Talk:Chemistry
Some elements were clearly known and understood as elements well before the 1600s. It is very culture-centric to say this kind of thing and we should avoid it. The Chinese were "scientific" enough to come up with gunpowder, the gunpowder used in fireworks and just bullets, the Greeks with a sort of napalm, and the Romans could certainly tell the difference between a great many of what we now call elements. They all knew that gold and lead had some properties in common, leading to the ambition of turning one into the other (which actually became possible in the 20th century although of course not economical). They knew about "salts" and the way that a few related crystals were interchangeable with each other in certain reactions.
It's not out of line to have a History of Chemistry in order to keep this out of here. Also whatever else is done, the article on Chemistry should focus on the various ways to express the periodic table of the elements and the concept of valence and the ion, since this is the least controversial thing one can say about chemical reactions - that the table describes their patterns.
Any repeating of the particle physics dogma that molecules are somehow made out of smaller bits made out of smaller bits should be kept to the minimum required to support the idea of valence. We have enough mechanistic paradigm biases in Wikipedia already... it's entirely rational to think of chemistry as a cognitive optimum whereby creatures made out of organic parts comprehend those parts, without ever inventing a "proton" or "neutron", although one can neutrally present these as variables on the periodic table itself.
- This is foolishness, how is the reduction of creatures to their organic parts any less of a "mechanistic paradigm" than stating facts about molecules being made of atoms and atoms being made of protons neutrons and electrons. It sounds like you'd be more fit to edit the articles on metaphyisics or pseudoscience.
autoprotolytic constant of water
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