Jayson_Virissimo comments on Seeking a "Seeking Whence 'Seek Whence'" Sequence - Less Wrong

18 Post author: Will_Newsome 25 June 2012 11:10AM

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Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 05 September 2012 10:32:08AM *  0 points [-]

The metaphysical principle of the conservation of matter—that matter can be neither created nor destroyed in chemical processes—called upon here is at least as old as Aristotle (Weisheipl, 1963).

-Michael Weisberg, Paul Needham, and Robin Hendry, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The citation seems to refer to this:
Weisheipl, James A. (1963), “The Concept of Matter in Fourteenth Century Science”, in Ernan McMullin, ed., The Concept of Matter in Greek and Medieval Philosophy, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

I wasn't able to obtain a jail-broken copy of the paper; maybe you'll have better luck.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 05 September 2012 06:32:58PM *  0 points [-]

here

This paper is about Europe and thus does not shed much light on al-Majriti. The paper is about a metaphysical principle, not an empirical one. People point to al-Majriti because he might have done relevant experiments.

After thousands of years of acceptance of this metaphysical principle, Occam was skeptical; perhaps the original application of his razor was that "quantity of matter" was meaningless, and thus too its conservation (though atomists could use a count). Later 14th century Europeans defined "quantity" as "mass," and thus made a precise claim. Following Averroes, they used inertial mass, not gravitational mass.

So you could say that Lavoisier did not discover conservation of mass, but experimentally checked it. But he made a big splash at the time, probably because scientists were no longer so enthusiastic about metaphysical speculation. In particular, he showed the 14th century people made the right guess.