the history of geochemistry

1 geochemistry as a science of the twentieth century

      We are living at a turning point in a remarkable era of human history. Events of extreme importance and profundity are taking place in the realm of human thought. Our fundamental views of “the Universe,” “Nature,” or “the Whole,” so much spoken about in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, are changing before our eyes with incredible speed. Not only theories and scientific hypotheses, those ephemeral products of intellect, but also new exact empirical facts and generalizations of exclusive value make us rebuild and reconstruct the picture of nature that has remained untouched and almost unchanged by many generations of scientists and thinkers.

      The new worldview, in fact the profound renewal of the centuries-old ideas about our surroundings and ourselves, captures us more and more every day. It inevitably penetrates into the domains of separate sciences, into the field of scientific work. These new views concern not only the inert matter that surrounds us, but they also embrace the phenomena of life; they change our notions in the fields of knowledge that we consider the closest to us and the most important. We can say that never in the history of human thought, have the idea and feeling of the whole, and of the causal interrelation of all observed phenomena, possessed such depth, sharpness and clarity as they have reached now in the twentieth century.

      The study of the change that has taken place in these ideas and notions makes us think that we are still very far from the ultimate result, and that we have hardly begun to realize the route that the new scientific work has taken. This must be taken into account while evaluating the new concepts of atoms and chemical elements that penetrate our present-day science. They are taking shape in the unsteady, changing, and almost unfamiliar picture of the cosmos. Atoms and elements – the old intuitions of ancient thought – are constantly changing their image and taking new forms in these new and contradictory circumstances.

      Each chemical element, we think, corresponds to a certain atom or atoms that are distinctly different in composition from other atoms corresponding to other chemical elements. The atom of the science of the twentieth century is not the atom of the ancient thinkers of Hellas and India, and neither is it the atom seen by the Moslem mystics of the Middle Ages and by the scientists of the last four centuries of our civilization. It is quite a new idea – a new notion. And although the historical roots of our present-day thoughts can be traced back to the atoms and elements of ancient science and philosophy, the changes undergone by them are so great that there is nothing left from the old concepts except the names.

      Everything has changed crucially. Maybe it would have been more correct to give a new name to the “atom” of the twentieth century, because it could be done without doing any harm to the historical truth. Our atom does not in the least resemble the matter it forms. The laws of its existence are not similar to the laws of the matter formed by it. In matter, in its physical and chemical characteristics, we observe only general statistical manifestations of large conglomerates of atoms. These show, in a vague and complicated form, only an insignificant part of the characteristics of the atoms themselves, and of their inner structure.

      A deep gap separates the scientific model of our surroundings and ourselves – according to the manifestations conditioned by our senses (the macroscopic view of the cosmos) – from the scientifically constructed cosmos where the atom reigns (the microscopic view of the cosmos). The principal physical notions, as well as the method of scientific thinking, suffer a crucial change in these manifestations. As soon as we make scientific advances into the world of the atom, our concept of physical causality sharply changes and deepens, while the century-old ideas about it are destroyed. [In addition to the micro and macro concepts of matter] a third aspect of the cosmos is taking shape at present thanks to the success of astronomical observation and research of the twentieth century: the world of space-time scientifically embraced by large numbers, that – like the atom world – cannot be measured by our senses.

      These three concepts about the world, about the reality covered by science, are not coordinated. Everything is in a state of creative motion, both scientifically and philosophically. The atom and its corresponding chemical element are present in all three forms of the worldview. It seems very probable that with attempts at further generalization, great significance will be gained through the trend of scientific synthesis that was put forward in the middle of the eighteenth century by the great Serbo-Croatian thinker, Ruggiero Boscovich (1711–1787), and that is drawing more and more attention at present.

      An atom is not a formless and structureless “center of forces,” but a regular conglomerate that according to Boscovich is comprised of matter and universe.¹ The history of this trend of thought, which seems to outline and anticipate the way of future scientific thought, has not yet been written. Another great natural scientist, Boscovich’s contemporary, James Hutton (1726–1797), approached the same world view independently and laid the foundations for contemporary geology.

      An integrated scientific worldview does not yet exist, but the countless new facts unveiling the structure of nature in all its aspects make our thought go deeper and deeper into the realm of atoms, and still further, to the