rampstyle - EN Magazine

9 December 2022

Dear ramp community, Did you know that between thirty and fifty percent of all scientific discoveries are the result of coincidence? Velcro, Viagra, X-rays – sometimes people find things without even looking for them, but they are rewarded with an unexpected alternative. The English language has a word for this kind of surprise realization: serendipity. Some scholars also speak of controlled sloppiness, a documentable deviation in experimental setups resulting from carelessness. For the sagacious, a mistake is information; for the ignorant, a mistake is a mistake. Albert Einstein even went one better: “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be research.” And ideally, you trust your creativity above all else. German sociologist and social theorist Niklas Luhmann describes creativity as “the use of coincidences to build structures”. Creative people experiment more often and fail more often. Strokes of genius don’t come about because you succeed more often, but because you try more often, along with persistence and tenacity and the courage to cheerfully screw things up once in a while. You can’t have one without the other. “You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take,” as Wayne Gretzky, the best ice hockey player of all time, once said. Just as a foretaste of what to expect inside this issue. With this in mind, happy reading!