Knight 2004 Chemical Sciences History and Sociology

Sholem G 1974 The Messianic Ideology in Judaism and OtherEssays in Jewish Spirituality. Schoken Books, New York

Social Compass 1982 About the theory of charisma, Specialissue, XXIX

WeberM 1947 The Theory of Social and Economic Organization,1st American edn. Oxford University Press, New York

Weber M 1956 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. J. C. B. Mohr,Tu bingen, Germany

WeberM 19561965Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. J. C. B. Mohr,Tu bingen, Germany, Vol. I, Chap. V, Sect. 1 [trans. TheSociology of Religion. Methuen, London]

WeberM 19561968Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. J. C. B. Mohr,Tu bingen, Germany, Vol. I, Chap. III, Sect. 10 [trans.Eisentstadt S N (ed.) Max Weber on Charisma and InstitutionBuilding. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Weber M 19561994 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft J. C. B. Mohr,Tu bingen, Germany, Vol. I, Chap. III, Sect. 1112a [trans.Heydebrand W (ed.) Sociological Writings. Continuum, NewYork]

Weber M 1958 Politick als Beruf. Duncker and Humbolt, BerlinWeber M 1985 Wissenschaft als Beruf. In: Weber M (ed.)

Gesammelte Aufsa tze zur Wissenschaftslehre. J. C. B. Mohr,Tu bingen, Germany, pp. 582613

A. Zingerle (ed.) 1993 Carisma. Dinamiche dellorigine e dellaquotidianizzazione-Charisma. Dynamiken des ursprungs undder verallta glichung Special issue of Annali di SociologiaSoziologisches Jahrbuch 9

S. Abbruzzese

Chemical Sciences: History and Sociology

The chemical sciences are concerned with specickinds of matter, and their transformations. Theboundaries of chemistry, notably with physics andbiology, are however social constructions varying indierent times and places. Chemistry is very ancient,going back into remote prehistory with cookery, thepreparation of drugs and dyes, the baking of clay intoceramics, and metal-working. Its evolution into ascience, where theory guides practice, and into aprofession, with formal courses and qualications,happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries(Brock 1992).

1. Ancient Technologies

From very remote times, people have been usingtechniques and processes which we would call chemi-cal, involving careful control, as part of a craft or artpassed from father to son, mother to daughter, ormaster to apprentice. Indeed the word chemistry issupposed to come from an ancient Egyptian wordchem meaning earthy: the Arabic denite article Alwas added to yield our alchemy, and dropped to givechymistry and then by 1700, chemistry. Earlytechnologies, culminating in triumphs such as themaking of porcelain and Japanese swords, includefeatures we would regard as magical; but since the

course of chemical reactions depends upon the purityof components, those involving natural products arehard to predict and to repeat. Recourse to prayers,incantations, and curious additives should not amazeus.

2. Metallurgy, Alchemy, and Pharmacy

Alchemy, with its objective of converting base metalsinto gold, which chemist-historians portrayed asabsurd or dishonest, was not unreasonable. Naturewas believed to be perfecting metals within her womb,and the alchemist was simply speeding up the process.If everything was composed, as Aristotle believed, ofthe four elements Earth, Water, Air, and Fire indierent proportions, then changing these ratioswould transform one substance into another, and leadmight become gold. If, alternatively, Democritus andEpicurus were correct in believing that in appearancethere were colors, smells, and tastes, but in realityatoms and void; then because lead, gold, and every-thing is made up of dierent arrangements of theseultimately similar atoms (or corpuscles), again con-versions are possible.

Alchemy began in Egypt and Babylonia, and also inChina: with emphasis both upon making gold (ormaybe something resembling it) using an elixir toexpedite the process, and of prolonging and enhancinglife by giving humans the noble and permanentqualities of gold. Pharmacy grew out of trial and error,but in the West the maverick Swiss doctor callinghimself Paracelsus (14931541) brought alchemy intoit. He introduced metallic compounds into previouslyherbal medicine, notably for the treatment of the newdisease, syphilis, which was ravaging Europe. Hepublicly burnt the books of the great Greek physician,Galen, and saw chemical study as essential for medi-cine. His career outraged the medical establishment,but the powerful and dangerous new remedies provedirresistible to doctors and patients, and medicalschools became centers for chemistry.

