re science and methodology was homeopathy tradition in article apr cs rochester edu fulk cs rochester edu mark fulk writes i m not familiar with the history of this experiment although arguably i should be for a brief but pretty detailed account try hempel s philosophy of natural science 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 this smacks a bit of ideology the supposition being that toricelli s subsequent descriptions of his reasoning are not veridical it gets dangerously close to an unfalsifiable view of the history and methodology of science if we deny that no subsequent reports of experimenters are reliable descriptions of their real reasons 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 but my point is that this type of case is not a rarity in fact i was going to point to pasteur as yet another rather common example particularly the studies on spontaneous generation and fermentation i will readily concede that ridiculous reasons can play an important role in how scientists spend their time but one should not confuse motivation with methodology nor suppose that ridiculous reasons provide the impetus in the majority of cases based on relatively infrequent anecdotal evidence 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
