評論
打印
7 Elemental Matters
7 基本物質
Chemistry as an earnest and respectable science is often said to date from 1661, when Robert Boyle of Oxford published The Sceptical Chymist—the first work to distinguish between chemists and alchemists—but it was a slow and often erratic transition. Into the eighteenth century scholars could feel oddly comfortable in both camps—like the German Johann Becher, who produced an unexceptionable work on mineralogy called Physica Subterranea, but who also was certain that, given the right materials, he could make himself invisible.
人們常說，化學作為一門嚴肅而受人尊敬的科學始于1661年。當時，牛津大學的羅伯特·玻義耳發表了“懷疑的化學家”——這是第一篇區分化學家和煉金術士的論文——但這一轉變是緩慢的，常常是不確定的。進入18世紀以后，兩大陣營的學者們都覺得適得其所——比如，德國人約翰·貝歇爾寫出了一篇關于礦物學的嚴肅而又不同凡響的作品，題目叫做《地下物理學》，但他也很有把握，只要有合適的材料，他可以把自己變成隱身人。
Perhaps nothing better typifies the strange and often accidental nature of chemical science in its early days than a discovery made by a German named Hennig Brand in 1675. Brand became convinced that gold could somehow be distilled from human urine. (The similarity of color seems to have been a factor in his conclusion.) He assembled fifty buckets of human urine, which he kept for months in his cellar. By various recondite processes, he converted the urine first into a noxious paste and then into a translucent waxy substance. None of it yielded gold, of course, but a strange and interesting thing did happen. After a time, the substance began to glow. Moreover, when exposed to air, it often spontaneously burst into flame.
早年，最能體現化學那奇特而往往又很偶然的性質的，要算是德國人亨內希·布蘭德在1675年的一次發現。布蘭德確信，人尿可以以某種方法蒸餾出黃金。（類似的顏色似乎是他得出這個結論的一個因素。）他收集了50桶人尿，在地窖里存放了幾個月。通過各種奧妙的過程，他先把尿變成了一種有毒的糊狀物，然后再把糊狀物變成一種半透明的蠟狀物。當然，他沒有得到黃金，但一件奇怪而有趣的事情發生了。過了一段時間，那東西開始發光。而且，當暴露在空氣里的時候，它常常突然自燃起來。
