Vladimir Shiltsev on Mikhail Lomonosov

    Three pivotal scientists: Germany’s Gottfried Leibniz, England’s Isaac Newton, and Russia’s Mikhail Lomonosov. Because the West knows little about Lomonosov, Vladimir Shiltsev writes:

    He is perhaps best known for being the first person to experimentally confirm the law of conservation of matter. That metals gain weight when heated –- now a well-known consequence of oxidation –- confounded British chemist Robert Boyle, who had famously observed the effect in 1673. The result seemed to implicate that heat itself was a kind of matter. In 1756 Lomonosov disproved that notion by demonstrating that when lead plates are heated inside an airtight vessel, the collective weight of the vessel and its contents stays constant. In a subsequent letter to Euler, he framed the result in terms of a broad philosophy of conservation: “All changes that we encounter in nature proceed so that . . . however much matter is added to any body, as much is taken away from another . . . since this is the general law of nature, it is also found in the rules of motion: a body loses as much motion as it gives to another body.
    In analogous experiments 17 years later, French chemist Antoine Lavoisier progressed further, showing that the increase in the weight of the metal is exactly offset by a reduction in the weight of the air’s oxygen.

    Thank goodness there are no laws of conservation of knowledge, or of compassion.

    (Quoted from “Mikhail Lomonosov and the Dawn of Russian Science,” by Vladimir Shiltsev. Page 42 of the 2012 February issue of Physics Today.)
    For a brief biography of Mikhail Lomonosov, click here. For images of or relating to Mikhail Lomonosov, click here.
    For information about Vladimir Shiltsev, click here. For images of or relating to Vladimir Shiltsev, click here.