Talk:Experimentum crucis

The first one who whrite about Experimentum Crusi was Francis Bacon and not Isaac Newton.

Tanis
User:FT2, User:Ancheta Wis, I think it is too early to call Tanis an experimentum crucis, besides which it isn't really an experiment. I'm thinking of replacing this section with something about Galileo's observations of phases of Venus, which is widely taken as discrediting the geocentric model of the universe. That should be pretty easy to source. Let me know if you object. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 01:03, 14 April 2019 (UTC)
 * It's an experiment in the sense that a hypothesis was nullified by an observation. A naturalistic discovery in the sense of Columbus or Magellan. --Ancheta Wis   (talk  &#124; contribs) 01:22, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

DNA
I do not think that the discovery of DNA counts as an experimentum crucis, by any means. Crick and Watson developed their theory of duplication in concert with having the crystallographic evidence of the double helix structure. An experimentum crucis would have involved Crick and Watson publishing a theory, and then an experiment being designed to test this theory. That was not the case. Owensumm (talk) 20:55, 31 January 2023 (UTC)


 * See Watson (1968), The Double Helix. Watson knew Crick's theorem for the Fourier transform of a helix (1), and had observed its characteristic diffraction pattern in his own experiments with tobacco mosaic virus (2). Thus Watson was prepared when he saw photo 51; his own description from the book: "his mouth went slack-jawed,and his pulse began to race" (3). Rosalind Franklin herself stated "DNA is not a helix" in January 1952. Her own methodology would have been to perform a full Patterson analysis. Since she was leaving the field, and since Wilkins would not have begun work on DNA until after Franklin had left, Bragg gave Watson and Crick permission to build concrete models of the nucleotides comprising DNA, as this was the fastest way to prove the viability of the hypothesis of the double helix (4). By the scientific method, (1), (2), (3), and (4) serve as prediction, observation, corroboration, and modelling of the hypothesis, respectively of the structure of the macromolecule that is DNA. Even Pauling (1951) had missed the double helix: he thought DNA was a triple helix. After Watson and Crick had built the model, everyone was convinced. The copying mechanism from the two strands was an afterthought mentioned in the paper; Crick's Fourier transform work is the heart of the advance, as mentioned in Scientific_method. -- Ancheta Wis    (talk  &#124; contribs) 21:47, 31 January 2023 (UTC)