Sardar says nothing more than wikipedia. He quotes the same passage and claims that it stands on its own. He italicizes the last phrase. If al-Majriti emphasized it in the original, I would take that as his making the claim.
He says “compare this experiment with that of Lavoisier.” Indeed, Lavoisier also used mercury, but it is terrible for this experiment, as I explained above, and maybe it caused Lavoisier to fool himself, too. But if that had been Lavoisier’s last experiment, he wouldn’t have convinced anyone. Who cares if one burn conserves mass? The point of the law is that if properly contained, all burns conserve mass. If al-Majriti weighed the container, that would be (1) closer to Lavoisier and (2) expressing an interest in the correct law, but the recorded weight sounds like the reagent, not the container.
How do you judge the independence of sources? I can certainly find you others that agree with Sardar. Added: I suppose you could look for agreement between sources with different politics.
Here is a Holmyard book from 1945 that quotes the same passage, but does not believe the author is proposing the law. Incidentally, he disputes the attribution to al-Majriti. (In 1922 in Nature, Holmyard announced that he had a new manuscript and gave the translation of that passage that he copied in 1945 and which wikipedia copied; Sardar gives a new translation.)
The metaphysical principle of the conservation of matter—that matter can be neither created nor destroyed in chemical processes—called upon here is at least as old as Aristotle (Weisheipl, 1963).
-Michael Weisberg, Paul Needham, and Robin Hendry, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The citation seems to refer to this: Weisheipl, James A. (1963), “The Concept of Matter in Fourteenth Century Science”, in Ernan McMullin, ed., The Concept of Matter in Greek and Medieval Philosophy, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
I wasn’t able to obtain a jail-broken copy of the paper; maybe you’ll have better luck.
This paper is about Europe and thus does not shed much light on al-Majriti. The paper is about a metaphysical principle, not an empirical one. People point to al-Majriti because he might have done relevant experiments.
After thousands of years of acceptance of this metaphysical principle, Occam was skeptical; perhaps the original application of his razor was that “quantity of matter” was meaningless, and thus too its conservation (though atomists could use a count). Later 14th century Europeans defined “quantity” as “mass,” and thus made a precise claim. Following Averroes, they used inertial mass, not gravitational mass.
So you could say that Lavoisier did not discover conservation of mass, but experimentally checked it. But he made a big splash at the time, probably because scientists were no longer so enthusiastic about metaphysical speculation. In particular, he showed the 14th century people made the right guess.
Sardar says nothing more than wikipedia. He quotes the same passage and claims that it stands on its own. He italicizes the last phrase. If al-Majriti emphasized it in the original, I would take that as his making the claim.
He says “compare this experiment with that of Lavoisier.” Indeed, Lavoisier also used mercury, but it is terrible for this experiment, as I explained above, and maybe it caused Lavoisier to fool himself, too. But if that had been Lavoisier’s last experiment, he wouldn’t have convinced anyone. Who cares if one burn conserves mass? The point of the law is that if properly contained, all burns conserve mass. If al-Majriti weighed the container, that would be (1) closer to Lavoisier and (2) expressing an interest in the correct law, but the recorded weight sounds like the reagent, not the container.
How do you judge the independence of sources? I can certainly find you others that agree with Sardar.
Added: I suppose you could look for agreement between sources with different politics.
Here is a Holmyard book from 1945 that quotes the same passage, but does not believe the author is proposing the law. Incidentally, he disputes the attribution to al-Majriti. (In 1922 in Nature, Holmyard announced that he had a new manuscript and gave the translation of that passage that he copied in 1945 and which wikipedia copied; Sardar gives a new translation.)
-Michael Weisberg, Paul Needham, and Robin Hendry, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The citation seems to refer to this:
Weisheipl, James A. (1963), “The Concept of Matter in Fourteenth Century Science”, in Ernan McMullin, ed., The Concept of Matter in Greek and Medieval Philosophy, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
I wasn’t able to obtain a jail-broken copy of the paper; maybe you’ll have better luck.
here
This paper is about Europe and thus does not shed much light on al-Majriti. The paper is about a metaphysical principle, not an empirical one. People point to al-Majriti because he might have done relevant experiments.
After thousands of years of acceptance of this metaphysical principle, Occam was skeptical; perhaps the original application of his razor was that “quantity of matter” was meaningless, and thus too its conservation (though atomists could use a count). Later 14th century Europeans defined “quantity” as “mass,” and thus made a precise claim. Following Averroes, they used inertial mass, not gravitational mass.
So you could say that Lavoisier did not discover conservation of mass, but experimentally checked it. But he made a big splash at the time, probably because scientists were no longer so enthusiastic about metaphysical speculation. In particular, he showed the 14th century people made the right guess.