Physicists’ Molecule, Chemists’ Atom?

Abstract

“…it is not chemistry that grows old, but chemists.” That was what Mr. Boussingault, being in his late fifties, said at Karlsruhe, the September 3, 1860. The occasion was the chemical congress, the second ever international scientific congress, which was convened by Kekulé. He realized the pressing need for personal contacts and exchange of ideas in order to find a common conceptual basis for chemical thinking. The chemists’ zeal of experimenting and the development of chemical industry rendered a large collection of phenomena and observations by the middle of the nineteenth century, demanding models and theories which enable the chemists to understand what they saw. The great success of the physical theories had set an example of the mathematical description of nature. However, a good many of the chemists refused the idea of applying the laws of physics to the phenomena of chemistry. The system of physical laws being rather a model than a tool they tried to develop the independent laws of chemistry.