Abstract

Carothers's polymerisation theory, and Flory's enunciation of equal reactivities, were hybrids of ideas, extensions by analogy of the principles and methods of rigorous scientific disciplines into a new field, still in a state of conceptual unclarity. Their hybrid-ideas were radical innovations which contributed towards establishing polymer chemistry as a separate chemical discipline. Joseph Ben-David's theory of hybridisation can cast new light on the social and technological origins of significant innovations in twentieth-century science. Carothers and Flory's enunciations of radically novel ideas were inseperable from their identification with the new role of polymer chemist.Quasi-academic or academically peripheral milieux have had a systematic, indeed historic, role in bringing about innovations in fundamental science, in isolating significant problems and fruitful analogies, and in shaping new types of academic careers. This mechanism at the periphery offsets the pressures for conformity and orthodoxy which otherwise tend to prevail in academic science at the centre