CHM 1020 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Antoine Lavoisier, Empty Spaces, Chemical Element
Document Summary
It is the smallest unit of matter that has the property of a chemical element. Electrons, protons, and neutrons are subatomic particles that make up atoms. Atoms are mostly composed of empty spaces. Leucippus and democritus first proposed that matter is composed of small indestructible particles. They proposed that many different kinds of atoms existed, each different in shape and size, and that they moved randomly through empty space. In 4th century b. c. , the greek philosophers plato and aristotle described the composition and behavior of matter as four main qualities: hot, dry, cold, and moist. Alchemy, a field of study concerned primarily with finding portions that would produce gold or confer immortality. In the late 1700s, a french chemistry antoine lavoisier discovered the law of mass conservation. Lavoisier hypothesized than an element is any material made of a fundamental substance that cannot be broken down into anything else. Through experiments, he showed that water could transform into oxygen and hydrogen.
