From the blog post: You can read a lot more about the history of molecular theory on Wikipedia. Oddly, this particular book isn’t referenced, but it does talk about how Perrin went on to win the...
From the blog post:
[…] the molecular theory of matter wasn’t widely accepted until the 1910s. Very famous, very smart scientists, including Ernst Mach and Henri Poincare, thought atoms were merely a convenient fiction for predicting experimental outcomes. Statistical calculations, like those deployed to derive the ideal gas laws from kinetic theory, were akin to approximating integrals with discrete sums. Since bulk media obeyed differential equations, many thought it was more likely that they were continuous substances. That nature was an assemblage of a nearly infinite collection of invisible, discrete billiard balls seemed rightfully outlandish.
The controversy was effectively put to rest by Jean Baptiste Perrin in his 1913 book Les Atomes. Perrin spent hundreds of pages detailing the experimental evidence for atoms and molecules. The core of his argument was that if you assume molecules exist, you could count them in surprisingly diverse ways.
You can read a lot more about the history of molecular theory on Wikipedia. Oddly, this particular book isn’t referenced, but it does talk about how Perrin went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1926 for “proving, conclusively, the existence of atoms.”
A bit more context: Ben Recht is a professor who is blogging his way through the last lectures of Paul Meehl, a psychologist who taught about the philosophy of science. The series starts with this post.
From the blog post:
You can read a lot more about the history of molecular theory on Wikipedia. Oddly, this particular book isn’t referenced, but it does talk about how Perrin went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1926 for “proving, conclusively, the existence of atoms.”
A bit more context: Ben Recht is a professor who is blogging his way through the last lectures of Paul Meehl, a psychologist who taught about the philosophy of science. The series starts with this post.