Действительно интересная книга: Чанг

[ivanov_petrov]

Я признаюсь - часто моё мнение о книге относится к тому, какой она должна быть, а не какая есть. То есть виден замысел автора, и оцениваешь именно его, замысел. Автор не доработал, не смог сделать до конца - но это уже другое дело. Такая оценка - потому что и замыслов-то стоящих очень мало, а чтобы автор смог воплотить - это совсем редко, так что

Comments

[ivanov_petrov]

If the Avogadro-Cannizzaro story is a myth, or at least an exaggerated or one-sided account, what is a better story? There are already historical accounts (e.g., Rocke 1984 , 1992 , 1993 ; Russell 1971 ; Partington 1964 ) whose thoroughness and sophistication I cannot hope to surpass in this book (or ever). My aim is to give a perspicacious account of this complex development that combines tolerable historical accuracy with useful philosophical insights. I also hope that my distinct interpretation of events will have some freshness even to the expert historians, and much of the content presented in the rest of the chapter will probably be news to the majority of profes-sional historians of science, due to the recent neglect of this area of study

[ivanov_petrov]

This momentous development was a triumph of operationalism (more on that in Sects. 3.2.1 and 3.3.1 ). Note that the kind of thinking represented in Hofmann’s expo-sition is directly rooted in easily and clearly reproduced laboratory operations. This is typical of the majority of atomic chemists in the middle of the nineteenth century: they took most seriously those theoretical ideas that could be directly linked to laboratory operations, and they sought to fi nd, invent, and secure more and more of those links

[ivanov_petrov]

Here is a guiding idea, to help us understand the spirit of nineteenth-century atomic chemistry: in order to learn something real about atoms, do something with them. More generally, Ian Hacking ( 1983 ) has probably done more than anyone in recent decades to promote this sort of point of view in the philosophy of science

[ivanov_petrov]

-- The discussion in the previous section should make clear that there were a number of different ways of getting at the atom empirically. Such operationalizations form the nuclei around which empirical systems of practice grow

[ivanov_petrov]

Even aside from the explanation of bonding, there was much that the new consensus did not provide. Recall the structuralist promise of chlorine-hydrogen substitution