antoine lavoisier came up with the law of conservation of mass.
antoine lavoisier came up with the law of conservation of mass.
who came up with the law of conservation of mass?
antoine lavoisier
the latter stages of the revolution was fuelled by the 1789 publication of lavoisier's "traité élémentaire de chimie" (elements of chemistry). beginning with this publication and others to follow, lavoisier synthesised the work of others and coined the term "oxygen". antoine lavoisier represented the chemical revolution not only in his publications, but also in the way he practiced chemistry. lavoisier's work was characterized by his systematic determination of weights and his strong emphasis on precision and accuracy. while it has been postulated that the law of conservation of mass was discovered by lavoisier, this claim has been refuted by scientist marcellin berthelot. earlier use of the law of conservation of mass has been suggested by henry guerlac, noting that scientist jan baptist van helmont had implicitly applied the methodology to his work in the 16th and 17th centuries. earlier references of the law of conservation of mass and its use were made by jean rey in 1630. although the law of conservation of mass was not explicitly discovered by lavoisier, his work with a wider array of materials than what most scientists had available at the time allowed his work to greatly expand the boundaries of the principal and its fundamentals.
chemical revolution
a change in momentum of a mass requires a force; according to newton's first law, known as the law of inertia, inertia simply being another term for mass. that force, applied to a mass, creates an acceleration, which when applied over time, changes the velocity of a mass. according to newton's second law, the law of momentum -- changing the velocity of the mass changes its momentum, (mass multiplied by velocity). it is important to understand at this point that velocity is not simply speed. velocity is the speed of a mass in a particular direction. in a very technical sense, speed is a scalar (mathematics), a magnitude, and velocity is a vector (physics), magnitude and direction. newton's third law, known as conservation of momentum, recognizes that changes in the motion of a mass, brought about by the application of forces and accelerations, does not occur in isolation; that is, other bodies of mass are found to be involved in directing those forces and accelerations. furthermore, if all the masses and velocities involved are accounted for, the vector sum, magnitude and direction, of the momentum of all the bodies involved does not change; hence, momentum of the system is conserved. this conservation of momentum is why gun recoil occurs in the opposite direction of bullet projection -- the mass times velocity of the projectile in the positive direction equals the mass times velocity of the gun in the negative direction. in summation, the total momentum of the system equals zero, surprisingly just as it did before the trigger was pulled. from a practical engineering perspective, therefore, through the mathematical application of conservation of momentum, it is possible to calculate a first approximation of a gun’s recoil momentum and kinetic energy, and properly design recoil buffering systems to safely dissipate that momentum and energy, simply based on estimates of the projectile speed (and mass) coming out the barrel. to confirm analytical calculations and estimates, once a prototype gun is manufactured, the projectile and gun recoil energy and momentum can be directly measured using a ballistic pendulum and ballistic chronograph.
recoil