HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY

A basic Chemical hypothesis first emerged in Classical Greece with the theory of four elements as propounded definitively by Aristotle stating that fire, air, earth and water were the fundamental elements from which everything is formed as a combination. Greek atomism dates back to 440 BC, arising in works by philosophers such as Democritus and Epicurus. In 50 BC, the Roman philosopher Lucretius expanded upon the theory in his book De rerum natura (On The Nature of Things). Unlike modern concepts of science, .

 Greek atomism was purely philosophical in nature, with little concern for empirical observations and no concern for chemical experiments.

In the Hellenistic world the art of alchemy first proliferated, mingling magic and occultism into the study of natural substances with the ultimate goal of transmuting elements into gold and discovering the elixir of eternal life. Work, particularly the development of distillation, continued in the early Byzantine period with the most famous practitioner being the 4th century Greek-Egyptian Zosimos of Panopolis. Alchemy continued to be developed and practised throughout the Arab world after the Muslim conquests, and from there, and from the Byzantine remnants, diffused into medieval and Renaissance Europe through Latin translations. Some influential Muslim chemists, Abū al-Rayhān al-Bīrūnī, Avicenna and Al-Kindi refuted the theories of alchemy, particularly the theory of the transmutation of metals; and al-Tusi described a version of the conservation of mass, noting that a body of matter is able to change but is not able to disappear.

 CHEMISTRY SCIENCE

Jābir ibn Hayyān (Geber), a Persian alchemist whose experimental research laid the foundations of chemistry.

The development of the modern scientific method was slow and arduous, but an early scientific method for chemistry began emerging among early Muslim chemists, beginning with the 9th century Persian or Arabian chemist Jābir ibn Hayyān (known as "Geber" in Europe), who is sometimes referred to as "the father of chemistry". He introduced a systematic and experimental approach to scientific research based in the laboratory, in contrast to the ancient Greek and Egyptian alchemists whose works were largely allegorical and often unintelligible. Under the influence of the new empirical methods propounded by Sir Francis Bacon and others, a group of chemists at Oxford, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke and John Mayow began to reshape the old alchemical traditions into a scientific discipline. Boyle in particular is regarded as the founding father of chemistry due to his most important work, the classic chemistry text The Sceptical Chymist where the differentiation is made between the claims of alchemy and the empirical scientific discoveries of the new chemistry. He formulated Boyle's law, rejected the classical "four elements" and proposed a mechanistic alternative of atoms and chemical reactions that could be subject to rigorous experiment. 

Fundamental interaction basic force, fundamental force PHYSICS

The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica

    See Article History

Alternative Titles: basic force, fundamental force

RELATED TOPICS

atom

electromagnetism

electroweak theory

matter

physical science

quantum field theory

strong force

Martinus J.G. Veltman

weak force

Yukawa Hideki

  Fundamental interaction, in physics, any of the four basic forces—gravitational, electromagnetic, strong, and weak—that govern how objects or particles interact and how certain particles decay. All the known forces of nature can be traced to these fundamental interactions. The fundamental interactions are characterized on the basis of the following four criteria: the types of particles that experience the force, the relative strength of the force, the range over which the force is effective, and the nature of the particles that mediate the force.

Gravitation and electromagnetism were recognized long before the discovery of the strong and weak forces because their effects on ordinary objects are readily observed. The gravitational force, described systematically by Isaac Newton in the 17th century, acts between all objects having mass; it causes apples to fall from trees and determines the orbits of the planets around the Sun. The electromagnetic force, given scientific definition by James Clerk Maxwell in the 19th century, is responsible for the repulsion of like and the attraction of unlike electric charges; it also explains the chemical behaviour of matter and the properties of light. The strong and weak forces were discovered by physicists in the 20th century when they finally probed into the core of the atom. The strong force acts between quarks, the constituents of all subatomic particles, including protons and neutrons. The residual effects of the strong force bind the protons and neutrons of the atomic nucleus together in spite of the intense repulsion of the positively charged protons for each other. The weak force manifests itself in certain forms of radioactive decay and in the nuclear reactions that fuel the Sun and other stars. Electrons are among the elementary subatomic particles that experience the weak force but not the strong force.  

READ MORE ON THIS TOPIC

subatomic particle: The basic forces and their messenger particles

The previous section of this article presented an overview of the basic issues in particle physics, including the four fundamental interactions that affect all of matter. In this section the four interactions, or basic forces, are treated in greater detail. Each force is described on the basis of the following characteristics: (1) the property of matter on which each force acts; (2) the...

READ MORE

The four forces are often described according to their relative strengths. The strong force is regarded as the most powerful force in nature. It is followed in descending order by the electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational forces. Despite its strength, the strong force does not manifest itself in the macroscopic universe because of its extremely limited range. It is confined to an operating distance of about 10−15 metre—about the diameter of a proton. When two particles that are sensitive to the strong force pass within this distance, the probability that they will interact is high. The range of the weak force is even shorter. Particles affected by this force must pass within 10−17 metre of one another to interact, and the probability that they will do so is low even at that distance unless the particles have high energies. By contrast, the gravitational and electromagnetic forces operate at an infinite range. That is to say, gravity acts between all objects of the universe, no matter how far apart they are, and an electromagnetic wave, such as the light from a distant star, travels undiminished through space until it encounters some particle capable of absorbing it.

