Perhaps... some day the precision of the data will be brought so far that the mathematician will be able to calculate at his desk the outcome of any chemical combination, in the same way, so to speak, as he calculates the motions of celestial bodies.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that future advancements in data precision will enable mathematicians to predict chemical outcomes as accurately as they can predict celestial motions.
Antoine Lavoisier's quote reflects his belief in the potential for great advancements in science, particularly in how data and mathematics can be utilized to understand and predict chemical interactions. It emphasizes the idea that as our tools for data collection and analysis become increasingly precise, the boundaries of what we can predict will expand significantly, paralleling the already established fields of celestial mechanics. This showcases the foundational relationship between mathematics and scientific inquiry.
In practice
In a lecture on data science, the speaker quoted Lavoisier to emphasize the importance of precise data in scientific predictions.
Imagination, on the contrary, which is ever wandering beyond the bounds of truth, joined to self-love and that self-confidence we are so apt to indulge, prompt us to draw conclusions which are not immediately derived from facts.
We think only through the medium of words. Languages are true analytical methods. Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method. The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged.
We must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.
If everything in chemistry is explained in a satisfactory manner without the help of phlogiston, it is by that reason alone infinitely probable that the principle does not exist; that it is a hypothetical body, a gratuitous supposition; indeed, it is in the principles of good logic, not to multiply bodies without necessity.
It took them only an instant to cut of that head, but it is unlikely that a hundred years will suffice to reproduce a singular one.
While I thought myself employed only in forming a nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry.
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
The gravest threat faced by the world is of an extremist group getting hold of nuclear weapons or materials.
When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.
It was because of Henderson that I stayed... It was he and he alone who kept me in Toronto and in Canada. Were it not for Henderson, I believe insulin would have been a product of the United States.
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
Something can be real - actually existing, not merely illusory - and yet not be fundamental. Scientists used to think that heat, for example, was a fluidlike substance called 'caloric' that flowed from hot objects to colder ones.
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