3. The First Chemical Theories

Until the mid-twentieth century, it was believed thatalchemywas abandoned by the rational thinkers of theScientic Revolution; especially Robert Boyle (162791) and IsaacNewton (16421727). Close examinationof their manuscripts (Principe 1998) shows that bothof them were in fact adepts, copying out and tryingalchemical recipes, and believing that they were wellon the way to a transmutation. But they were alsoadherents to the atomic view of matter, seeing hardand indestructible corpuscles or particles as funda-mental. These formed very stable primary mixts, suchas iron, gold, or sulfur, which in turn combined witheach other. Unlike gravity which was universal,chemical anity was elective: some substances reactedtogether, others did not. J. W. Goethe wrote a novel,

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Electie Anities (1809) exploring chemical and hu-man bonding; chemists in eighteenth-centuryGermany and Sweden (the center of chemical activity)drew up tables of anity in attempting to predict theoutcome of reactions.

From Germany also came the rst chemical para-digm. G. H. Stahl (16601734) proposed that every-thing whichwould burn contained phlogiston (Greek,ammable): this idea brought order into chemicalunderstanding, whereas atomic ideas were vague anduntestable. Moreover, in Germany Lorenz Croll in1778 began the rst chemical journal, ChemischeAnnalen, bringing into being a chemical communitythere (Hufbauer 1982). His example was followed inFrance and England by Antoine Lavoisier andWilliam Nicholson.

4. Laoisiers Reolution

Lavoisier (174394) was a wealthy man, prominent inthe privatized tax system of France; his spare time hedevoted to chemistry, in a splendidly equipped lab-oratory. Becoming a member of the Royal Academyof Sciences, the small salaried body charged withscientic research, he resolved to reform the languageand theory of chemistry. As in Carl Linnaeus botany,names should be international, clear, and free fromchangeable theory: while phlogiston should be replacedas incoherent. Stahl saw phlogiston emitted in burning;Lavoisier by contrast (in a classic paradigm shift) sawsomething absorbed from the air, leading to anincrease in weight. He drew upon the work of JosephPriestley (17331804), who had isolated vital oreminently respirable air in a British tradition of workon gases. Lavoisier christened this substance oxygen(Greek, sour) because he believed that it was alsoresponsible for acidity (generalizing from analyses ofnitric and sulfuric acids). Water was a compound ofoxygen with another gas, hydrogen: such elementswere the basis of chemistry, rather than the hypo-thetical corpuscles which might concern physicists, orthe Earth, Water, Air, and Fire with which Priestleysfriend Thomas Jeerson (17431826) structured hisbook on Virginia. In 1794 Lavoisier was executed as atax proteer during Robespierres Reign of Terror,while the left-wing views of Priestley (who continuedto disagree with him over phlogiston) led to his exile inPennsylvania. But their new and exciting chemistrysurvived and prospered (Bensaude-Vincent and Abbri1995, Knight and Kragh 1998).

5. Electricity and Chemistry

In 1799 Alessandro Volta (17451827) showed thatelectricity was generated when twometals were dippedinto water; there was no need for any animal tissue, asLuigi Galvani (173798) had supposed. His paper wasan alarm bell, as Humphry Davy (17781829) put it,

and chemists everywhere repeated and extended theexperiments. But results were confusing until in 1806Davy did the careful experiments conrming hisintuition that pure water is decomposed electricallyinto oxygen and hydrogen only. Just as Newton hadfound that gravity was the force behind planetarymotions, soDavy inferred that electricity and chemicalanity were manifestations of one power. In 1807 heused this insight in isolating the light and reactivemetals potassium and sodium, and (putting Britainback on the chemical map) went on to demonstrate,with chlorine, that Lavoisier had been wrong aboutacidity.

