Sherlock or Sheerlack?

There is one character that thru time has gotten very famous for his wits and rational ways of solving all kinds of enigmas. Even nowadays, when we think of someone really smart, it almost automatically comes to us to call him a Sherlock. Sherlock Holmes, as a creation of Arthur Conan Doyle, had to share the writer's limitations in science, which, to the educated mind, showed to be many. To the average person, though, the writting skills of Conan were enough to make it believable. So, since I can't state something without facts, let's go thru some:

Conan's limitations are visible when he describes Moriarty, Sherlock's dreaded enemy. In "The Final Problem", he stated Moriarty wrote a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem". It is estimated Moriarty would be 21 in 1865, but in 1815 the Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel had already solved it, and there was nothing left for Moriarty to solve. Actually, it remains the same till now.

But that is not Chemistry, what was supposedly Sherlock's specialty, so let's get to that... After all, Conan Doyle himself was a physician, and 100 years ago no decent physician could pass without at least some knowledge of Chemistry. But in virtually every case Sherlock was actually wrong in one way or the other. First, the absurd... In several stories Sherlock Holmes seems to be able to single out one among several amorphous organic materials by use of a microscope... It just happens that it is virtually impossible to do so, and far easier to conduct a chemical examination of the contents. Nonethless, his "piercing" eyes manage to find THAT enough evidence to convict a man of murder... If he was alive today, none of us would be safe! Then, in "A Study of Scarlet", Holmes propose to test a mechanism to detect blood on a "litre of water"... He then pierces his own finger and let a drop fall in the container.... Even supposing he let go a very small drop of blood, even then, there would be at least one part of blood in some 50.000 parts of water. But he says about it: "There could not be more than one part in one million"... Quite a misunderstanding of basics solution of liquids for someone accomplished in Chemistry... All the time the terms he uses are old and out of use even at that period. Once he mentions a study he made on "acetones". Acetones? There is just one acetone, that is the name of a specific substance, not a group of substances... He could have mistaken the fact it is a member of the "Ketones", a mistake an amateur could commit, but not him. He calls metallic alloys "amalgams" instead. All alloys sure are amalgams, but not otherwise, and no chemist would generalize.

To finish, although there are others, thereis the story "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle". A carbuncle is a precious stone, a variety of garnet which is, chemically, an iron-alluminun silicate... It's name is derived from the fact it is deep red like small burning carbuncles of coal (carbunculus in Latin means little pieces of coal)... While there are several varieties of garnets of different colors, for that reason just the red ones are called carbuncles, so you would agree, a "Blue Carbuncle" is a contradiction in terms.

One could say those were just mere details, but it was in the details that Holmes found the evidence to condemn the criminals... I wonder how many injustices he would commit if he was alive today... I prefer to trust the whole gama of new tests and capable profissionals in the forensics area we have now.

But if we can raise such an adoration for a flunked persona that didn't even exist, what to say of real ones? That's why we need to be careful before accepting what we are told, even if by supposed "experts" in any field.

Voltar