。当时他注意到飘入培养皿内的霉菌杀死了周围的细菌。史班赛和弗莱明并不只是运气好罢了。史班赛有把该意外观察转变为一项创新发明的知识和机敏，而只有细菌专家才能看出弗莱明那些不请自来的孢子的重要性。诚如路易斯·巴斯德说过“在观察领域内，机会只青睐有准备的头脑”。
The word that best describes this subtle blend of chance and agency is “serendipity”. It was coined by Horace Walpole, man of letters and aristocratic dilettante. Writing to a friend in 1754,Walpole explained an unexpected discovery he had just made by reference to a Persian fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip”. The princes, he told his correspondent, were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of…now do you understand Serendipity?” These days, we tend to associate serendipity with luck, and we neglect the sagacity. But some conditions are more conducive to accidental discovery than others.
英语中这种描述偶然机遇和人为因素的微妙混合被叫做西林迪普（
serendipity
）。这是知识分子兼贵族业余艺术家的霍雷斯·瓦尔波尔取的名字。在
1754
年的给友人的一封信内，瓦尔波尔为了解释他刚刚的一个意外发现，引用了一个波斯童话《西林迪普的三王子》。他在信中这么提到，那三位王子“总是有新的发现，不管是无意的还是有意的，而发现的事物又不是他们本来所寻找的……现在你明白西林迪普的意思了吧？”今天，我们常把其和运气联系起来，而忽略了其中人为的因素。但是满足某些条件会更易于产生意外发现。
Today’s world wide web has developed to organise, and make sense of, the exponential increase in information made available to everyone by the digital revolution, and it is amazingly good at doing so. If you are searching for something, you can find it online, and quickly. But a side-effect of this awesome efficiency may be a shrinking, rather than an expansion, of our horizons, because we are less likely to come across things we are not in quest of.
万维网经历了逐渐的发展，现在已将数字革命带给所有人的那些成级数增加的大量信息组织起来，并让人们可以理解这些信息，令人惊讶的是，万维网很擅长这个工作。如果你要搜索什么事物，那你可以在网上很快地找到。但是这种惊人的效率的一个副作用就是我们的视界不但没有扩大，反而缩小了，因为我们和自己并没有在找的事物偶遇的机会变小了。
When the internet was new, its early enthusiasts hoped it would emulate the greatest serendipity machine ever invented: the city. The modern metropolis, as it arose in the 19th century, was also an attempt to organise an exponential increase, this one in population.Artists and writers saw it as a giant playground of discovery, teeming with surprise encounters. The flaneur was born: one who wanders the streets with purpose, but without a map.
早在互联网还是一个新鲜玩意儿的时候，其早期拥护者希望它能仿效世界上曾发明过的最好的制造偶遇的机器：城市。现代大都市在
19
世纪兴起也是对人口级数增长进行组织的结果。艺术家和作家把都市看成一个巨大的发现场地，充满了意外的偶遇。漫游者开始出现了，这些人在街道上有目的地散步，却没有明确方向。
Most city-dwellers aren’t flaneurs, however. In 1952 a French sociologist called Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe asked a student to keep a journal of her daily movements. When he mapped her paths onto a map of Paris he saw the emergence of a triangle, with vertices at her apartment, her university and the home of her piano teacher. Her movements, he said, illustrated “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individuallives”.
不过，大多数城市居民都不是漫游者。
1952
年法国一位叫保罗·亨利·雄巴德劳维的社会学家要求一位学生每天都记录下她当天的行踪。当雄巴德劳维把这位学生的路程图放在巴黎地图上时他看到的只是一个三角形，三个顶点分别为她的公寓，学校以及她钢琴老师的家。雄巴德劳维提出，她的移动表明了“个人实际生活中的巴黎是多么狭窄”。
To some degree, the hopes of the internet’s pioneers have been fulfilled. You type “squid” into a search engine, you land on the Wikipedia page about squid, and in no time you are reading about Jules Verne and Pliny. But most of us use the web in the manner of that Parisianstudent. We have our paths, our bookmarks and our feeds, and we stick closely to them. We no longer “surf” the information superhighway, as it has become too vast to cruise without a map. And as it has evolved, it has become better and better at ensuring we need never stray from our virtual triangles.
