Lavoisier in the Year One

I picked up a book from the library on Lavoisier's discovery of the oxygen by Madison Smartt Bell "Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution." Atlas Books 2005. Madison's narrative juxtaposes how Lavoisier revolutionizes chemistry in the 18th Century against the how French revolutionaries brought their political revolution to its harsh and sometimes insane extreme. The Reign of Terror cuts Lavoisier's life short at the guillotin in 1793.

Foremost in Lavoisier's work was the discovery of the principle of oxygen. Chemistry then was dominated by the phlogiston theory. Phlogiston was kind of a "oxygen" in reverse or "anti-oxygen". Hence, Stahl thought that charcoal gave up plogiston when burnt instead of combining with oxygen to obtain carbon dioxide. In reverse, they thought that the calx of lead PbO2 gained its phlogiston from charcoal when heated with charcoal to from Pb, instead of losing oxygen in the process of reduction. Boyle was first to show that the calx (with no plogiston) was heavier than the metal (with plogiston) but it still took some time for people to discard this theory.

Lavoisier took a long time to convince the scientific fraternity, but what struck me was how he arrived at it. In addition to gathering sufficient experiemental evidence, Lavoisier also created a radical new nomenclature that is still in use right now. Lavoisier's views highlight the importance of "naming of names." To him, "Languages don't have the sole object of expressing ideas and images through signs; they are additionally, veritable analytic methods, by whose aid we proceed from the known to the unknown... An analytic method is a language; a language is an analytic method, and these experessions, are in a certain sense, synonyms." In introducing this nomenclature, Lavoisier was very clear that what had been created was "a method of naming rather than a nomenclature."

Nomenclature serves to subdivide, to distinguish, but naming drives at the very actual meaning of objects and ideas. Wrong names as in the case of phlogiston, serve only to obscure not just the meaning but our understanding.