RSVP: Joseph Evinger (jdevinger@comcast.net)
When: 2nd Thursday of the month, 3:00-4:30 pm
Where: Zoom (click "Zoom" to join event)
Meeting ID: 848 0146 1083
Passcode: science
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+1 669 900 9128
Meeting ID: 848 0146 1083
Open to: All
Science and Ideas:
What Is Fire? The Complex History of an Elementary Question
For millennia natural philosophers, alchemists, and finally scientists closely studied nature and struggled to answer the simple question: “What is fire?” Some took a purely secular approach, examining fire and matter from a mechanical or chemical point of view. Others hoped that by studying how parts of the world fit together they could better understand the mind of the divine being who created it and may guide its workings still. A classic idea, independently devised in many cultures around the world, imagined that matter is made up of a small number of elementary substances, one of which is fire.
Jim Gasperini will explore the long journey from the notion of fire as an element to the modern conception of combustion. This required one of the most difficult and consequential conceptual leaps in history, which finally emerged from a dramatic competition among English, Swedish, and French scientists in the late eighteenth century.