Chapter 62 Part Two Results Chapter 15 Science 2

2 Before we judge what effect the dual revolution has had on science, it is best to briefly comment on the development of the scientific community.In general, the classical natural sciences were not revolutionized.That is to say, they are mainly within the scope of investigation established by Newton, or continue along the research line already traveled in the 18th century, or expand and develop the earlier incomplete discoveries into a wider theory system.Of the new fields opened up in these ways, the most important (and with the most immediate technological consequences) was electricity, more precisely electromagnetism.The following five major dates (four of which are within the period of this book) mark decisive advances in electromagnetism: 1786, Galvani discovers electric current; 1799, Volta makes the battery; 1800 In 1820, Oersted discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism; in 1831, Faraday established the relationship between these forces, and accidentally discovered that he himself created A new way of studying physics (replacing mechanical push and pull with "fields") heralded the advent of modern science.Foremost in the new theoretical synthesis are the laws of thermodynamics, the relationship between heat and energy.

The modern revolutions in astronomy and physics took place in the seventeenth century; the revolution in chemistry was just beginning in the period of this book.Of all the sciences, chemistry is most closely related to industrial technology, especially to the rinsing and dyeing processes in the textile industry.What is more, the creators of modern chemistry were not only experienced in their own right and in close cooperation with other experienced people (such as Dalton of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and Priestley of the Birmingham Crescent Society), but Sometimes political revolutionaries, albeit moderates.Two of them fell victim to the French Revolution: Priestley, who fell to the Tory rabble, because he was too sympathetic to the Revolution; the great Lavoisier, who was guillotined because he was not sympathetic enough, or Mainly because he is a big businessman.

Chemistry, like physics, is one of the preeminent branches of French science.Its actual founder, Lavoisier, published his main treatise Traite Elementaire in the year of the French Revolution.The impetus to the development of chemistry in other countries, even those countries such as Germany that later became centers of chemical research, and especially the organization of chemical research, was basically derived from France. The major advances before 1789 consisted in making some important threads out of the chaos of empirical experiments by elucidating some fundamental chemical processes, such as combustion, and some basic elements, such as oxygen.They also carry out precise quantitative measurements for this discipline and develop plans for further research.A key concept in atomic theory (developed by Dalton between 1803 and 1810) that made it possible to invent chemical formulas and use them to develop the study of chemical structures.A flood of new experimental results followed. Chemistry in the nineteenth century had become one of the most vital of all the sciences, and thus one that attracted (like every vital science) large numbers of able men.However, the atmosphere and methods of chemistry are still basically the eighteenth century.

However, chemistry had a revolutionary impact in the discovery that life could be analyzed using the theories of the inorganic sciences.Lavoisier discovered that respiration is a form of oxidation.Woehler's discovery (1828) that a compound originally found only in living organisms—urea—could also be artificially synthesized in the laboratory opened up a vast new field of organic chemistry.Although the great obstacle to progress, the belief that living objects obey fundamentally different laws of nature than inanimate objects, has been dealt a severe blow, neither mechanical nor chemical methods have brought Biologists made further progress.The most fundamental advance in biology during this period, the discovery by Schleiden and Schwann that all living things are composed of countless cells (1838-1839), established the foundation for biology. A theory equivalent to atomism; however, full-fledged biophysics and biochemistry still lie in the distant future.

There has been a revolution in mathematics, if not as dramatic as in chemistry, but in its nature, even more profound.Physics remained within the framework of the seventeenth century, and chemistry unfolded on a broad front through the gap opened by the eighteenth century.Unlike these two, the mathematics of the period covered by this book entered a completely new world, far beyond the Greek world that still dominated arithmetic and plane geometry, and the seventeenth-century world that dominated analytic geometry.Innovations in science brought about by the theory of complex variables (Gauss, Cauchy, Abel, Jacobi), group theory (Cauchy, Galois) or vector theory (Hamilton) , in addition to being highly praised by mathematicians, few people can appreciate its mystery.Through this revolution, Lobachevsky in Russia and Bowyer in Hungary (1831) overthrew the longest-held theory—Euclidean geometry.The imposing and unshakable structure of Euclidean logic rests on certain assumptions, one of which is the theorem that parallel lines and water do not intersect, which is neither self-evident nor verifiable.Building the same geometric logic on other assumptions may seem simple today.For example (Lobachevsky, Bowyer) a line parallel to any line L can be extended infinitely through point P.Or (Riemann) any line parallel to line L does not pass through point P.This is all the more so now that we have been able to construct a real plane to which these rules apply (thus the Earth is consistent with Riemann's rather than Euclid's assumption that it is a sphere).However, making such assumptions in the early nineteenth century was an act of thought comparable to replacing the Earth-centered theory with a heliocentric one.