🚀 go-pugleaf

>>>>> On 9 Jan 1993 11:30:50 -0600, turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell
 Russell> Turpin) said: Followup-To: sci.philosophy.tech
 Russell> NNTP-Posting-Host: im4u.cs.utexas.edu

 Russell> -*---- Cross-posted and redirected to sci.philosophy.tech.

 Russell> -*----
 Russell> (Jon Noring) writes:
>
> Here's an excerpt from Truzzi's lecture which follows in whole, just
 Russell> to give
> you an idea of its' contents:

 Russell> I thank Jon Noring for posting this excerpt.  All remaining
 Russell> single-indent text is from this excerpt, i.e., Truzzi's
 Russell> words, not Jon Noring's.

> The history of science is full of some very notable rejections.
> Some of them are now even silly sounding.  Lord Kelvin said that
> x-rays would prove to be a hoax.  Thomas Watson, once chairman of
> the board of IBM, said in 1943, "I think there is a world market for
> about five computers".  This got so bad that in 1889, Charles Duell,
> who was then the commissioner of the US Office of Patents, wrote a
> letter to president McKinley asking him to abolish the Patents
> Office since "everything that can be invented has been invented".
> [See note at end of this post for a later clarification of this
> fact.]  Ernst Mach said he could not accept the theory of relativity
> any more than he could accept the existence of atoms and other such
> dogmas, as he put it.  Edison supposedly said that he saw no
> commercial future for the light bulb.  When the phonograph was first
> demonstrated at the French Academy of Science, one scientist leaped
> up, grabbed the exhibitor, started shaking him, and said, "I won't
> be taken in by your ventriloquist!"  Rutherford called atomic power
> "moonshine".  The history of science is full of such crazy stories.

 Russell> Yes, the history of science *is* full of these crazy
 Russell> stories.  But I do not think any of these stories
 Russell> illustrates Truzzi's point very well.  He gives two



	[stuff deleted]


	How about the tetrahedral nature of the carbon atom?  The idea
and subsequent notions of stereochemistry were first posited by Van
Hoft and Lebel  (sp?).   Wohler,  widely considered to be the "father"
of organic chemistry,  denounced them as mystics quite publicly.


	Slightly more specialized is the decades long argument about
hypervalent carbon,  fought to the death, literally, by H.C. Brown and
the late Saul Winstein.  Winstein happened to be correct, but it
wasn't conclusively demonstrated until after his death.  Literally
MILLIONS and MILLIONS of dollars were spent fighting this chemistry
"war". 

I could think of more...

Nathan Siemers
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/  | / /__|  /  /---/ /__| /  | /    nathan@chemres.tn.cornell.edu