从某种程度上来说，互联网先锋们的希望已经满足了。你在搜索引擎上打入“乌贼”，马上就会被带入维基百科讲述乌贼的页面，没过多久你已经在阅读关于儒勒·凡尔纳和普林尼的文章了。但是我们中的大多数人使用互联网的方式类似于那位巴黎学生。我们有自己的路径，自己的收藏，自己的馈送，我们和它们亲密无间。我们不再在信息高速公路上“漫游”了，它已经过于巨大，无法不借助导向而自行游览。而且随着它逐渐进化，它越来越擅长保证我们不会偏离自己的虚拟三角。
Google can answer almost anything you as kit, but it can’t tell you what you ought to be asking. Ethan Zuckerman, directorof the Centre for Civic Media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a long-time evangelist for the internet, points out that it doesn’t match the ability of the printed media to bring you information you didn’t know you wanted to know. He calls the front page of a newspaper a “discovery engine”:the lead story tells you something you’re almost certain to be interested in—the imminent collapse of the global economy, or Lady Gaga’s latest choice of outfit—and elsewhere on the page you learn that revolution has broken out in a country of whose existence you were barely aware. Editors with an eye for such things, what Zuckerman calls “curators”, are being superseded by“friends”— people like you, who probably already share your interests and world view— deliveredby Facebook. Twitter is better at leading us to the interests of people beyond our social circle, but our tendency to associate with others who think in similar ways—what sociologists call our “value homophily”—means most of us end up with a feed that feels like an extended dinner party.
谷歌可以回答你问的几乎一切问题，但是它不会告诉你你应该问什么。伊桑·祖克曼是麻省理工学院的公民媒体中心的主管，也是长期以来的互联网支持者，他指出传统印刷媒体能带给你那些你不知道自己想知道的信息，而互联网还没有做到这一点。他把报纸的头版称为一个“发现引擎”，头条报道告诉你一些你几乎一定会感兴趣的新闻，像是全球经济之将倾，或是女神卡卡的最近衣着等等，而头版上的其它新闻可以告诉你在一些你都不知道存在的国家里发生的革命。祖克曼认为有这种慧眼的编辑（他称其为“图书馆馆长”），现在正在被脸谱网提供的“好友”取代，这是一个像是你我这样的群体，其兴趣，世界观可能本已差别不大。推特微博可以更好地让我们接触到自己社交圈子以外的人的兴趣，但是我们还是有倾向于和自己想法相似的人相互结交的天性。社会学家称其为人类的“价值类聚”，这意味着我们中大多数获得的信息流就好像是一个延长的晚餐聚会一样。
One reason why television viewing has held up relatively well, defying predictions of its demise, is that, compared with the internet, it is good at serendipity. Danny Cohen is in charge of BBC1, Britain’s most-viewed channel. He told me that a new programme on a difficultor obscure subject can still inherit a substantial audience from a popularshow. This is, in some ways, a mysterious phenomenon. “I could understand it when changing the channel meant getting off the sofa,” says Cohen. “But now?”Despite remote controls and far more channels, we still willingly succumb to the choices of the broadcasting curators.
和很多预测不符，看电视这一行为并没有消亡，其仍然很受欢迎的一个原因在于和互联网相比，电视更善于创造偶遇。英国最多人观看的电视台，
BBC
一台的负责人丹尼·柯亨告诉我一个受欢迎的节目结束后接上一个主题较为艰涩难懂或是不为人知的新节目之后，还是有想当数量的观众会不转台继续观看。这在某种角度来看是一个神秘现象。柯亨说过：“在必须从沙发上站起来换台的时代我还能理解这一趋势，但是现在呢？”尽管我们有遥控器和多得多的频道，我们仍然心甘情愿地让电视台决定我们观看的节目。
Cohen worries that even as the volume of media has grown exponentially, “our propensity to explore it is diminishing”.Driven by the needs of advertisers keen to hit ever more tightly delineated targets, today’s internet plies us with “relevant” information and screens out the rest. Two different people will receive subtly different results from Google, adjusted for what Google knows about their interests. Newspaper websites are starting to make stories more prominent to you if your friends have liked them on Facebook. We spend our online lives inside what the writer Eli Pariser calls “the filter bubble”.
柯亨担心即使随着媒体内容级数增长，“我们探索这些内容的倾向在逐渐减弱”。随着广告商需要对准描述越来越精确的个人，今天的互联网强制灌输大量“相关”信息，把所有其它信息都屏蔽掉了。两个不同的人在谷歌上搜索同样的内容会得到有着微妙差异的结果，谷歌根据其兴趣对搜索结果已经进行了调整。如果你的好友在脸谱网上标出喜欢某新闻，新闻网站会把它们放在更显眼的位置吸引你。我们在线的时间现在都生活在作家艾利·普雷舍所谓的“过滤泡泡”的内部。
To escape it, we can leave our screens and walk outside. But some of our most serendipitous spaces are under threat from the internet. Wander into a bookshop in search of something to read: the bookjackets shimmer on the table, the spines flirt with you from the shelves. You can pick them up and allow their pages to caress your hands. You may not find the book you wanted, but you will walk out with three you didn’t. Amazon will have your book too, but its recommendation engine doesn’t even come close to delivering the same stimuli. Similarly, a librarian isn’t as efficient as asearch engine, his memory isn’t nearly as capacious, but he may still be betterat making suggestions to a reader in search of—well, something.
