“…Until now, serendipity research has relied very much on narratives shared by scientists and others, from those passed down through history (Van Andel, 1994) to written in tweets online (Bogers & Björneborn, 2013;Rubin et al, 2011), as evidence and counterargument for definitions, diagrams and frameworks of serendipity as it happens. Recently, this research has moved away from the narrative and toward empirical research (Erdelez, 2004;Ross & Vallée-Tourangeau, 2022) as a resource for greater understanding, and with this move the theory has moved from categorization of the phenomena we call serendipity to analysis of its components and the conditions in which it occurs (or does not, for that matter). The narratives in this series, then, will be taken as a testing ground for emergent serendipity theory, illustrating what it can add to our understanding of how discoveries are made as well as offering an opportunity to prove or to question generalizations now being made from historical, familiar cases.…”