Davy had been appointed to the newly-foundedRoyal Institution in Londons fashionable West End,where he proved himself a lecturer of enormousattractiveness, making professing a performance art(Golinski 1992, Knight 1998). The fees which men andwomen paid to join, and hear him, supported aresearch laboratory in the basement. Davy becameone of the rst people in Britain to make a living out ofchemical research, which had previously perforce beena hobby for an aristocrat like Boyle, a minister ofreligion like Priestley, or a doctor like Galvani. At theRoyal Institution, Davy trained (in a kind of informalapprenticeship) his successor, Michael Faraday(17911867), and the pursuit of Davys insight thatchemical anity was electrical continued there.

With Lavoisier, chemistry had acquired an exactlanguage, closer to algebra than to the evocative termsof the alchemists; and it had testable theories, forexample of acidity. It is the science of the secondaryqualities, of colors, smells, and tastes; it promised to beuseful (chlorine for disinfecting and bleaching, forexample, and oxygen for chest complaints); and itproved popular everywhere. With its connection toelectricity, it became the dynamic fundamental science,concerned not just with matter but also with force;there was as yet no unied science of physics. Mech-anical explanations seemed shallow; while chemistrysconnections with heat, light, and electricity went deep.

6. A Mature Science

J. J. Berzelius (17791848) in Sweden used the unsys-tematic Davys insight to create a structure forchemistry, dualism, based on the idea that everycompound had a positive and a negative part. He alsopicked up John Daltons idea that each element wascomposed of atoms, identical to each other anddierent from those of other elements: Berzeliusarranged these in an electrochemical series fromoxygen, the most negative, to potassium. The numberof elements known steadily grew through the centurywith improvements in chemical analysis.

Berzelius trained a number of chemists by havingthem to stay in his house, where Anna the housekeeperwashed up dishes and asks. But in the 1820s JustusLiebig (180373) at theUniversity ofGiessen launched

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the rst graduate school for turning out a stream ofchemists with Ph.D. degrees (Brock 1997, Morrell1997). Liebigs success depended upon his havingperfected apparatus for analyzing organic com-pounds; his students usually did their research onsome natural product, and published it in the journalwhich became called Liebigs Annalen after its editor.They found jobs, particularly in the dye industry (Foxand Nieto-Galan 1999) and in pharmacy which wereboth becoming based in science rather than craft skills;many went to England, a rich country with a pooreducational system. With the collapse of Napoleonsempire in 1815, the University of Berlin had emergeddedicated to research and teaching (Wissenschaft undBildung), and the various German states began tocompete in their opera houses and universities. Theyfollowed Giessen, building better laboratories andbidding for star chemists. Schools began teachingchemistry, textbooks were needed (Lundgren andBensaude-Vincent 2000), and academic careers openedup in a eld now largely separated from medicine.Universities in Britain and the USA followed theGerman model, usually demanding German researchexperience from professorial candidates.

In the 1850s chemists could agree about what thingswere made of, but not about formulae. Dalton hadsupposed that water must have the simplest possibleformula, HO; Davy and others, notably AmadeoAvogadro (17761856), went for our H

O formula

because two volumes of hydrogen combine with one ofoxygen. An atom of oxygen thus weighed either 8 or 16times as much as one of hydrogen, and such un-certainties ran through the whole list of elements. In1860 August Kekule (182996), a pioneer in workingout chemical structures such as that of benzene, calledfor an end to this confusion through an internationalconference, which met in Karlsruhe. It was poorlyorganized, but afterwards chemists came to accept thereformulation of Avogadros arguments by StanislaoCannizzaro (18261910). With agreed atomic weights,tabular arrangement of the elements became possible;and the most successful was the Periodic Table ofDmitri Mendeleev (18341907).

His predictions of the properties of some hithertoundiscovered elements were startlingly accurate; andwith the table (as he hoped) the student had toremember fewer brute facts. From its position anelements properties would be known. It is strikingthat somany bright ideas, fromDalton via Cannizzaroto Mendeleev, came from people on the peripheryrather than in the great scientic centers.

