The Relation of Physical and Chemical Processes

Abstract

In recent times various relations between chemistry and physics have been submitted to investigation. The old idea of making chemistry applied physics — and particularly applied mechanics — thus received new encouragement. But if by this idea is meant that the laws discovered in physics will suffice without extension and generalization to allow us deduce all chemical processes, it appears to me scarcely less naive than that of Thales, which would deduce everything from the properties of water. It is not likely that a wider field of experience should be completely contained in a smaller one which is already known. Analogies between physical and chemical processes indeed exist, but they would have to be more comprehensive before we can believe in the identity of these two fields of experience. Some physical laws — the conservation of mass, the conservation of the quantity of electricity, the conservation of energy, the law of entropy, and so on — reach indeed over into chemistry; but an unprejudiced survey leads us to hold it possible that a chemistry of the future should include physics — rather than that such a physics should include chemistry.