Читать книгу The Fontana History of Chemistry - William Brock J. - Страница 14

I see not why we must needs believe that there are any primogeneal and simple bodies, of which, as of pre-existent elements, nature is obliged to compound all others. Nor do I see why we may not conceive that she may produce the bodies accounted mixt out of one another by variously altering and contriving their minute parts, without resolving the matter into any such simple and homogeneous substances as are pretended.

(ROBERT BOYLE, The Sceptical Chymist, 1661)

The phrase ‘The Scientific Revolution’ conjures up a rebellion against Greek authority in astronomy and dynamics, and physics in general. It reminds us of names like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, Descartes, Bacon and Newton. Chemists’ names are missing. Indeed, a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century revolution in chemical understanding does not readily spring to mind. What was there to rebel against or to revolutionize? Was there a new chemical way of looking at substances in the seventeenth century that in any way paralleled the new physical way?

The historian’s reply has usually been a negative one, with the rider that chemistry developed much later than either astronomy or physics or anatomy and physiology; and that chemistry did not become a science until the eighteenth century. Its revolution was carried out by Lavoisier.

Whether or not this was the case, it can be agreed that chemistry presented the early natural philosopher with peculiarly difficult problems. The sheer complexity of most of the chemical materials with which chemists commonly worked can be seen, with hindsight, to have inevitably made generalizations extremely difficult. Chemists were considering with equal ardour the chemical components of the human and animal body, and of plants and minerals, the procedures of metallurgy, pottery, vinegar, acid and glass manufacture, as well as, in some quarters, abstractions like the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. There was no universally agreed chemical language, no convenient compartmentalization of substances into organic and inorganic, into solids, liquids and gases, or into acids, bases and salts; and no concept of purity. For example, when Wilhelm Homberg (1652–1715) ‘analysed’ ordinary sulphur in 1703, he obtained an acid salt, an earth, some fatty matter and some copper metal.

But perhaps the greatest stumbling block to the further development of chemistry was a case of insufficient analysis – there was a complete absence of a knowledge or concept of the gaseous state of matter. Chemistry remained a two-dimensional science, which studied, and only had equipment and apparatus to handle, solids and liquids.

This does not mean that chemistry lacked organization, for there were any number of grand theories that brought order and classification to this complicated subject. The problem with these organizational theories was not only their mutual inconsistency, but the fact that by the 1660s they looked old-fashioned and part of the pre-revolutionary landscape that astronomers and physicists had moved away from. To many natural philosophers, therefore, chemistry seemed tainted; it was an occult or pseudo-science that was beyond the pale of rational discourse.

This was where Boyle came in, for he devoted his life to bringing chemistry to the attention of natural philosophers as a subject worthy of their closest and honest attention. His intention was to ‘begat a good understanding betwixt the chymists and the mechanical philosophers’. In order to do this, he had to show, among other things, that the three or four traditional explanations of chemical phenomena lacked credibility and that a better explanation lay in the revived corpuscular philosophy.