7. The Fragmentation of Chemistry

In death, we rot: for we (and animals and plants) arethen subject to chemical reactions which go dierentlywhile we are alive.Most people believed in a vital forcewhich maintained life. It is claimed that FriedrichWoehler (180082), pupil of Berzelius and friend of

Liebig, destroyed this vitalism when in 1828 hesynthesized urea. In fact the chief interest in thisreaction was that ammonium cyanate and urea turnedout to have the same atomic constitution: theirdierent properties were the result of dierentarrangements (Brooke 1995). So the story has more todo with understanding molecular structure; but thesynthesis, and the work of Liebig and his students inanalysis, showed that no gulf separated organic andinorganic worlds. Nevertheless, by 1848 whenBerzelius died, it was clear that dualism did not torganic compounds well, and as the chemical com-munity grew it was convenient to separate organicchemistry, based upon carbon, from the inorganicbranch. The expansion of universities led to newprofessorships and laboratories devoted to the special-ism of organic chemistry, from which in the twentiethcentury emerged biochemistry.

Chemists had relied upon balances, test-tubes,condensers, blowpipes, and other apparatus dicultto manipulate. The chemist had to think with his (oroccasionally her) ngers, and was proud of skills inglassblowing. Chemistry was essentially experimental,exciting and often dangerous, attractive. Then in 1860came collaboration between Robert Bunsen, inventorof the controllable gas burner, and the physicist G. R.Kirchho, who found that elements heated to a hightemperature have characteristic spectra. Analysiscould be done by physical methods, and this opticalspectroscopy was the rst of what is now an armory ofsuch techniques which has transformed the appear-ance of chemical laboratories (Morris and Travis, inKrige and Pestre 1997, pp. 71540).

About the same time the new science of thermo-dynamics, based on energy and its transformations,brought together into classical physics sciences whichhad been separate, or had been part of the empire ofchemistry, Davy and Faraday had been pioneers inwhat became a new specialism, physical chemistry,investigating energy changes in reactions, and themechanisms, rates, and reversibility of processes. Theleaders here were Wilhelm Ostwald (18531932) andJ. H. Vant Ho (18521911) who launched a journal,and promoted academic positions and laboratories.The new profession of chemical engineering wasclosely linked to the rise of physical chemistry.Whereas early in the nineteenth century chemists hadbeen called in only as consultants or trouble shooterswhen something went wrong, by the end of it they wereemployed full-time (Bud and Roberts 1984). In in-dustry, intellectual property belongs generally to thecompany and not the individual, and is secured bypatents (Travis et al. 1998).

8. The Reduction of Chemistry

The nineteenth century was the heyday of chemistry,the golden age in which it came to maturity andseemed fundamental. The chemist and spectroscopist

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William Crookes (18321919) followed Faraday instudying cathode rays, but J. J. Thomson in 1897identied them as composed of subatomic corpuscles,soon named electrons. The subsequent nuclear ato-mic model of Ernest Rutherford (18711937)forwhom all science was physics or stamp-collectingand Niels Bohr (18851962) accounted not only forspectra, but also for the Periodic Table. Chemistrybecame a branch of physics (Nye 1996); the propertiesof gold could in principle be calculated from dataabout protons, neutrons, and electrons, though inpractice the chemistry laboratory is essential. Thismeant that chemistry lost its glamor; the chemist wasas ubiquitous as ever, an essential member of theteams or groups so characteristic of twentieth-centuryscience, but playing a service role (Knight 1995).

The number of chemists has continued to grow, ashas the number of new substances unknown in naturewhich they have synthesized. Davy wrote of thechemist being a godlike creator, and this creativity isnowadays celebrated by chemists such as RoaldHomann. The engineer or architect must rememberthe law of gravity, but to mourn that architecture hasbeen reduced to physics would be absurd: like the poetor the painter, the chemist has to work withinconstraints, but that is a feature of lifeindeedmakingcreativity possible (Homann and Torrance 1993).

