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More than 2,000 years of elements: a prehistory of the periodic table

Jennifer Rampling traces how ideas of material essence and indivisibility evolved in the centuries before modern atomic theory.
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  1. Jennifer Rampling

    1. Jennifer Rampling is assistant professor of history at Princeton University in New Jersey, where she teaches the history of early modern science.

More than two millennia before the periodic table was conceived, ancient philosophers were already grappling with the nature of ‘stuff’ in the world. Are all substances reducible to the same, universal matter? If so, when exactly does one substance become distinct from another? From Greece in the fifth century bc to northern Europe in the seventeenth century, successive attempts to answer these questions gave rise to a profusion of coexisting concepts, from elements to principles, atoms to corpuscles — each intended to solve a specific problem, each raising new difficulties.

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Nature 565, 563-564 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00289-5

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