In the writings of the polymath and experimental scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) one sometimes comes across startlingly modern observations on the phenomenology of scientific activity, for example on the relationship between experiment and hypothesis, on the role of contingence in scientific discoveries, or on the dialectic between the invention of the new and the arrangement of accumulated knowledge. In a record of his private notebooks, known as Sudelbücher ("Waste Books"), he casually notes what constitutes a pure demonstration experiment:Now that we know nature, even a child understands that an experiment is nothing more than a compliment paid to it. It is a mere ceremony. We know its answers beforehand. We ask nature for its consensus as the great lords ask the estates. 1 Demonstration experiments were common around the eighteenth century, not only for didactic purposes, but also in the many forms of spectacularization of science, which concerned in particular a then new and mysterious field of knowledge: electricity. The aforementioned definition, however, also brings with it an implicit distinction between a demonstration experiment and a proper experiment: in the former, phenomena we already know are just confirmed and displayed; in the second, something new, which we haven't discovered yet, comes forth. It was precisely this dialectic of expectability and surprise, typical of scientific activity, that engrossed Ludwik Fleck in the twentieth century. According to Fleck, valuable experiments are always