A new book argues that our ignorance is so large, lucky discoveries are inevitable.

The three princes of Sarandib—an ancient Persian name for Sri Lanka—get exiled by their father the king. They are good boys, but he wants them to experience the wider world and its peoples and be tested by them before they take over the kingdom. They meet a cameleer who has lost his camel and tell him they’ve seen it—though they have not—and prove it by describing three noteworthy characteristics of the animal: it is blind in one eye, it has a tooth missing, and it has a lame leg.

After some hijinks the camel is found, and the princes are correct. How could they have known? They used their keen observational skills to notice unusual things, and their wit to interpret those observations to reveal a truth that was not immediately apparent.

It is a very old tale, sometimes involving an elephant or a horse instead of a camel. But this is the version written by Amir Khusrau in Delhi in 1301 in his poem The Eight Tales of Paradise, and this is the version that one Christopher the Armenian clumsily translated into the Venetian novel The Three Princes of Serendip, published in 1557; a publication that, in a roundabout way, brought the word “serendipity” into the English language.

In no version of the story do the princes accidentally stumble across something important they were not looking for, or find something they were looking for but in a roundabout, unanticipated manner, or make a valuable discovery based on a false belief or misapprehension. Chance, luck, and accidents, happy or otherwise, play no role in their tale. Rather, the trio use their astute observations as fodder for their abductive reasoning. Their main talent is their ability to spot surprising, unexpected things and use their observations to formulate hypotheses and conjectures that then allow them to deduce the existence of something they’ve never before seen.

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