The Newton of Chemistry
In his terrific history of chemistry, Mendeleyev’s Dream , Paul Strathern pointed out the impact of what Newton did to physics and science in general: “Any scientific advances were expected to incorporate the mechanical rigor and mathematical exactitude of Newtonian physics.” Poor chemistry. It still belonged to the “world of quality”, not quantity. And so chemistry would stay until Antoine Lavoisier came along a century later. He believed in weighing and measuring. He made a leap of faith and assumed that while “substances taking part in a chemical reaction could be transformed, but their overall weight would be the same”. If he had just made an assumption that was later proven true and is now a bedrock of science itself, it could be dismissed as a lucky guess. But Lavoisier performed experiments based on his assumption and the conclusions he drew changed chemistry. For example, he had seen that water boiled for hours produced a sediment on the flask it was boiled in. ...