re science and methodology was homeopathy tradition in article c l ws jn unx sas com sasghm theseus unx sas com gary merrill writes in article apr cs rochester edu fulk cs rochester edu mark fulk writes genes this fantasy led him to sequence samples of the band and carry out binding assays the result was a well conserved or so bp sequence but why do you characterize this as a flight of fancy or a fantasy the fantasy was that he had found something of fundamental importance to one of the hot questions of the day he really had very little reason to believe it other than raw hope by fantasy i certainly don t mean velikovskian manias some other theory or domain i would offer some rather well known examples such as toricelli s puy de dome experiment done for the sake of his sea of air hypothesis i m not familiar with the history of this experiment although arguably i should be surprising well given the prior explanations of the phenomena involved it certainly be counted as so was the theory constructed and the experiment designed out of perfectly rational grounds well there was a pretty successful and well know theory of fluids the analogy to fluids by toricelli is explicit the novelty was in thinking of air as a fluid but this was quite a novelty at the time was the theory interesting yes was it new well one could argue that it was merely the extension of an existing theory to a new domain but i think this begs certain questions we can debate that if you like i think that it is enough if his contemporaries found the result surprising that s not what i d quibble about what i d like to know are toricelli s reasons for doing his experiment not the post hoc constructed reasons but the thoughts in his head as he considered the problem it may be impossible to know much about toricelli s thoughts that s too bad if it is so one of root bernstein s services to science is that he has gone rooting about in pasteur s and fleming s and other people s notes and has discovered some surprising clues about their motivations pasteur never publicly admitted his plan to create mirror image life but the dreams are right there in his notebooks finally public after many years ready for anyone to read and i and my friends often have the most ridiculous reasons for pursuing results one of my best came because i was mad at a colleague for a poorly written claim i disproved the claim of course toricelli s case may be an example of a rarety where the fantasy not only motivates the experiment but turns out to be right in the end mark mark a fulk university of rochester computer science department fulk cs rochester edu
