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MANY A SLIP BETWIXT THE CUP AND THE LIP. “Laurent, who was known to taste his laboratory products every now and then to get the full range of sensory effect, did not mention ingesting them, but it serves as a reminder that these substances were of more than theoretical interest.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

PURGING LANGUAGE. “When Antoine Lavoisier, Antoine-François Fourcroy, Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau and Claude Berthollet put forth their revolutionary new nomenclature in 1787, they were proposing not only a new system of naming, but one of classification as well, which exemplified a shift towards considering the fundamental, hidden principles of nature, rather than the effects that a substance produced. “Principles” now referred to the ultimate constituents of matter: hydrogen, oxygen, etc.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

THE FLOATING WORLD. “Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefèvre have characterised the classification of chemical materials in this period as multidimensional, moving back and forth between the imperceptible (vital or inert) and perceptible (having or not having an effect upon the animal economy).” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

PERSISTENT VITALIST WORDS. “Naturalists trying to explain living processes like generation and growth drew on a language of active principles to explain how matter could come to organise itself. Apothecaries, herbalists, and chemists also used a language of principles when studying the virtues of plants, although it was not always clear what they meant.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

THEOLOGICAL VITALISM. “For Isaac Newton, active principles, originating in God, transformed a mechanical universe of mere matter into a dynamic, living one. With gravity as the reigning model, Newton cast these principles not as forms of matter, but as a kind of force or subtle fluid.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

TANGLE OF NATURALISM. “The situation grew more complex in the eighteenth century, as the Newtonian conception of “active principles” threaded the space between alchemical occult qualities and reductionist mechanism.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

BOOZE THE DRIVER. “Wine, after all, was an obvious early example of the ability of natural substances to act on human bodies, and the effort to isolate the particular principle responsible for these effects drove much of the push toward distillation associated with early modern alchemy. Alembics, cucurbits, and stills all sought to separate the more volatile (and intoxicating) elements from the more inert.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

ENERGY SHELLS. “Strange matter comes about as a way to relieve degeneracy pressure. The Pauli exclusion principle forbids fermions such as quarks from occupying the same position and energy level. When the particle density is high enough that all energy levels below the available thermal energy are already occupied, increasing the density further requires raising some to higher, unoccupied energy levels. This need for energy to cause compression manifests as a pressure.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_matter View in LinkedIn

NEUTRON STARS STRANGE MATTER. “It could conceivably be non-strange quark matter, if the effective mass of the strange quark were too high. Charm quarks and heavier quarks would only occur at much higher densities.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_matter View in LinkedIn

STRANGE MATTER STARS. “Strange matter that is only stable at high pressure. Under the broader definition, strange matter might occur inside neutron stars, if the pressure at their core is high enough (i.e. above the critical pressure). At the sort of densities and high pressures we expect in the center of a neutron star, the quark matter would probably be strange matter.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_matter View in LinkedIn