Chemical elements Boyle

Corpuscles might well be divisible, but atoms by definition were not. Today, we associate atoms with chemical elements. Boyle definitely did not do so. That made for difficulties in relating theory to laboratory practice, for reasons we shall soon see. 

The first chemist to perform truly quantitative experiments was Robert Boyle (1627-1691), who carefully measured the relationship between the pressure and volume of air. When Boyle published his book The Skeptical Chymist in 1661, the quantitative sciences of physics and chemistry were bom. In addition to his results on the quantitative behavior of gases, Boyle s other major contribution to chemistry consisted of his ideas about the chemical elements. Boyle held no preconceived notion about the number of elements. In his view, a substance was an element unless it could be broken down into two or more simpler substances. As Boyle s experimental definition of an element became generally accepted, the list of known elements began to grow, and the Greek system of four elements finally died. Although Boyle was an excellent scientist. 

Boyle believed there were many elements. He defined them as primitive and simple, or perfectly unmingled bodies, which are the ingredients of all mixtures and compounds. Boyle thought these elements accounted for all the different properties of chemicals. From Boyle s pioneering work it became clear that elements cannot be changed into one another by ordinary methods. Therefore, the attempts to convert base (nonprecious) metals into gold were discontinued. 

The operational approach to the definition of fundamental concepts in science has been emphasized by Mach, Poincare, and Einstein and has been expressed in a very clear form by Bridgman [2]. (Operational definitions had been used implicitly much earlier than the twentieth century. Boyle, for example, defined a chemical element in terms of the experiments by which it might be recognized, in order to avoid the futile discussions of his predecessors, who identified elements with qualities or properties.) In this approach, a concept is defined in terms of a set of experimental or mental operations used to measure or to recognize the quantity The concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations (Bridgman). An operational definition frequently may fail to satisfy us that we know what the concept really is. The question of scientific reality has been explored by many scientists and philosophers and is one that every student should examine. However, in the operational approach, we are not concerned with whether our definition has told us what the concept really is what we need to know is how to measure it. The operational approach has been stated succinctly by Poincare in the course of a discussion of the concept of force ... 

In 1661 Robert Boyle (1627-1691), an early chemist from Great Britain, published a book tided The Skeptical Chymist, which was the beginning of the end of alchemy. His book ruled the perceptions and behavior of early scientists for almost 100 years. Two of his contributions were the use of experimental procedures to determine properties of the chemical elements... 

When Boyle published the second edition of The Sceptical Chymist in 1680, he added an appendix that gave his definition of a chemical element. He wrote ... 

This was not first time that the idea of a chemical element was defined. Nor does it seem, at first glance, to be anything that would really advance the science of chemistry. All Boyle was saying, after all, was that an element was anything that was not a compound or a mixture of different substances. What gave the idea importance was Boyle s insistence that only experiment could determine what was or was not an element. If a substance could be broken down, then it clearly was not an element. One should not decide, for theoretical or philosophical reasons, that certain substances (for example, earth, air, fire, and water) were the elements of which everything else was composed. 

Boyle himself did not consider his definition of a chemical element to be especially important. In fact he called the concept laboriously uselesse. Perhaps it was not a very useful concept in Boyle s day. There was really no way to determine what the true... 

In 1661 Robert Boyle published The Sceptical Chymist, a book in which he discussed the criteria by which one can decide whether a substance is or is not a chemical element. He concluded that the four Aristotelian elements and three principles commonly accepted in his time cannot be real chemical elements since they can neither compose nor be... 

As we have already seen, there was throughout this period a steady increase in the materialization of the chemical elements, whether one believed in three, four, or five. In the case of fire the phlogiston concept is certainly in that pattern. But the chief ancestor lies in the even older tradition of the sulphur principle. The sensation of heat is seen as distinct from the particles of fire, which for many chemists, Boyle among them, were responsible for the increase in weight when metals were calcined. There is no problem in finding a source for Rouelle s idea of fire as occurring both fixed and free. 

The atomic theory as originally conceived by Democritus and Epicurus, developed by Lucretius, and resurrected by Gassendi from about 1647 on, was doubtless the source from which Boyle derived his ideas on this subject, as he cites both Epicurus and Gassendi. Boyle, however, in the above proposition carefully avoids any dogmatic assertion of these hypotheses. It is plain, however, that these atoms or corpuscles as he calls them are a constant element of his thought. In part six (an appendix) to the Sceptical Chymist, he states more distinctly his definition of a chemical element. Carneades says 80... 

