Abstract
The only chemists known to have contributed seriously to cosmology, are Svante Arrhenius (1908) with the eminently sensible suggestion that new stars and planets arise from the debris of previous cycles, and Harold Urey (1952) who advanced chemical arguments to support the idea of aggregation in the spiral arms of a central core that rotates in a nebular cloud. By way of contrast it is noted that medieval cosmology was intimately entangled with alchemy, astrology, religion, creation and natural philosophy (Priesner & Figala, 1998). During the Renaissance a link to Christian theology was added.
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Notes
- 1.
Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541).
- 2.
Omnibus sed paucis luceo.
- 3.
There is sufficient evidence to show that Boyle, like his contemporary, Newton, never gave up the idea of transmuting base metals into gold. Modern-day alchemists, following Paracelsus and relying on cold fusion, are still experimenting with the reaction between salt, sulphur and mercury to make gold as in the following scheme (with proton count in parentheses):
$$\begin{array}{rcl} \mbox{ NaCl}(28) + \mbox{ S}(16)& \rightarrow &\mbox{ NaS}(27) + \mbox{ Cl}(17) \uparrow\\ \mbox{ NaS}(27) + \mbox{ Hg}(80)& \rightarrow &\mbox{ NaCl}(28) + \mbox{ Au}(79) \\ \end{array}$$ - 4.
The α − β − γ notation refers to the seminal big-bang paper under the names Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow (1948), published on 1 April.
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Boeyens, J.C.A. (2010). Chemical Evidence. In: Chemical Cosmology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3828-9_5
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