The architecture of matter by Stephen Edelston Toulmin

Author:Stephen Edelston Toulmin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science -- History, Matter -- Constitution
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1982-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE ACTIVITIES OF THE INANIMATE

not about the air within the flask. Even if he had made these further measurements, he would scarcely have known what to make of the results. He was in no position to give Lavoisier’s answers, since he could not yet formulate Lavoisier’s questions.

The historical situation is in fact even more piquant. As early as 1630, Jean Rey of Montpellier had published a series of Essays (recently re-edited by D. McKie), reporting observations very similar to Boyle’s and interpreting them on lines similar to Lavoisier’s:

This increase in weight comes from the air, which in the vessel has been rendered denser, heavier and in some measure adhesive, by the vehement and long-continued heat of the furnace: which air mixes with the calx (frequent agitation aiding) and becomes attached to its most minute particles.

But an explanation can become established only when there is a systematic body of theory into which it can fit, and Jean Rey’s account of calcination found no place to lodge in the matter-theory of his time. It was revived only at a later period, when questions about the chemical properties of the air had acquired a new significance and urgency.

For the time being, questions about the weight of fire were as significant and important as questions about the weight of any ‘substance’. So the picture we have of Voltaire in his laboratory, trying to devise a means of determining this weight unambiguously, is not that of a literary dilettante, but that of a genuine scientist struggling with a problem which —in the context of his own time—was real and inescapable.

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