Um século de conhecimento científico esquecido: um olhar para os estudos acerca do átomo no século XIX

Abstract

Considering Chemistry as a historical science, this work starts from the premise that the History of Chemistry is fundamental to understanding chemical knowledge. Among the various chemical knowledge taken as curricular contents in the discipline of Chemistry, the atom stands out, which is the structuring for this science. Despite this, even though the textbooks present historical aspects of the atom curriculum content, it is presented in a chronological and fragmented way. In this context, the present work aims to carry out a historical reconstruction of studies carried out in the 19th century regarding the atom, which makes it possible to understand the fact that only two contributions are being addressed in Chemistry textbooks, namely Dalton(1803) and Thomson (1898). For this, we selected four books that deal with the development of atomic theory published in the 19th and early 20th centuries: Lucretius and the atomic theory, published by John Veitch in 1875. Henry E. Roscoe and Arthur Garden published Anew view of the origin of Dalton’s atomic theory in 1896. The study of the atom, The foundations of Chemistry, published by Francis Venable in 1904, and The development of the atomic theory, published by Andrew Norman Meldrum in 1920. Using Martins (2005) as a theoretical reference, we follow some stages of work in the History of Science. The search for clues for the reconstruction history was based on the following question: What atomic theories are presented in the selected books? At the end of our study, we concluded that there is genuine “a century of forgotten scientific knowledge” which are not related in current Chemistry textbooks. Unlike what textbooks report, there is no jump between studies by Dalton and Thomson about the atom, but a century full of publications, debates, and disputes over priority on this topic.