Assignment 4

The culture of Europe during the Middle Ages to the Renaissance focused more towards a mechanical and natural method of explaining why science happens the way it does. The basis of this starts with the atomistic theories left behind by Greek atomists. Greek atomists had their work translated at the end of the Middle Ages by Europeans, and their concepts carried over into the 16^th century and Renaissance era of thinking. Through this theory, the idea that a substance can retain itself, or stay the same through various chemical changes, revolutionized the way scientists thought. The ideal of something skeletal in all chemicals, atoms, became apparent by the end of the Middle Ages (1). Before the idea of atom exchange and electron transferring physicians, chemists, and other scientists described chemical phenomena as transmutations, an idea that had stuck with them for centuries thanks to the alchemists before them. It wasn’t until physicians started explaining chemical changes as an exchange of atoms, and separation, that the idea of transmutation started to become obsolete (1). The famous scientists Galileo formulated the basis of mechanical philosophy. This concept describes particles as moving matter, rather than standing still atomic structures. This idea of motion translated over to other scientists’ theories of atoms. This forever changed the views of physicists and chemists in this era (1). In the seventeenth and eighteenth century chemists and scientists wanted to find out the nature of combustion and the forces behind it in order to utilize it for practical uses and understand what had a “nature of fire”(1). The atomistic theories developed earlier, at this point, have been widely accepted by the scientific community at this time in Europe. They also searched for a means of neutralizing acids and bases, experimenting greatly with mixing the two together in hopes of neutralizing or saturating one or the other (1).