On 11/06/2011 05:07 PM, Peter Heckert wrote:
Am 06.11.2011 18:36, schrieb Peter Gluck:
What I wrote is connected to a subject more popular here these days.
The future is unknown, but perhaps it could be useful to )re) read the
play OXYGEN by Djerassi and Hoffman
http://www.djerassi.com/oxygen11/oxygen.htm
I have translated it in Romanian but the text was lost due to a
hard-disk crash.
It gives an answer to the question: who has discovered oxygen? Not an
absolute answer.
There cannot be an absolute answer. There are many answers, some
competing, some not.
This is a little bit like the question "Were is the spring of the river
Nil?".
In reality rivers have many springs and one mouth end. (There are
exceptions)
A big problem is, when you discover something new then it has no name.
So, how talk about this?
Many did research phlogiston at this time, this was the prevalent
theorie and might have discovered oxygen and might have described its
behaviour correctly, but the term "oxygen" did not exist and the physics
and chemistry of gases was unknown.
So there where no possibility to put this discovery into a wider
context. The language needed for this did not exist.
They would have used the name "phlogiston" or other names and so their
description is not understandable nowadays.
So far I know, Lavoisier was the first who made documented quantitative
measurements for oxidation and burning. He might not be this person that
first discovered oxygen, but he developed these methods needed to prove
and measure and predict its existence.
Exactly. He took a quantitative approach, carefully weighting before and
after the combustion, and found out that the end products were heavier
than the combustible, and that lead in turn to the discovery of
oxygen(in modern scientific terms), and to the abandonment of the
phlogiston theory.
But take notice that it was the quantitative approach, and particularly,
weighting, what leads to the modern discovery of oxygen. Moreover: when
you consider all the results of a combustion (not only those that have
weight) you can easily conclude that there's indeed something that is
escaping during the combustion, namely, in the form of light and warmth.
Not that I want to sustain or defend the phlogiston theory, (that's far
from my intention), but please take notice that a combustion is in fact
something involving more than just matter in the ordinary sense.
In a sense, the cherished modern notion of a combustion like just the
encounter of a combustible and an oxidizer, is just a partial truth(the
part that can be weighted), whereas the whole process is composed by
much more than that, and certainly involves something similar to the
old, discredited, phlogiston.
We tend to value the explanations that conform to the notions of our
time, like, by example, materialism, and consider them to be true, but
in fact they are no more than approximations and, in a certain sense,
just conventions or discourses of our time. Reflections of our mental
frameworks.
Future mankind will find very strange, and even funny, not only the
partial and conventional notions of our time, but also the strength and
insistence with which we tend to adhere to them, as if they were
absolute truths, when they are in fact not more than conventions. Just
in the same way, or even more, as we tend to laugh now about past knowledge.
Regards,
Mauro
Without this we would probably today still discuss about phlogiston
theories and could doubt the existence of oxygene.
Best, Peter
