Lavoisier was an 18th-century French chemist. Toward the end of the 1700s, scientists across Europe were trying to understand combustion (how fire worked). Lavoisier, a prominent French philosopher and court administrator, had initially subscribed to the phlogiston theory, which dictated that there were special fiery substances (“phlogistons”) in the air. As he conducted more and more experiments, however, Lavoisier began to believe that combustion was less about fiery substances and more about the way different chemical compounds interacted with one another. Ultimately, Lavoisier’s experiments led him to discover oxygen as a unique compound and to develop a new understanding of chemical reactivity.
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Antoine Lavoisier Character Timeline in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The timeline below shows where the character Antoine Lavoisier appears in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1. Introduction: A Role for History
...Several of the most well-known revolutions are associated with scientists Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Antoine Lavoisier, and Albert Einstein. However, Kuhn believes that many less famous scientific revolutions are equally important.
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Chapter 6. Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discovery
...trying to isolate one gas from the other gases in the air, while others (like Lavoisier) were making sense of oxygen in terms of atoms and chemical energy. Real discovery, then,...
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Lavoisier’s discovery of oxygen initiated a paradigm shift. But Kuhn is careful to point out that...
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Chapter 7. Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories
As with Copernicus, Lavoisier’s discovery of oxygen came out of a crisis—and as with Copernicus, many scientists thinking about...
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Chapter 9. The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions
...electricity, it helped scientists think through conduction as a built-in property. In chemistry, it allowed Lavoisier to build experiments based on the innate attractions of various chemical particles.
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Chapter 12. The Resolution of Revolutions
...turns his attention to scientists who have truly discovered something new (like Copernicus, Galileo, and Lavoisier). How did these men persuade their colleagues and ensure that their paradigms were the successful...
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