Abstract
I respond to Scerri’s recent reply to my claim that there was a scientific revolution in chemistry in the early twentieth Century. I grant, as Scerri insists, that there are significant continuities through the change about which we are arguing. That is so in all scientific revolutions. But I argue that the changes were such that they constitute a Kuhnian revolution, not in the classic sense of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but in the sense of Kuhn’s mature theory, developed in the 1980s and early 1990s.
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Notes
A referee for the journal rightly noted that the mass of an electron is so small relative to the mass of protons and neutrons that the effects of the electrons on the atomic weight of an atom is negligible.
In an article with Line Andersen, we illustrate the ways in which chemists were working in a different world after they classified chemical elements according to their atomic number from the world they worked in when they classified elements according to their atomic weight. For example, due to Henry Moseley’s innovative research, x-ray technology was incorporated into the methods employed by chemists (see Wray and Andersen 2020, 141).
I discuss this issue in more detail in my review of Scerri’s A Tale of Seven Scientists (see Wray 2017).
Van den Broek published prodigiously in Nature, from 1911 on, usually letters, which had become an important venue for quickly reporting scientific discoveries (see Baldwin 2015, 101). Further, important scientists took his work seriously, at least seriously enough to address him in print (see, for example, Nicholson 1914 and Lindemann 1914). His contributions are recounted by Soddy in his Nobel Lecture (see Soddy 1922, 392).
Even if we grant that the structure of the periodic table of elements remained largely in tact through this episode in the history of chemistry, it is important to acknowledge that there were still many contentious issues about the periodic table and the chemical elements in the early 1900s. John Heilbron, for example, notes that “there were conversations at Manchester throughout 1912 about the periodic arrangement of the elements, particularly about the problems accommodating the growing number of radioelements in Mendeleev’s chart” (Heilbron 1966, 340). Further, Heilbron notes that “by 1913 the total of rare earths known, proposed, or anticipated ranged from fourteen to twenty-three” (Heilbron 1966, 351). Even Mendeleev’s own views were still unsettled in the early 1900s. As Heilbron notes, “in the 3rd English edition of his Principles of Chemistry … Mendeleev introduced two elements below hydrogen, one being an agent responsible for the unknown coronal lines, the other being the physicists’ aether” (Heilbron 1966, 349, Note 50; see also Kragh 2000, 437). So we should not be deceived by the relative stability of the periodic table.
Laboratory practices in chemistry were changing rapidly at the beginning of the 20th Century. Kragh notes that “at the 1907 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science,” “Arthur Smithells, Professor of Chemistry at Leeds … expressed his worries about the problems that had come from ‘the great rapidity with which the whole [physical] science is growing … in particular, from the sudden appearance of the subject of radio-activity with its new methods, new instruments, and especially with its accompaniment of speculative philosophy’ (Smithells 1907, p.356)” (Kragh 2000, 438–439).
The specifics of Moseley’s innovations are discussed in a short piece in American Physical Society News, commemorating Moseley’s untimely war-time death (see APS News 2012).
Despite his frequent use of Kuhnian terms, in his recent publication (see Vogt 2021), Vogt aims to show how Lakatos’ general philosophy of science illuminates various developments that occurred in the history of chemistry, specifically with respect to the concept of a chemical element and the Periodic Table of Elements.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Lori Nash and Thomas Vogt for feedback on earlier drafts. I thank a referee and the editor for Foundations of Chemistry for their thoughtful, constructive feedback.
Funding
My research has been supported by an Aarhus Universitets Forskningsfond—Starting Grant: AUFF-E-2017-FLS-7-3.
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Wray, K.B. What happened when chemists came to classify elements by their atomic number?. Found Chem 24, 161–170 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-022-09423-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-022-09423-0