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Comment by Daniel Groovimus (daniel-groovimus) on There is way too much serendipity · 2024-02-05T18:13:15.695Z · LW · GW

Nice post but the idea that Albert Hofmann's famous chemical ingestion was absolutely accidental is debatable. That is if you consider why he synthesized LSD-25 for the second time 5 years after it failed at the purpose for which he was researching. You would have to believe that a failed compound was accidently synthesized for the episode to fit into the theme of this. Notice the name that he gave it, LSD-25. It wasn't for whim that he included the sequence number from his notebook. It was because he had a long series of dreams revolving around the number 25 that propelled him back into the lab to figure out which compound was the 25th compound in his ergot-derived chemical quest, and of course after bicycle day, he had no more dreams of 25. This is told in his autobiographical 'LSD My Problem Child'.