Page 7 - June 2024 Newsletter

Fortunately, Campbell—who had trained as a scientist himself—
loved the joke, and printed Asimov’s spoof in the March 1948
issue.
In actual fact, it’s really quite a weak joke. If it had been written
up in the form of an ordinary short story, it would have been a
forgettable one. The idea is simply that a fictitious substance
called “thiotimoline” dissolves in water a second or so before it’s
actually added. What makes the six-page piece so memorable—
and genuinely very funny—is its ostensibly serious format,
complete with numerical tables, diagrams and a formal list of
references at the end. All these things are absolutely standard in
scientific papers, but they’d never been seen before in a work of
fiction.
The thiotimoline piece highlighted a strange-but-true fact about
spoofs in general: no matter how outrageous they are, if they’re
written in a superficially factual style, some people will take them
for the truth.
Here is the opening of “The Endochronic Properties of
Resublimated Thiotimoline”, which gives a good flavour of its
deliberately turgid style:
It has been long known that the solubility of organic
compounds in polar solvents such as water is enhanced by the
presence upon the hydrocarbon nucleus of hydrophilic—i.e. water
-loving—groups, such as the hydroxy (–OH), amino (–NH2), or
sulphonic acid (SO3H) groups. Where the physical characteristics
of two given compounds—particularly the degree of subdivision of
the material—are equal, then the time of solution—expressed in
seconds per gram of material per millilitre of solvent—decreases
with the number of hydrophilic groups present. Catechol, for
instance, with two hydroxy groups on the benzene nucleus
dissolves considerably more quickly than does phenol with only
one hydroxy group on the nucleus. Feinschreiber and Hravlek in
2
their studies on the problem have contended that with increasing
hydrophilism, the time of solution approaches zero.
That this analysis is not entirely correct was shown when it was

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