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Vol. 27 No. 3
May-June 2005

Up for Discussion | A forum for members and member organizations to share ideas and concerns.
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end your comments by e-mail to [email protected]

Simples and Compounds

In the Jan-Feb 2005 CI, Claudio Giomini, Mario E. Cardinali, and Liberato Cardellini, put forth a rationale for replacing the term “element” with simple substance. They wrote, “To make a clear-cut distinction between elements and elementary substances, we suggest replacing the latter term with “simple substances,” a term that, according to Scerri and Laing, was employed, with this meaning, by Mendeleev himself.” The following letters were received in response.


by Eric Scerri

I would like to express my agreement with Giomini, Cardinali, and Cardellini for drawing attention to the fact that substances like diatomic oxygen and electrolytic copper occur as simple substances.1 However, two qualifications should be made. As the authors state, I have previously also made this point, and have invoked the name of Mendeleev for also having done so.2 Nevertheless, Mendeleev used a slightly different term, namely “simple body.”

More importantly, the authors seem to deny the status of elementhood altogether to simple substances. This appears a little excessive given the entrenched use of the term “element” to mean a simple substance such as diatomic oxygen that can be isolated.

The notion of a simple body was first introduced by Lavoisier as a means of ridding chemistry from all talk of elements as the invisible principles of the ancient Greek philosophers and alchemists. This is how modern chemistry was born, by denying the metaphysical aspect of elements. But as many authors have pointed out, neither Lavoisier nor anyone else has quite succeeded in eradicating the more philosophical sense of the term element. Although we need to recognize the metaphysical foundations of chemistry, we cannot hope to deny substances like di-oxygen—that can be isolated—their status as “elements.”

What the authors might consider doing is drawing on the dual sense of the term element. They could make a distinction between element as a simple substance and element as a basic substance, the latter of which they clearly allude to in their description of “element.” This terminology was first proposed by the radiochemist Fritz Paneth who was in fact responsible for the term “simple substance” that the authors seem to have adopted.3

References
1. C. Giomini, M.E. Cardinali, L. Cardellini, Chemistry International, 2005 (1), 18.
2. E.R. Scerri, Minds and Molecules, N. Bhushan, S. Rosenfeld (eds.), New York, Oxford University Press, 2000, 51–72.
3. F.A. Paneth, Foundations of Chemistry, 2003, 5, 113–145. Reprinted from a translation of a lecture given in 1931.

Eric Scerri <[email protected]> teaches in the chemistry department at UCLA in Los Angeles, California, USA and is the editor of Foundations of Chemistry, <www.kluweronline.com/issn/1386-4238>.


by John E. Hammond

I believe the change suggested by Giomini et al (Jan-Feb 2005 CI, p.18) is not necessary. Chemists generally understand the difference between elements and elementary substances and use the term “element” as a shorthand descriptor. I do not know any chemist who would not understand that diamond, graphite, or fullerenes are all different forms of the element carbon—the common names take care of differentiation. Non-chemists are unlikely to understand the distinction and could become further confused by having “two types of elements.”

John E. Hammond <[email protected]> is in the R&D Department of Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. in Chicago, Illinois, USA.


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