B Hess, Joule, Kelvin, and Gibbs all contributed to thermochemistry and have thermodynamic entities named after them. Volta, Faraday, and Galvani (choice D) contributed to electrochemistry, Kekule to organic chemistry, London to chemical bonding, Boyle and Charles to gas laws, Arrhenius to acid/base chemistry and thermochemstry, Pauli to quantum theory, Davy and Ramsay to element isolation, and Mendeleev to the periodic table. 

These beliefs led to the creation of an extensive development of folk medicine that prevailed for many centuries. However, with the publication in 1661 of Robert Boyle s The Skeptical Chemist, the foundations for the application of chemistry to the development of drugs were laid down. The archaic ideas of Aristotle (regarding the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water) and Hippocrates (the body s four fluids humors —blood, black and yellow bile, and phlegm) were finally swept away, and a chemical element was defined as a substance that could not be broken down into simpler substances. 

Note that Lavoisier, like Boyle before him, distinguished between ultimate atoms and the undecomposed substances of the laboratory, what we call chemical atoms and physical atoms. There was no accessible way in Lavoisier s system to connect ultimate atoms with chemical elements. Sticking to the facts in Lavoisier s way meant avoiding making any connection between atoms and elements. There was, philosophically, a profound distinction between them. For the next two generations, chemists were to argue about that distinction. Some were sure it was necessary, some were equally sure that it was unnecessary and simply wrong. 

Kim, Mi Gyung. The Analytic Ideal of Chemical Elements Robert Boyle and the French Didactic Tradition of Chemistry. Science in Context 14, 2001, 361-395. 

Martin, J. M., and M. Whitfield. 1983. The significance of the river input of chemical elements to the ocean." In Trace Metals in Sea Water, eds. Wong, Boyle, Btuland, Burton, and Goldberg (Plenum Publishing Corporation New York), pp. 265-296. 

Exactly 300 years ago (1669), Nicolaus Steno discovered the law of constant interfacial angles in quartz, and Erasmus Bartholinus discovered the double refraction of light in calcite about the same time, Robert Boyle (1661) defined the concept of chemical elements by qualitative mineral analyses. 

It may be useful to look into the way electrons became relevant to chemistry. In the century between Boyle and Lavoisier, the concept chemical element was consolidated, and in the system 6) elaborated by Lavoisier the last few years before... 

Robert Boyle (1627-1691) is noted for his pioneer experiments on the properties of gases and his espousal of a corpuscular view of matter that was a forerunner of the modem theory of chemical elements and atomic theory. Boyle conducted pioneering experiments in which he demonstrated the physical characteristics of air and the necessity of air for combustion and respiration. In 1661, he described, in the second edition of his work. New Experiments Physio-Mechanical, the relationship, known as Boyle s Law, of the volume of gases and pressure. Attacking the Aristotelian theory of the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) and the three principles (salt, sulphur and mercury), proposed by Paracelsus, in The Skeptical Chymist, he can be considered as the founder of modem chemistry. " ... 

The first definition of the chemical element, in the modem sense, is due to R. Boyle (1627-1629) in his book Skeptical Chemist, he defined the chemical element as a substance which cannot be decomposed into other substances. So, the elements (simple bodies) are not composed of other substances, but they themselves are the products in which are decomposed, ultimately, all other substances. Boyle did not shown specifically what these items were about, for example, he could not decide if metals or their oxides had a character of an element. On the other hand, the negation, which stay on the basis of his statement, make it uncertain as a practical definition, because even not known the decomposition methods for a substance at a given time (historical epoch), this not necessarily means that such a decomposition is not possible in an arguable future. In any case, the use of the term element, in the sense of elemental substance, i. e., simple substance, was maintained until now, with the note that only its significance was made clear as time passed by. An important step was the transition from the meaning of the element notion as principle, encompassing a collection of properties, to some specific to substance type. Noteworthy, Lavoisier, in his famous Elementary Treatise of Chemistry (1789) included in the simple substances category approximate 40 substances, of which 25 were really elements (Horovitz et al., 2000). 

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