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What Makes a Mature Science

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Jan Baptist van Helmont (1580–1644) was an astute thinker for his day. It was he, for instance, who coined the term “gas,” which he derived from the Greek word for chaos (χᾰ́ος). But he is better known for an experiment he ran in the early 1600s investigating the growth of plants and trees. He took a 5-pound willow seedling, planted it in 200 pounds of soil, and carefully watered the tree for five years. He then separated the tree from the soil, weighed both, and found that the tree now weighed around 169 pounds while the dry soil weighed 199 pounds and 14 ounces. This was a powerful demonstration that the weight of the tree did not come from the soil, but van Helmont drew the wrong conclusion: he took this as evidence that the element of water could turn into wood. Despite his work with gases, it never occurred to him that most of the weight might be drawn from substances in the air. As an alchemist, van Helmont believed other strange ideas as well, like that you can transform basil l

Back to Articles Back to Articles What Makes a Mature Science Words by SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD Long Read Issue 07 Back to Articles What Makes a Mature Science Mechanism alone cannot make a science credible. It must describe its subject matter in terms of entities, properties, and rules. Example H2 Example H3 ‍ Jan Baptist van Helmont (1580–1644) was an astute thinker for his day. It was he, for instance, who coined the term “gas,” which he derived from the Greek word for chaos (χᾰ́ος). But he is better known for an experiment he ran in the early 1600s investigating the growth of plants and trees.

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