Frases de Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine Lavoisier
Data de nascimento: 26. Agosto 1743
Data de falecimento: 8. Maio 1794
Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier foi um químico francês, considerado o pai da química moderna. Foi eleito membro da Royal Society em 1788.
É reconhecido por ter enunciado o princípio da conservação da matéria, apesar de o russo Mikhail Lomonossov tê-lo feito 14 anos antes. Além disso identificou e batizou o oxigênio, refutou a teoria flogística e participou na reforma da nomenclatura química. Célebre por seus estudos sobre a conservação da matéria, mais tarde imortalizado pela frase popular:
Citações Antoine Lavoisier
„We must trust to nothing but facts“
— Antoine Lavoisier
Context: We must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.
pp. xviii
„Thus, while I thought myself employed only in forming a Nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry.“
— Antoine Lavoisier
p.xiv
„The art of concluding from experience and observation consists in evaluating probabilities, in estimating if they are high or numerous enough to constitute proof. This type of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than one might think. It demands a great sagacity generally above the power of common people. The success of charlatans, sorcerors, and alchemists— and all those who abuse public credulity— is founded on errors in this type of calculation.“
— Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine Lavoisier and Benjamin Franklin, Rapport des commissaires chargés par le roi de l'examen du magnétisme animal (Imprimerie royale, 1784), trans. Stephen Jay Gould, "The Chain of Reason versus the Chain of Thumbs", Bully for Brontosaurus (W.W. Norton, 1991), p. 195
„Here, then: a revolution [in science and chemistry] has taken place in an important part of human knowledge since your departure from Europe... I will consider this revolution to be well advanced and even completely accomplished if you range yourself with us.... After having brought you up to date on what is happening in chemistry, it would be well to speak to you about our political revolution. We regard it as done and without any possibility of return to the old order.“
— Antoine Lavoisier
Letter to Benjamin Franklin (Feb 2, 1790) as quoted by I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (1985)
„We may lay it down as an incontestible axiom, that, in all the operations of art and nature, nothing is created; an equal quantity of matter exists both before and after the experiment; the quality and quantity of the elements remain precisely the same; and nothing takes place beyond changes and modifications in the combination of these elements. Upon this principle the whole art of performing chemical experiments depends: We must always suppose an exact equality between the elements of the body examined and those of the products of its analysis.“
— Antoine Lavoisier
p. 226
„When I began the following Work, my only object was to extend and explain more fully the Memoir which I read at the public meeting of the Academy of Sciences in the month of April 1787, on the necessity of reforming and completing the Nomenclature of Chemistry. While engaged in this employment, I perceived, better than I had ever done before, the justice of the following maxims of the Abbé de Condillac, in his System of Logic, and some other of his works. "We think only through the medium of words.—Languages are true analytical methods.—Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method.—The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged."“
— Antoine Lavoisier
p.xiii
