Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Torbern Bergman

Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Torbern Bergman
Author: Anders Lennartson
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2020-08-31
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3030491943

This book tells the story of two of the most important figures in the history of chemistry. Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742–1786) was the first to prepare oxygen and realise that air is a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen; he also discovered many important organic and inorganic substances. His fellow chemist and good friend, Torbern Bergman (1735–1784), was one of the pioneers in analytical and physical chemistry. In this carefully researched biography, the author, Anders Lennartson, explains the chemistry of Scheele and Bergman while putting their discoveries in the context of other 18th-century chemistry. Much of the information contained in this work is available in English for the first time.

The Chemical Works of Carl Wilhelm Scheele

The Chemical Works of Carl Wilhelm Scheele
Author: Anders Lennartson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 118
Release: 2017-05-08
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3319581813

This brief draws on the first modern book about Carl Wilhelm Scheele which was published in Swedish in 2015. Following an introduction and bibliography of Scheele’s published works, the author analyses Scheele’s publications paragraph by paragraph, explaining the procedures and the results in modern terms, and summarising and elucidating Scheele’s conclusions. Up until now the original works by Scheele have only in part been translated into English, and to get a complete view of Scheele’s work, knowledge of both Swedish and German was required. This brief opens up the important work of Carl Wilhelm Scheele to an international audience of historians of chemistry, students of history of chemistry and interested chemists.

Civilization and the Culture of Science

Civilization and the Culture of Science
Author: Stephen Gaukroger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 534
Release: 2020-02-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0192588931

How did science come to have such a central place in Western culture? How did cognitive values—and subsequently moral, political, and social ones—come to be modelled around scientific values? In Civilization and the Culture of Science, Stephen Gaukroger explores how these values were shaped and how they began, in turn, to shape those of society. The core nineteenth- and twentieth-century development is that in which science comes to take centre stage in determining ideas of civilization, displacing Christianity in this role. Christianity had provided a unifying thread in the study of the world, however, and science had to match this, which it did through the project of the unity of the sciences. The standing of science came to rest or fall on this question, which the book sets out to show in detail is essentially ideological, not something that arose from developments within the sciences, which remained pluralistic and modular. A crucial ingredient in this process was a fundamental rethinking of the relations between science and ethics, economics, philosophy, and engineering. In his engaging description of this transition to a scientific modernity, Gaukroger examines five of the issues which underpinned this shift in detail: changes in the understanding of civilization; the push to unify the sciences; the rise of the idea of the limits of scientific understanding; the concepts of 'applied' and 'popular' science; and the way in which the public was shaped in a scientific image.

The Limits of Matter

The Limits of Matter
Author: Hjalmar Fors
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2015-01-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 022619499X

This is a book about how the modern notion of materiality was established during the period c. 1680-1760. It studies what natural philosophers engaged in chemistry and mineralogy said about phenomena such as witchcraft, trolls and subtle matters, and relates this discourse to their innovations in matter theory. In this way it takes the debate about Enlightenment, which has mostly been confined to fields such as the history of philosophy, theology and physics, into a new arena.

Matter and Method in the Long Chemical Revolution

Matter and Method in the Long Chemical Revolution
Author: Victor D. Boantza
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2016-05-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317099346

The seventeenth-century scientific revolution and the eighteenth-century chemical revolution are rarely considered together, either in general histories of science or in more specific surveys of early modern science or chemistry. This tendency arises from the long-held view that the rise of modern physics and the emergence of modern chemistry comprise two distinct and unconnected episodes in the history of science. Although chemistry was deeply transformed during and between both revolutions, the scientific revolution is traditionally associated with the physical and mathematical sciences whereas modern chemistry is seen as the exclusive product of the chemical revolution. This historiographical tension, between similarity in ’form’ and disparity in historical ’content’ of the two events, has tainted the way we understand the rise of modern chemistry as an integral part of the advent of modern science. Against this background, Matter and Method in the Long Chemical Revolution examines the role of and effects on chemistry of both revolutions in parallel, using chemistry during the chemical revolution to illuminate chemistry during the scientific revolution, and vice versa. Focusing on the crises and conflicts of early modern chemistry (and their retrospectively labeled ’losing’ parties), the author traces patterns of continuity in matter theory and experimental method from Boyle to Lavoisier, and reevaluates the disciplinary relationships between chemists, mechanists, and Newtonians in France, England, and Scotland. Adopting a unique approach to the study of the scientific and chemical revolutions, and to early modern chemical thought and practice in particular, the author challenges the standard revolution-centered history of early modern science, and reinterprets the rise of chemistry as an independent discipline in the long eighteenth century.