Clark and Jerry, Every branch of science has four kinds of developers: (1) naturalists, (2) experimenters, (3) theoreticians, and (4) engineers. They often disagree, but they need each other. Many of them play two or more roles at different times. Peirce played all four roles in his various work in science and engineering.
Naturalists gather data as they find it. For millennia, biology was dominated by naturalists who gathered and classified data about plants and animals. Most of the experiments were done by farmers who were and still are biological engineers. In biology, Aristotle was mostly a naturalist, but he also proposed theories and did some experiments (with the help of his students). Aristotle's writing on embryology (supported by experiments with chicken eggs) was a paradigm of how to do science. It's not possible to do detailed experiments without some theory. The theory of phlogiston, for example, was the basis for precise measurements, which led to the 19th c. theories of thermodynamics, which led to Boltzmann's statistical mechanics, which led to Planck's theory of radiation, which led to Einstein's 1905 version of quantum mechanics. CG
Theoretical chemists are physicists. <grin>
JLRC
As you probably expect, my views of “theoretical chemists” are radically different. <grin>
Chemistry and physics developed together. The chemists were about a century ahead of the physicists in developing theories of atoms and molecules. Even in the early 20th century, Ernst Mach refused to admit any theories about unobservable atoms. Mach's constant denunciations about theories of atoms made life extremely unpleasant for Boltzmann in Vienna. In the summer of 1905, Boltzmann and his family were on vacation in Italy. When they were preparing to return, Boltzmann hanged himself. JLRC
From roughly 1913 (Rutherford/Moseley papers on the structure of atoms) until roughly 1970, your assertion is reasonable in that the physics community provided the rational for chemical reasoning.
For most of the 20th century, hydrogen was the only atom that physicists could explain by working out the math. For all other atoms and molecules, physicists depended on *chemical reasoning*. Even today, physicists start with chemical data and reasoning for guidelines and insights about which phenomena are worth pursuing with detailed computations. John
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
