john tyndall was given credit for disproving spontaneous generation.
john tyndall was given credit for disproving spontaneous generation.
who is given credit for disproving spontaneous generation?
john tyndall
louis pasteur's 1859 experiment is widely seen as having settled the question of spontaneous generation. he boiled a meat broth in a flask that had a long neck that curved downward, like that of a goose or swan. the idea was that the bend in the neck prevented falling particles from reaching the broth, while still allowing the free flow of air. the flask remained free of growth for an extended period. when the flask was turned so that particles could fall down the bends, the broth quickly became clouded. however, minority objections were persistent and not always unreasonable, given that the experimental difficulties were far more challenging than the popular accounts suggest. the investigations of john tyndall, a correspondent of pasteur and a great admirer of pasteur's work, were decisive in disproving spontaneous generation and dealing with lingering issues. still, even tyndall encountered difficulties in dealing with the effects of microbial spores, which were not well understood in his day. like pasteur, he boiled his cultures to sterilize them, and some types of bacterial spores can survive boiling. the autoclave, which eventually came into universal application in medical practice and microbiology to sterilise equipment, was not an instrument that had come into use at the time of tyndall's experiments, let alone those of pasteur.
spontaneous generation
the titles of galileo's work "two new sciences" and johannes kepler's "new astronomy" underscored the atmosphere of change that took hold in the 17th century as aristotle was dismissed in favor of novel methods of inquiry into the natural world. bacon was instrumental in popularizing this change; he argued that people should use the arts and sciences to gain dominion over nature. to achieve this, he wrote that "human life [must] be endowed with new discoveries and powers." he defined natural philosophy as "the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things; and enlarging the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible." bacon proposed scientific inquiry supported by the state and fed by the collaborative research of scientists, a vision that was unprecedented in its scope, ambition and form at the time. natural philosophers came to view nature increasingly as a mechanism that could be taken apart and understood, much like a complex clock. natural philosophers including isaac newton, evangelista torricelli and francesco redi conducted experiments focusing on the flow of water, measuring atmospheric pressure using a barometer and disproving spontaneous generation. scientific societies and scientific journals emerged and were spread widely through the printing press, touching off the scientific revolution. newton in 1687 published his "the mathematical principles of natural philosophy", or "principia mathematica", which set the groundwork for physical laws that remained current until the 19th century.
natural science