What is the difference between serendipity & synchronicity?
Serendipity is finding something unexpected and useful while searching for something else entirely. For instance, the discovery of the antibacterial properties of penicillin by Alexander Fleming is often said to have been serendipitous, because he was merely cleaning up his laboratory when he discovered that the Penicillium mold had contaminated one of his old experiments (it should be realized, however, that Fleming had been researching common substances for several years in the hopes of discovering antibacterial properties, and thus was prepared to understand what he was seeing). Synchronicity is a word coined by the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung to describe the temporally coincident occurences of acausal events. It was a principle that he felt compassed his concept of the collective unconscious, in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlay the whole of human experience and history—social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual.
