re science and methodology was homeopathy tradition in article apr ecsvax uncecs edu ccreegan ecsvax uncecs edu charles l creegan writes what about kekule s infamous derivation of the idea of benzene rings from a daydream of snakes in the fire biting their tails is this specific enough to count certainly it turns up repeatedly in basic phil of sci texts as an example of the inventive component of hypothesizing and has been rather thoroughly demolished as myth by robert scott root bernstein see his book discovering ring structures for benzene had been proposed before kekule after him and at the same time as him the current models do not resemble kekule s many of the predecessors of kekule s structure resemble the modern model more i don t think extra scientific is a very useful phrase in a discussion of the boundaries of science except as a proposed definiens extra rational is a better phrase in fact there are quite a number of well known cases of extra rational considerations driving science in a useful direction for example pasteur discovered that racemic acid was a mixture of enantiomers the origin of stereochemistry partly because he liked a friend s crank theory of chemical action the friend was wrong but pasteur s discovery stood a prior investigator mitscherlich looking at the same phenomenon had missed a crucial detail presumably because he lacked pasteur s motivation to find something that distinguished racemic acid from tartaric now we say d tartaric acid again pasteur discovered the differential fermentation of enantiomers tartaric acid again not because of some rational conviction but because he was trying to produce yeast that lived on l tartaric acid his notebooks contained fantasies of becoming the newton of mirror image life which he never admitted publically perhaps the best example is the discovery that dna carries genes avery started this work because of one of his students and ardent anglophile and francophobe canadian defended fred griffiths discoveries in mice most of griffiths critics were french which decided the issue for the student avery told him to replicate griffiths work in vitro which the student eventually did whereupon avery was convinced and started the research program which in or so years produced the famous discovery avery macleod and mccarty jem mark a fulk university of rochester computer science department fulk cs rochester edu
