Modern chemistry, foundation

Within the last fifty years, chemistry has moved forward with giant steps. But not a single one of these steps would have been possible without the dedicated work of the chemists of the past who laid the foundation on which modern chemistry rests. 

Dalton s Atomic Theory was an important milestone in the development of chemistry, but modern chemistry students will correctly note that it was incomplete, and in some cases, just plain wrong. For example, not all atoms of a given element are identical, because Dalton did not know about the existence of isotopes. Likewise, we now know that atoms are comprised of still smaller particles and that nuclear processes convert atoms of one element into atoms of other elements. By the very nature of science, when a hypothesis, law or model—no matter how dearly held—fails to make correct predictions, it must be discarded or modified. So, significant portions of Dalton s original theory have been modified. However, the importance of Dalton s theory can hardly be understated and should not be assessed by whether or not it was correct in the finest details, but in how it provided a working foundation that guided current and future scientists in their quest to understand the physical world. 

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. ... 

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). 

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. 

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. 

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... 

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

The great edifice of modern chemistry has arisen upon the twin foundation-stones of Lavoisier s Oxygen Theory of Combustion and Dalton s Atomic Theory of the constitution of matter. It is ollen overlooked that a period of some twenty years separated these two conceptions, It is true that with the acceptance of Lavoisier s views it could have been said that now sits expectation in the air but meanwhile the dormant science, awakening slowly from its age-long sleep, passed through a confused interregnum, coincident in world history with the rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte and the consolidation of the former American colonics into a rapidly growing democratic republic. 

As in the solution of the problem of combustion, it was the study of gases that opened the way once again to a decisive advance. The twin foundation stones of Lavoisier s Oxygen Theory and Dalton s Atomic Theory, upon which modern chemistry rests, were both laid as a result of the study of gases. 

The foundation of chemistry was constructed by A. de Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry. Lavoisier proposed the law of the conservation of mass stating the mass of an isolated system is maintained as a result of processes acting inside the system, and organized the whole knowledge of earlier chemistry in his book, Traite elementaire de chimie (Elementary Treatise on Chemistry) (1789). Following the law of definite composition (1799) stating a chemical compound always contains exactly the same proportion of elements by mass, suggested by... 

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