Homann, born in Poland, survivingWorldWar II,escaping to the USA, learning chemistry there, anddoing research which brought him a Nobel Prize,exemplies another trend. Chemistry reached theWestvia Islam. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,it was a European science, with Germany the mostimportant center by 1900. Papers in German journals,and research experience in Germany, counted high inany pecking order; but already theUSAwas becominga major power in science. There in 1916 G. N. Lewisproposed the electronic theory of chemical combi-nation, much developed by his pupil Linus Pauling.Since 1945 the USA has been the center of things,making the English language and publication in USjournals the key to prestige in research. Two worldwars, and Hitlers coming to power between them, arepart of the reason for this; equally important has beenAmerican prosperity, itself dependent on science.Chemistry has steadily gone West.

9. The Status of Chemistry

Davy and Liebig (Rossiter 1975) wrote famous bookson agricultural chemistry, and in the nineteenthcentury chemical fertilizers and pesticides were un-equivocally welcomed in a Europe of food shortages.Lavoisier improved French gunpowder, and laterchemists produced high explosives making possibleengineering achievements and also formidable wea-pons. All these things were seen as benets. National

chemical societies, their academic and professionalaspects sometimes in tension, were formed and en-joyed prestige (Russell et al. 1977). Although pol-lution from new chemical industries (as from olderones like tanning) was palpable and led to legislation,the expectation was that the chemists would be able tocure it. It did not happen: Rachel Carsons book TheSilent Spring (1962) alerted the world to the dangers.So in the late twentieth century, despite successes suchas plastics, and the array of new drugs available formedicine, chemistry is seen as boring and its appli-cations as threatening. Chemists feel misunderstoodand underappreciated.

Twentieth-century chemistry is dominated not onlyby universities in the Giessen tradition, but also bybig-spending international companies with researchlaboratories, now turning towards biotechnology(Galentos and Sturchio, and Kevles, in Krige andPestre 1997, pp. 22752, 30118) and by the military.Research is carried on no longer by a Woehler or aCrookes, on their own or with an assistant, but byteams of people possessing various skills. Chemistryhas been taught in an impersonal way, with less hands-on experiment in a worldmore conscious of health andsafety.

This is a strange eventful history, which was untilthe mid-twentieth century mainly written by partici-pants who looked for progress. They had the ad-vantage of being familiar with chemicals and ap-paratus; but professional historians of science havecome to lookmore closely at contexts and careers. Thehistory which emerges deserves to be known beyondthe world of chemists.

See also: Archaeometry; Behavioral Neuroscience;Biomedical Sciences and Technology: History andSociology; Ceramics in Archaeology; CognitiveNeuroscience; History of Science; Human Sciences:History and Sociology; Physical Sciences: Historyand Sociology; Research and Development inOrganizations; Scientic Disciplines, History of;Technological Innovation

Bibliography

Bensaude-Vincent B, Abbri F 1995 Laoisier in EuropeanContext. Science History, Canton, MA

Brock W H 1992 The Fontana History of Chemistry. Fontana,London

Brock W H 1997 Justus on Liebig: the Chemical Gatekeeper.Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK

Brooke J H 1995 Thinking about Matter. Ashgate Variorum,Aldershot, UK

Bud R, Roberts G K 1984 Science ersus Practice. ManchesterUniversity Press, Manchester, UK

Fox R, Nieto-Galan A 1999 Natural Dyestus. Science History,Canton, MA

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Golinski J 1992 Science as Public Culture: Chemistry andEnlightenment in Britain, 17601820. Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge, UK

Homann R, Torrance V 1993 Chemistry Imagined.Smithsonian, Washington, DC

Hufbauer K 1982 The Formation of the German ChemicalCommunity 17201795. California University Press, Berkeley,CA

Knight D M 1995 Ideas in Chemistry. Athlone, LondonKnight D M 1998 Humphry Day: Science and Power. Camb-

ridge University Press, Cambridge, UKKnight D M, Kragh H 1998 The Making of the Chemist.

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UKKrige J, Pestre D 1997 Science in the Twentieth Century.

