including headings The four elements, Democritus and the atom, Aristotle's variable atoms, Greek science in Alexandria, Alchemy in Asia, ...
Hume and Smith are the intellectual leaders of this Scottish movement, but they have distinguished colleagues in scientific research. In 1756 Joseph Black, a lecturer in chemistry in Glasgow, publishes a paper which demo...
Among the practical scientists of Alexandria are men who can be seen as the first alchemists and the first experimental chemists. Their trade, as workers in precious metals, involves melting gold and silver, mixing alloy...
His own notions are much closer to the truth. Indeed it is he who introduces the concept of the element in its modern sense, suggesting that such entities are 'primitive and simple, or perfectly unmingled bodies'. Elemen...
There are strong mystical influences in Egypt, some of them deriving from Babylonian astrology, and this tradition too encourages experiment. Astrologers believe in many hierarchies, among the planets in the heavens but...
Another group of Aristotle's works concerns science. Those of most lasting value are the treatises on natural history, where he differs from most Greeks in attempting a scientific observation of the real world (Darwin, i...
In 674 a Muslim fleet enters the Bosphorus to attack Constantinople. It is greeted, and greatly deterred, by a new weapon which can be seen as the precursor of the modern flamethrower. It has never been discovered precis...
The Greek philosopher Empedocles, a native of Sicily, introduces a theory which will be accepted in Europe until the 17th century. He states that all matter is made up, in differing proportions, of four elemental substan...
