Corpuscular matter theory

Luethy, Christopher Herbert, John Emery Murdoch and William Royall Newman, eds. Late medieval and early modern corpuscular matter theories. Leiden Brill, 2001. viii, 610 p... 

Lawrence M. Principe, Wilhelm Homberg Chymical Corpuscularianism and Chrysopoeia in the Early Eighteenth Century, 535-56 in Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories, eds. C. Liithy, J. E. Murdoch, and W R. Newman (Leiden Brill, 2001). 

Although Bacon adhered to a type of corpuscular matter theory, I forbear from discussing this complicated issue in the present book. For such a discussion, see Benedino Gemelli, Aspetti dell atomismo classico nettafilosofia di Francis Bacon e net Seicento (Florence Olschki, 1996). 

Although the major trend in Geberian alchemy was corpuscularist rather than atomistic, some followers of Geber did in fact commit themselves to an openly atomist perspective. See Newman, Experimental Corpuscular Theory in Aristotelian Alchemy From Geber to Sennert, in Liithy, Murdoch, and Newman, Late Medieval and Early Modem Corpuscular Matter Theories, pp. 301-306. 

Corpuscular Matter Theories. Ed. Christoph Liithy, John E. Murdoch, and William R. Newman, pp. 331-363. Leiden E.J. BriU, 2001. 

Eighteenth Century. In Late Medieval and Early Modem Corpuscular Matter Theories, edited by Christoph Luthy, John E. Murdoch, and WiUiam R. Newman, 535-556. Leiden, Boston, Kdln Brill. 

William R. Newman is Associate Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. He has published The Summa Perfectionis of Pseudo-Geber A Critical Edition, Translation and Study (Leiden Brill, 1991), and will soon publish Gehennical Fire The Lives of George Starkey, An Alchemist of Harvard in the Scientific Revolution with Harvard University Press. In addition, he has written numerous papers on the history of alchemy, and is engaged in a study of the general relationship between alchemy and the occult sciences. His current research also includes the development of corpuscular matter theory, the issue of continuity versus disjuncture in early modern science, and eighteenth-century chemistry before Lavoisier. 

Newman, William Royall. "Experimental corpuscular theory in Aristotelian alchemy Geber to Sennert." In Late medieval and early modern corpuscular matter... 

Thackray has argued that Newton s most fundamental contribution to the development of matter theory was his replacement of the sort of corpuscular philosophy favored by, say Boyle, with a view of nature based on particles and the forces in between them. Thackray. (1970). Atoms and Powers 26. 

The buried edifice of matter theory that we have unearthed provides a window into the remarkable degree of interaction between theory and practice that was possible in medieval and early modern alchemy. It can only be cause for surprise that Paul of Taranto was already maWg sophisticated use of the reduction to the pristine state to refute Thomistic theories of mixture and the unity of forms and to support a corpuscular theory in the High Middle Ages centuries before Sennert and Boyle made the same move. Equally startling, perhaps, is the way in which early modern thinkers such as Libavius and Sennert yoked Aristotle s meteorology to the matter theory of the alchemists in order to produce a picture of the... 

The first consistent attempt to unify quantum theory and relativity came after Schrddinger s and Heisenberg s work in 1925 and 1926 produced the rules for the quantum mechanical description of nonrelativistic systems of point particles. Mention should be made of the fact that in these developments de Broglie s hypothesis attributing wave-corpuscular properties to all matter played an important role. Central to this hypothesis are the relations between particle and wave properties E — hv and p = Ilk, which de Broglie advanced on the basis of relativistic dynamics. 

Corpuscular theory offers, for that matter, only a very limited basis for the explanation of macroscopic phenomena (...) sometimes it looks as if 1,2-dichloroethane is C2H4C12 (...) . 

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