Chemicals

7 Pages 1857 Words

s as many
papers than in 1901, when van’t Hoff received the first chemistry Nobel prize.

The focus of the present paper is not on so-called highlights of chemistry, but on ordinary or average chemistry, so to speak.
Only if we put aside our favorite subjects of chemistry and regard what all the millions of chemists worldwide are doing, we
have a chance to get some more objective insight in what happens in chemistry as a whole. As a philosopher trained in
chemistry my general interest is in philosophical issue of chemistry (e.g. Schummer, 1997a). But, surprisingly, chemistry seems
to evade all kinds of received philosophical approaches, such that philosophers of science simply neglected chemistry until
recently. Even today many philosophers think that quantum chemistry and its relation to quantum mechanics is the only issue
worthwhile thinking about. Chemistry proper appears to be something that does not fit our received image of science. In fact,
the most striking feature of chemistry is that it does not simply describe and explain our world as it is; chemists rather produce
their own objects of investigations, i.e. they make new chemical substances.

The making of new substances is by no means a marginalia. In quantitative terms it is by far the main activity of chemists. A
sample survey of 400 papers on ‘general chemistry’ has shown that some 75% present at least one new substance (Schummer,
1997c). On the average, every paper abstracted by Chemical Abstracts today presents 2 new substances. We even have much
evidence that the making of new substances has constantly been the main activity of chemists during the past 200 years
(Schummer, 1997b). The number of known substances has been growing exponentially since 1800, from som...