BRODIE, B.C. - THE ATOMIC DEBATE IN CHEMISTRY. - "BOOLEAN CHEMISTRY"

The Calculus of Chemical Operations; being a Method for the Investigation, by means of Symbols, of the Laws of the Distribution of Weight in Chemical Change. Received April 25, Read May 3, 1866. Part I-II. (I. On the Construction of Chemical Symbols. II. On the Analysis of Chemical Events). Received January 13, - Read May 18, 1878. (2 papers).

(London, Taylor and Francis, 1866 a. 1877. 4to. No wrappers as extracted from "Philosophical Transactions", Vol. 156 - Part II a. vol. 167 - Part I. Pp. 781-859 a. pp. 35-116. Clean and fine.

First appearance of both papers, controversial as Brodie here tries to established a new chemical philosophy, refusing atomism and founding the calculation of chemical processes on Boolean Algebra, defining chemical symbols with mathematical terms and notations. The work is a remarkable attempt to set chemistry on a rational deductive basis. - The introduction in the second paper meets the main points raised by his critics.

"In 1866 the Royal Society began to publish Brodie’s "The Calculus of Chemical Operations" (Philosophical Transactions, 156 [1866], 781-859; 167 [1877], 35-116) which introduced Greek symbols for the chemical elements to replace the roman alphabet (Berzelian) symbols that contemporary chemists used to represent atomic weights. Brodie’s symbols, however, represented operations on space (volumes), not weights for, besides its revolutionary symbolism, the calculus also demanded an appreciation of George Boole’s algebraic logic, which Brodie had studied after the publication of Boole’s Investigation of the Laws of Thought in 1854. In this an equation such as y = xy is a symbolic statement that y is a subset of x in which the symbol x is an operator on y. Although professional mathematicians like William Donkin and Henry Smith later advised Brodie, it appears that he developed the system without professional help. The principal difficulty about the calculus for the present-day historian and philosopher of science is the need to explain it before going on to discuss it and the difficulty of giving any concise description of it.

Boole had developed the concept of symbolic operators in algebraic analysis. These provided a code as to how the symbols were to be understood and manipulated. Brodie exploited this in the idea of a chemical operator, or chemical operations, that he symbolized by Greek letters. It is probably unwise, therefore, to interpret Brodie’s philosophy as analogous to Percy Bridgman’s later operationism. He proposed that if two substances with the empirically-derived weights, x and y combined to form a new compound with weight xy, then x + y = xy. From such weight equations he constructed a symbolic algebra that bypassed any atomistic interpretation."(William H. Brock in "Hyle Biography").

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