The Layers of Chemical Language, II: Stabilizing Atoms and Molecules in the Practice of Organic Chemistry

Abstract

Atomic and molecular theories occupy a canonical status in the nineteenthcentury historiography of chemistry. The origin and transmission of Dalton's atomic theory and the 'neglect' of Avogadro's hypothesis have received disproportionate attention from historians.' Underlying much fascination with the theories in the beginning was the assumption that Dalton and Avogadro constitute the unequivocal authors of the present-day ontology of the atom and the molecule. Historians have made important advances in the meantime by characterizing chemical atomism as a set of practices and conventions irreducible to a simple ontology. They have shown that chemists, in their uses of Dalton's theory, consistently and sharply differentiated between the law of constant and multiple proportions and the hypothesis of ontological atoms.? If Dalton's theory had a core, it consisted for the contemporary chemists not in the ontology of atoms, but in the method of calculating relative atomic weights from stoichiometric measurements, or in Dalton's "calculating system".' Likewise, the Avogadro scholarship has travelled a long distance from the earlier whiggish claim that nineteenth-century chemists could have avoided such a havoc if only they had adopted Avogadro's hypothesis earlier.Fisher even asserts that "what needs explanation is not why the hypothesis was ignored, but why a few eccentrics accepted it".' Despite these advances, historians have not yet questioned the stability of Dalton's and Avogadro's theories. To be sure, many historians have acknowledged the historicity of the concepts of the atom and the molecule -that Dalton's 'atom' and Avogadro's 'molecule' were not our atom and molecule. Nevertheless, they have not explored the variability of their meanings in usage. Rocke, for example, provides a useful definition of the nineteenth-century chemical atomism that "there exists for each element a unique 'atomic weight', a chemically indivisible unit, that enters into combination with similar units of other elements in small integral multiples". His definition "avoids all reference to the ultimate structure of matter" and anchors it in the stoichiometric laws, quite true to the nineteenth-century use of tatorn'.' He still assumes, however, that chemical atomism consisted of assigning the relative weights of chemical

Wordplay, world‐play, and interdisciplinary imaginations

“…At times new vocabulary and expressions became necessary to express conceptual developments in chemistry practice and theory (Kim, 1992a, pp. 69–96; 1992b, pp. 397–437; 2014a).…”

Απόπειρες Διαμόρφωσης Επιστημονικού Λόγου Στον Ελληνικό Χώρο Του 18ου Αιώνα

“…Ενδιαφέρουσα περιπτωσιολογική μελέ τη με συναφές περιεχόμενο η εργασία του Mi Gyung Kim, "The layers of chemical language", ιδιαίτερα το δεύτερο μέρος "Stabilizing atoms and molecules in the practice of organic chemistry". [Kim, 1992] »ο ΕΙΣΑΓΩΓΉ ca νομιμοποιήσουν μια ορισμένη επιστημονική προσέγγιση . Συνεπώς, η ιστορική μελέτη των ρητορικών εκφάνσεων της επιστήμης έχει μεγάλη συγγένεια με τις μεθόδους της πο λιτισμικής ιστορίας και είναι σε θέση να φέρει στο φως νέες όψεις του επιστημονικού φαινομένου, οι οποίες μέχρι σήμερα δεν έτυχαν της προσοχής των ιστορικών.…”