Looking in Freshman Lab III – Looking into The Constitution of Bodies:

How does the supposition of particles help us to see?

This is a lecture specifically for first-year students. It will tell a story of how the presupposition that particles exist is used and made precise by a succession of chemists, from Lavoisier through Mendeleev. Does it enable us to see anything new in the phenomena we encounter in the laboratory? How does its contribution to seeing compare with that of Archimedes’ and Pascal’s mathematical approaches to weights and fluids?