Foundation of modern chemistry

The foundations of modern chemistry were laid in the sixteenth century with the development of systematic metallurgy (extraction of metals from ores) by a German, Georg Bauer, and the medicinal application of minerals by a Swiss alchemist called Paracelsus. 

Albury used his analysis of Lavoisier s chemistry to support the Founder Myth, claiming that Lavoisier s attempt to devise a formally algebraic mode of reasoning applicable to all chemical problems made the 7mzte the foundation of modern chemistry . In a similar maimer, Beretta insisted on the radical discontinuity between Lavoisier s chemistry and that of his phlogistic and alchemical... 

Dalton, John (1766-1844) English chemist and teacher whose atomic theory has become the foundation of modern chemistry. His physical research was chiefly on mixed gases the law of partial pressures is also known as Dalton s law. In 1794, he first described color blindness, known for a time as Daltonism. 

It was only in 1959 that Guy Ourisson renovated the study of organic chemistry by organizing the Groupe d Etudes de Chimie Organique (GECO), to facilitate contact with chemists abroad and to rethink the theoretical foundations of modern organic chemistry. 89 That this was a project sorely needed is indicated by Micheline Charpentier-Morize s reflections on her doctoral thesis defense in 1958. Prevost presided over the jury. When she referred to the possible existence of a "p-complex" to explain reactivity, Prevost exclaimed, "Madame, if I have one reproach for you, it is that you know the modem theories too well. "90... 

The fundamental idea of modern chemistry is that matter is made up of atoms of various sorts, which can be combined and rearranged to produce different, and often novel, materials. The person responsible for this master-concept of our age (Greenaway, p. 227) was John Dalton. He applied Newton s idea of small, indivisible atoms to the study of gases in the atmosphere and used it to advance a quantitative explanation of chemical composition. If French chemist Antoine Lavoisier started the chemical revolution, then it was Dalton who put it on a firm foundation. His contemporary, the Swedish chemist Jons J. Berzelius, said If one takes away from Dalton everything but the atomic idea, that will make his name immortal. ... 

For a mellow introduction to this topic, see Ireland, R. E. Chapter 5, "Stereochemistry Raises its Ugly Head," in "Organic Synthesis, Prentice Hall Foundations of Modern Organic Chemistry Series," Reinhart, K. L., Jr., Ed. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, 1969, pp. 100-122. 

The aim of modern chemistry can be formulated as the understanding of the properties of substances as functions of the constituent kinds of atoms, that is, stated more accurately, as functions of the atomic numbers which indicate the positions that the elements occupy in the Periodic System (Chapter I). The latter is the basis on which the structure of the whole of chemistry should be and can be raised. The foundations, on which this basis rests in its turn the explanation of the Periodic System from the principles of the behaviour of electrons on the one hand and of the nuclei, composed of protons and neutrons, on the other hand, belong to the realm of physics. 

Although there exists an extensive historiography on Robert Boyle and on the Chemical Revolution, the relationship between these two important foundational moments of modern chemistry has not been established in a satisfactory manner. Rather, Thomas Kuhn and Ursula Klein have argued that Boyle s mechanical philosophy had little influence on the development of modern chemistry (Kuhn, Robert Boyle and Structural Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century, Isis 43, 1952, 12-36 Klein, Verbindung und Afftnitat, Birkhauser, 1994 idem, Robert Boyle—Der Begriinder der neuzeitlichen Chemie. Philosophia Naturalis 31, 1994, 63-106). 

YJ hile Wemer s classic paper 49) of 1891 can be regarded as the foundation of modern inorganic coordination chemistry, it has been only during the past 10 to 15 years that a rationalization of the many stereochemistries possible for a coordination complex has become possible— through the modern techniques of spectroscopy and magnetism. Even today, however, many problems remain to be solved, and it is the purpose of this review to outline some of these difficulties. 

The foundations of organic chemistry date from the mid-1700s, when chemistry was evolving from an alchemist s art into a modern science. At... 

The use of kinetics to detail mechanism is a foundation-stone of modern chemistry. Nevertheless, many chemical engineers believe that with a sufficient number of free parameters, a reasonable" model can be adjusted to fit any set of experimental data. The results of this paper (wherein a chemically motivated model with 12 free parameters could not fit the experimental data for 1-propanol disappearance whereas an alternative model with only 8 parameters did fit the data) are in accord with the chemist s perspective that kinetics can be used to elucidate mechanism when sufficient data are available. 

The work was supported by Grants for Shanxi Youth Technical Foundation of China (No.20021008), and Institute of Modern Chemistry, China. 

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