"How To Dunk A Doughnut"

[fiefoe]

Len Fisher is an apologist for his fellow scientists:

• Scientists, like hangmen, are socially disadvantaged by their profession.
• Scientists, like sports fans, are much more interested in the exceptional than they are in the average.
  
• Journalists aren't the only people who see science in terms of "discoveries." Even some scientists do. Shortly after the Royal Society was founded in 1660, Robert Hooke was appointed as "curator of experiments" and charged with the job of making "three or four considerable experiments" (i.e., discoveries) each week.
• This was Baconian science, named after Sir Francis Bacon, the Elizabethan courtier who declared that science was simply a matter of collecting a sufficient number of facts to make a pattern.
• ...as with the famous physicist who was asked to calculate the maximum possible speed of a racehorse. His response, according to legend, was that he could do so, but only if he was permitted to assume that the horse was spherical.
  

In praise of 'the beauty of that familiar detail':
    '...the principle of heat convection, discovered by the Anglo-American Count Rumford after burning his mouth on a hot apple pie; the first measurement of the size of a molecule, performed by Benjamin Franklin after observing the calming effect of dirty wash water on the waves in a ship's wake'