Classical separation

摘要

The intimacy of the electron in regards to chemistry has been long exploited by the field's practitioners. This year marks the bicentennial of English chemist Sir Humphry Davy's determination that chlorine is an element (and thus removing Lavoisier's guess that oxygen was inextricably linked to acids). Davy used the eponymous pile by Italian physicist Alessandro Volta to discover much of the leftmost side of the periodic table, which of course frequently finds its members in a salty chloridic form. In a field peppered with eponymous units of measure, devices, and concepts (e.g., amperes, coulombs, farads, and volts, galvanic cells, Maxwell's equations), the giants of 19th century (western European) science showed what magic could be wrought with the electron in a world ignorant of the quantum underpinnings.