The Scientist’s Atom and the Philosopher’s Stone How Science Succeeded and Philosophy Failed to Gain Knowledge of Atoms /

• Main Author: Chalmers, Alan (Author)
• Corporate Author: SpringerLink (Online service)
• Format: Electronic eBook
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht : Springer Netherlands, 2009.
• Series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science ; 279
• Subjects: Philosophy.; History.; Metaphysics.; Philosophy and science.; Physics.; Philosophy of Science.; History of Science.; Philosophy, general.; History of Philosophy.; History and Philosophical Foundations of Physics.

Drawing on the results of his own scholarly research as well as that of others the author offers, for the first time, a comprehensive and documented history of theories of the atom from Democritus to the twentieth century. This is not history for its own sake. By critically reflecting on the various...

Table of Contents:

• Atomism: Science or Philosophy?
• Democritean Atomism
• How does Epicurus’s Garden Grow?
• Atomism in its Ancient Greek Perspective
• From the Ancient Greeks to the Dawn of Science
• Atomism, Experiment and the Mechanical Philosophy: The Work of Robert Boyle
• Newton’s Atomism and its Fate
• The Emergence of Modern Chemistry With No Debt to Atomism
• Dalton’s Atomism and its Creative Modification via Chemical Formulae
• From Avogadro to Cannizzaro: The Old Story
• Thermodynamics and the Kinetic Theory
• Experimental Contact with Molecules
• Experimental Contact with Electrons
• Atomism Vindicated?.