Philosophy caloric

Figure 6. Daltonian atoms and molecules with their surrounding atmospheres of repulsive caloric. (From J. Dalton, A New System of Chemical Philosophy,...

We might expect a good treatise, based on such sound philosophy. It is divided formally into three parts. The first part deals with the various gases, their formation and properties, and with the combinations of caloric with bodies, for Lavoisier still held it necessary to consider heat as a fluid substance. He says, in the Traite ... 

Heat had been a part of natural philosophy, the territory of physics now it was being claimed as part of the territory of chemistry. That heat was related to change of physical state, from solid to liquid and from liquid to gas, was well known substances melted or evaporated on heating. Lavoisier explained such transformations in terms of the acquisition of caloric. But what of the relation of substances which existed in chemical combination as part of a solid... 

W. Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 2vols, (London Parker, 1840), vol. 1, pp. 399-400. Privately Harcourt questioned how Whewell could give as much credit as he did to Lavoisier since, with the role of caloric in his scheme, the Frenchman seemed as guilty as Watt. For Harcourt, only Cavendish escaped the stricture. 

The gap in Kant s philosophy of nature has to be closed by a dynamic theory of matter, which leads to the central role of a world ether or caloric ether. 60 The ether is a universal continuum of dynamic forces (attraction and repulsion) of matter and the material basis for the interaction between all empirically observable bodily entities. Moreover, it is the carrier of all phenomena of heat and light. Kant s dynamic theory of matter is the necessary precondition of all experience. Therefore, the concept of matter is both empirical and a priori (21 289) and similarly for the concepts of caloric (Warmestoff) and ether. I will use the terms caloric and ether interchangeable,61 as Kant does most of the time in the OP.62... 

FIGURE 227. Figures of jackets of caloric and lines of force postulated by Dalton to explain why like molecules of gas must repel each other so that gases of different densities remain mixed rather than layered in the atmosphere (from Dalton, A New System of Chemical Philosophy, Part I, Manchester, 1808). 

At the beginning of the 19 century the description of matter attained, what one would call today, a scientific basis. Dalton supported the atomic theory with experiments permitting the development of modem chemistry. The book A New System of Chemical Philosophy, describes this new approach. In Fig. 1.1, an excerpt is displayed. Chapters 1 and II give a summary of the contemporary understanding of nature by analyzing heat and mass, the two basic building-blocks of any material. Chapter 1 displays the theory of the caloric as it was generally... 

That matter was not indefinitely divisible but had an atomic or molecular structure was q working hypothesis for most scientists from the eighteenth century onwards. There was a minor reaction towards the end of the nineteenth century when a group of physicists who professed a positivist philosophy pointed out how indirect was the evidence for the existence of atoms, and their objections were not finally overcome until the early years of this century. If in retrospect, their doubts seem to us to be unreasonable we should, perhaps, remember that almost all those who then believed in atoms believed equally strongly in the material existence of an electromagnetic ether and, in the first half of the nineteenth century, often of a caloric fluid also. Nevertheless those who contributed most to the theories of gases and liquids did so with an assumption, usually explicit, of a discrete structure of matter, llie units mi t be named atoms or molecules (e.g. Laplace) or merely particles (Young), but we will follow modern convention and use the word molecule for the constituent element of a gas, liquid, or solid. 

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