re science and methodology was homeopathy tradition in article apr cs rochester edu fulk cs rochester edu mark fulk writes flights of fancy and other irrational approaches are common the crucial thing is not to sit around just having fantasies they aren t of any use unless they make you do some experiments i ve known a lot of scientists whose fantasies lead them on to creative work usually they won t admit out loud what the fantasy was prior to the consumption of a few beers simple example warren jelinek noticed an extremely heavy band on a dna electrophoresis gel of human alu fragments he got very excited hoping that he d seen some essential part of the control mechanism for eukaryotic 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 while i am unfamiliar with the scientific context here it appears obvious that his speculation for lack of a better or more neutral word was at least in significant part a consequence of his knowledge of and acceptance of current theory coupled with his observations it would appear that something quite rational was going on as he attempted to fit his observation into that theory or to tailor the theory to cover the observation this does not seem like an example of what most would normally call a flight of fancy or a fantasy it is not clear to me what you mean by rational vs irrational perhaps you can give a few examples of surprising experiments that were tried out for perfectly rational reasons or interesting new theories that were first advanced from logical grounds the main examples i can think of are from modern high energy physics which is not typical of science as a whole well i think someone else in this thread was the first to use the word also extra scientific etc nor am i prepared to give a general account of rationality in terms of examples there is some danger of beginning to quibble over what a surprising experiment is what counts as surprising etc the same may be said about logical grounds my point is that quite frequently perhaps even most frequently the roots of a new theory can be traced to previously existing theories or even to previously rejected hypotheses of 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 was this theory and the resulting experimental test surprising well given the prior explanations of the phenomena involved it certainly must 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 gary h merrill principal systems developer c compiler development sas institute inc sas campus dr cary nc sasghm theseus unx sas com mcnc sas sasghm
