Saturday, September 2, 2017

The Father of Modern Chemistry

From Smithsonian:
Lavoisier didn’t think that Priestley was right about phlogiston, prompting a long-running battle. Lavoisier didn’t believe Priestley because of his own groundbreaking approach to chemistry. Lavoisier believed that “matter–identified by weight–would be conserved through any reaction,” writes Chemical History. Today this is known as the law of conservation of mass. What it means is that the same amount of matter that goes into a chemical reaction comes out of it. This central belief led him to study how the gases present in air related to fire and to breathing. Writing for io9, Esther Inglis-Arkell explains how this led Lavoisier to torment the poor rodent. (Read more.)
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