David Peat

56 From Certainty to Uncertaintycomponents of all matter, began in the mid seventeenth century whenthe chemist Robert Boyle suggested that, rather than being underlyingprinciples or forms, the elements are actual physical objects. Elementscombine in different ways to form the various components of the worldaround us. Over a century later Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier systematicallystudied the many different reactions whereby substances can bebroken down into their components, and the ways these componentscan recombine to produce a wide variety of chemical compounds. Hisresearch resulted in a list of what he believed to be the chemical elementsproposed by Boyle, elements including iron, zinc, and mercury,that can never be broken down into anything simpler. For Lavoisier,these elements were the building blocks of the rest of matter. 1It was left to John Dalton, in the first years of the nineteenth century,to identify the notion of indivisible atoms with Lavoisier’s chemicalelements. Each element, he proposed, is composed of characteristic,identical atoms. These atoms link together to form molecules ofvarious chemical compounds. What was once considered to be the resultof certain basic principles, principles that also made up a person’sparticular character—earth, fire, air, and water—had now been transformedinto little balls that interacted mechanically according to thelaws formulated by Newton.Science had uncovered a deep secret of nature, but at the expenseof losing the sense of intimacy and participation that comes from believingthat all nature is alive, and that we are participators under thedoctrine of “as above so below.” Yet, as we shall see in this chapter, thestory of the nature of matter, of the movement from certainty to uncertainty,forms a great circle. The more science left the world of eternalforms and principles to voyage into the world of atoms, the morethese atoms became more and more insubstantial, until matter finallyvanished back into principles of form and symmetry.Throughout the nineteenth century scientists continued to specu-1Because of the extreme difficulty of breaking them down into more elementarycomponents, Lavoisier believed that substances, such as silica, were also elements.Today we know that silica is a chemical compound of the elements siliconand oxygen.