SIMILAR TOPICS

mesic atom

stress

nuclear reaction

inertial force

equilibrium

d’Alembert’s principle

equivalence principle

radioactivity

monatomic gas

spin

For years physicists have sought to show that the four basic forces are simply different manifestations of the same fundamental force. The most successful attempt at such a unification is the electroweak theory, proposed during the late 1960s by Steven Weinberg, Abdus Salam, and Sheldon Lee Glashow. This theory, which incorporates quantum electrodynamics (the quantum field theory of electromagnetism), treats the electromagnetic and weak forces as two aspects of a more-basic electroweak force that is transmitted by four carrier particles, the so-called gauge bosons. One of these carrier particles is the photon of electromagnetism, while the other three—the electrically charged W+ and W− particles and the neutral Z0 particle—are associated with the weak force. Unlike the photon, these weak gauge bosons are massive, and it is the mass of these carrier particles that severely limits the effective range of the weak force.

The fundamental interactions of physics

Ancient astronomy.

 History ofastronomy

Ancient Egyptian astronomy is evident in monuments like the ceiling of Senemut's tomb from the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt.

Astronomy is the oldest of the natural sciences. The earliest civilizations dating back to beyond 3000 BCE, such as the Sumerians, ancient Egyptians, and the Indus Valley Civilization, all had a predictive knowledge and a basic understanding of the motions of the Sun, Moon, and stars. The stars and planets were often a target of worship, believed to represent their gods. While the explanations for these phenomena were often unscientific and lacking in evidence, these early observations laid the foundation for later astronomy. 

According to Asger Aaboe, the origins of Western astronomy can be found in Mesopotamia, and all Western efforts in the exact sciences are descended from late Babylonian astronomy. Egyptian astronomers left monuments showing knowledge of the constellations and the motions of the celestial bodies, while Greek poet Homer wrote of various celestial objects in his Iliad and Odyssey; later Greek astronomers provided names, which are still used today, for most constellations visible from the northern hemisphere.

Natural philosophy

 Natural philosophy

Natural philosophy has its origins in Greece during the Archaic period, (650 BCE – 480 BCE), when pre-Socratic philosophers like Thales rejected non-naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena and proclaimed that every event had a natural cause. They proposed ideas verified by reason and observation, and many of their hypotheses proved successful in experiment; for example, atomism was found to be correct approximately 2000 years after it was first proposed by Leucippus and his pupil Democritus.

Physics in the medieval Islamic world

 Physics in the medieval Islamic world

The basic way a pinhole camera works

Islamic scholarship had inherited Aristotelian physics from the Greeks and during the Islamic Golden Age developed it further, especially placing emphasis on observation and a priori reasoning, developing early forms of the scientific method.

The most notable innovations were in the field of optics and vision, which came from the works of many scientists like Ibn Sahl, Al-Kindi, Ibn al-Haytham, Al-Farisi and Avicenna. The most notable work was The Book of Optics (also known as Kitāb al-Manāẓir), written by Ibn Al-Haitham, in which he was not only the first to disprove the ancient Greek idea about vision, but also came up with a new theory. In the book, he was also the first to study the phenomenon of the pinhole camera and delved further into the way the eye itself works. Using dissections and the knowledge of previous scholars, he was able to begin to explain how light enters the eye, is focused, and is projected to the back of the eye: and built then the world's first camera obscura hundreds of years before the modern development of photography.

Ibn Al-Haytham (Alhazen) drawing

Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965 - c. 1040), the pioneer of optics

The seven-volume Book of Optics (Kitab al-Manathir) hugely influenced thinking across disciplines from the theory of visual perception to the nature of perspective in medieval art, in both the East and the West, for more than 600 years. Many later European scholars and fellow polymaths, from Robert Grosseteste and Leonardo da Vinci to René Descartes, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, were in his debt. Indeed, the influence of Ibn al-Haytham's Optics ranks alongside that of Newton's work of the same title, published 700 years later.

The translation of The Book of Optics had a huge impact on Europe. From it, later European scholars were able to build the same devices as what Ibn al-Haytham did, and understand the way light works. From this, such important things as eyeglasses, magnifying glasses, telescopes, and cameras were developed.

Classical physics

 Classical physics

Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727), whose laws of motion and universal gravitation were major milestones in classical physics

Physics became a separate science when early modern Europeans used experimental and quantitative methods to discover what are now considered to be the laws of physics.[18][page needed]

Major developments in this period include the replacement of the geocentric model of the solar system with the heliocentric Copernican model, the laws governing the motion of planetary bodies determined by Johannes Kepler between 1609 and 1619, pioneering work on telescopes and observational astronomy by Galileo Galilei in the 16th and 17th Centuries, and Isaac Newton's discovery and unification of the laws of motion and universal gravitation that would come to bear his name.[19] Newton also developed calculus,[c] the mathematical study of change, which provided new mathematical methods for solving physical problems.[20]

The discovery of new laws in thermodynamics, chemistry, and electromagnetics resulted from greater research efforts during the Industrial Revolution as energy needs increased. The laws comprising classical physics remain very widely used for objects on everyday scales travelling at non-relativistic speeds, since they provide a very close approximation in such situations, and theories such as quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity simplify to their classical equivalents at such scales. However, inaccuracies in classical mechanics for very small objects and very high velocities led to the development of modern physics in the 20th century.