Harwood, AmsterdamLundgren A, Bensaude-Vincent B 2000 Communicating Chem-

istry: Textbooks and their Audiences, 17891939. ScienceHistory, Canton, MA

Morrell J 1997 Science, Culture and Politics in Britain, 17501870. Ashgate Variorum, Aldershot, UK

Nye M J 1996 Before Big Science. Twayne, New YorkPrincipe L 1998 The Aspiring Adept. Princeton University Press,

Princeton, NJRossiter M 1975 The Emergence of Agricultural Science: Justus

Liebig and the Americans, 18401880. Yale University Press,New Haven, CT

Russell C A, Coley N G, Roberts G K 1977 Chemists byProfession. Open University Press, Milton Keynes, UK

Travis A S, Schro ter H G, Homburg E, Morris P J T 1998Determinants in the Eolution of the European ChemicalIndustry, 19001939. Kluwer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands

D. Knight

Chess Expertise, Cognitive Psychology of

Expertise may be dened as the ability of someindividuals to perform at levels vastly superior to themajority. For historical and scientic reasons, researchon chess expertise has played a major role in the studyof expertise in general. The rst reason is that chessitself has a very long history (the modern form ofWestern chess goes back to the sixteenth century).This has made possible an extensive study of the game,leading to the development of several theories aboutthe proper way to play by leading players such asSteinitz, Nimzowitch, and Euwe. Next, the rules ofchess oer a well-specied and constrained environ-ment that is easily formalizable. Chess is also a gameexible enough to allow multiple experimentalmanipulations. In addition, the presence of a ratingsystem (the Elo system) allows one to estimate playersskill quantitatively and precisely. Compared to mostother domains of expertise, this ability to measure skillis a denite advantage. Contrast this situation with,for example, the study of experts in physics ormedicine, where researchers have to use very roughclassications such as novice, intermediate, and ex-

pert. Finally, there has been rich cross-fertilizationbetween psychological research on chess expertise andresearch in formal elds like computer science andmathematics.

1. Chess in the Sciences

1.1 Chess in the Formal Sciences

Unsurprisingly, chess has been a favorite subject ofstudy in the formal sciences. On several occasions,chess has been used to explore aspects of game theory;in a celebrated paper published in 1912, Zermoloformalized the concept of game tree and introducedthe method of backwards induction with reference tochess. The game has also been of interest to mathe-maticians, for example in the eld of combinatorics.However, most of the research has been made inarticial intelligence and computer science. If oneignores chess automata, most of which turned out tobe fraudulent, computer chess started in earnest in1949 with Shannons paper describing a computerprogram able to play an entire game, either by fullsearch to a specied depth or by selective search. Sincethat seminal work, researchers have extensivelyexplored various techniques for improving theeciency of search algorithms or to make search moreselective (see Newell and Simon 1972, Levy andNewborn 1991). The crowning achievement of thequest for ecient search algorithms (the so-calledbrute-force approach) was the development of DeepBlue, the rst computer to beat a world champion inan ocial match. Deep Blues special-purpose hard-ware allowed it to consider up to 200 million positionsper second. By contrast, a nice example of the selective-search approach is a program written by Pitrat (1977),which uses heuristics to cut the search tree down to thesame size as humans (about 100 positions). Recently,computer chess has seen a strong interest in databasetheory and in the development and testing of machine-learning algorithms.

1.2 Chess in the Social and Behaioral Sciences

Expert behavior in chess has attracted the attention ofvarious social and behavioral sciences, includingpsychoanalysis, psychiatry, and sociology. Questionssuch as Does extreme practice of a skill lead tomadness? Why are women weaker than men atchess?, Can oedipal compulsions lead to creativity?,and Why is there a high proportion of Jews amongtop players? have been asked in these elds, althoughthe answers oered are often controversial (Dextreitand Engel 1981, Holding 1985). In addition, chess hassometimes been used not as an object of study, but as

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Chess Expertise, Cognitie Psychology of

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International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences ISBN: 0-08-043076-7

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Knight 2004 Chemical Sciences History and Sociology