Enlightenment
Antoine Lavoisier
1743–1794
“We may lay it down as an incontestible axiom, that, in all the operations of art and nature, nothing is created; an equal quantity of matter exists both before and after the experiment.”
Antoine Lavoisier was a French chemist and public official who reformed the method and language of chemistry before his death in the Revolution. defines an element as any substance analysis has not yet decomposed, insists that mass is conserved under the balance, and names compounds by their parts. Speculation about ultimate atoms is set aside. The phlogiston theory cannot survive that discipline. Modern chemistry inherits his operational standard for what counts as elementary and how reactions must be measured.
In the Conversation
2 of the Great Ideas