I like how Dr. Cogan started with a brief summary of what he was going to be talking about. Then he went into talking about a few of the books that he enjoyed. I thought it was a good interjection to start with some questions before really diving into the material, these questions were things I’ve never thought of before and it was very eye opening to give them thought. It was interesting to hear about what people back then thought air was, a single substance, etc. It’s crazy to see how much science has come along over the years. We also went over some of the big events during the enlightenment. I don’t think I ever learned about all of these things. To be a member of the Royal Society, we learned that you had to be somewhat well off or have another good job in order to be a part of it. In this lecture we learned about Joseph Priestly and the interesting theory that because he had tuberculosis as a child may have been why he was so intrigued with air. I have never heard of Phlogiston before so that was cool to hear about. Priestly did a lot of interesting experiments throughout the course of his life, with oxygen, nitrogen and other things. We also learned about Lavoisier. We did not have time to watch the movie, but we heard a little about it during the end of the lecture. Overall this was an interesting lecture about two important chemists.
One of the points that Kuhn makes in his book, Theresa, is that past scientific revolutions are invisible to us because we are told that science progresses incrementally (step by step). He argues that this is simply not the case. He would say that the reason you ve never heard of phlogiston, for example, is that it is not the paradigm you were exposed to in your education. You would have only heard of the paradigm that replaced it (oxygen and modern chemistry), making this entire period of intense debate over competing ideas completely invisible to you. It s like the old saying about war that the winners get to write history and probably has a lot of truth to it. Also, I am glad you appreciated the book list I put in the talk. I got the idea from your previous post on Dr Root’s book suggestion haha.