The Three Princes of Serendib

"In ancient times there existed in the country of Serendippo, in the Far East, a great and powerful king by the name of Giaffer. He had three sons who were very dear to him. And being a good father and very concerned about their education, he decided that he had to leave them endowed not only with great power, but also with all kinds of virtues of which princes are particularly in need.”
"And to them he entrusted the training of his sons, with the understanding that the best they could do for him was to teach them in such a way that they could be immediately recognized as his very own.”
"As the three princes are endowed with great intelligence, they soon become highly trained in the arts and sciences. However, when the tutors inform the king of his sons’ achievements, he is sceptical. So he summons his eldest son and announces that he wishes to retire to a monastery and that his son should succeed him as ruler. The eldest son politely refuses, insisting that his father is wiser and should reign until his death. The two younger sons also refuse when commanded in a similar manner.

Although the king is astonished by the wisdom displayed by his sons, he decides to send them on a prolonged journey so that they can acquire empirical experience. He summons his sons and, giving the impression of being angry and disappointed because they have all disobeyed him, banishes them from Serendip. “Thus they started their peregrination and moved out of his kingdom until they reached the kingdom of a great and powerful emperor, whose name was Beramo.”

Serendib

" The tenth-century historian Abu Rihan Muhammad bin Ahmad, or Alberuni, called the island Singal-Dip, also derived from sinhala and a form of the word meaning "island". However, in Arabic, Sri Lanka ultimately came to be known as Serendib or Sarandib, which led to the Persian Serendip (as used in the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes were always making discoveries of things they were not seeking, from which Horace Walpole in 1754 would ultimately coin the English word serendipity). An Arabic form of more recent vintage than Sarandib, Sailan, later came to be via predecessor words in Arabic Tilaan and Cylone, also sharing the same root as Ceylon"


"Una serendipia es un descubrimiento científico afortunado e inesperado que se ha realizado accidentalmente.Se puede denominar así también a la casualidad, coincidencia o accidente.
La historia de la ciencia está llena de serendipias. Por ejemplo, Einstein reconoce esta cualidad en algunos de sus hallazgos. También existen casos de serendipias en obras literarias, cuando un autor escribe sobre algo que ha imaginado y que no se conoce en su época, y se demuestra posteriormente que eso existe tal como lo definió el escritor, con los mismos detalles. No se debe confundir con la anticipación o la ciencia-ficción, donde se adelantan inventos mucho más genéricos que casi todo el mundo cree que probablemente existirán algún día.
El término serendipia deriva del inglés serendipity, neologismo acuñado por Horace Walpole en 1754 a partir de un cuento persa del siglo XVIII llamado «Los tres príncipes de Serendip», en el que los protagonistas, unos príncipes de la isla Serendip (que era el nombre árabe de la isla de Ceilán, la actual Sri Lanka), solucionaban sus problemas a través de increíbles casualidades"