The Phlogiston Theory from wikipedia
The theory holds that all flammable materials contain phlogiston, a substance without colour, odor, taste, or mass that is liberated in burning. Once burned, the "dephlogisticated" substance was held to be in its "true" form, the calx.
Challenge and demise
Eventually, quantitative experiments revealed problems, including the fact that some metals, such as magnesium, gained weight when they burned, even though they were supposed to have lost phlogiston. Mikhail Lomonosov attempted to repeat Robert Boyle's celebrated experiment in 1753 and concluded that the phlogiston theory was false. He wrote in his diary: "Today I made an experiment in hermetic glass vessels in order to determine whether the mass of metals increases from the action of pure heat. The experiment demonstrated that the famous Robert Boyle was deluded, for without access of air from outside, the mass of the burnt metal remains the same."
Some phlogiston proponents explained this by concluding that phlogiston had "negative weight"; others, such as Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, gave the more conventional argument that it was lighter than air. However, a more detailed analysis based on the Archimedean principle and the densities of magnesium and its combustion product shows that just being lighter than air cannot account for the increase in mass.
We have physicists now proposing "negative mass" and "negative energy" as explanations for all kinds of things. Everyone knows Boyle, but who knows Lomonosov? Similarly, "dark matter" and "dark energy" are ad hoc creations. They're created to exist to explain what can be explained in other currently unknown ways, and they're cheap. Cheap ideas are reinforced by big and popular science at big universities where many seek all kinds of non scientific ulterior motives. We live in an era of myth. Myth is cheap. |
