Because stories of scientific discoveries hold such a crucial role in the recounting of scientific development in both scientific education and in public culture, historians and philosophers of science alike have devoted much published work to the topic. In popular storytelling, discoveries appear to be an integrant, if not an essential part, of the development of science, with milestones in an ever-rising path to understanding humans and the world. While there is a consensus among historians that discoveries are often pictured too simplistically, not much of the scholarly literature percolates in popular media or scientific textbooks.
Our forthcoming collective volume titled "Discovering the chemical elements. No Simple stories " (Eds Van Tiggelen and Lykknes) presents nine such cases to help problematize common stories of discovery. The chapters provide a case in point on how successive context affects the construction of discovery stories, appointing winners, standardizing the storytelling which ends in short format in textbooks, and eventually picturing science as a linear progression very much against the nature of science.
We therefore advocate for more attention paid to what we call the “context of narration” along with the classical concepts of “context of discovery” and “context of justification” proposed by philosopher Reichenbach. We argue that discovery is a process beyond what a linear chronology can demonstrate, and that this process is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed, while being narrated, irrespective of whether the targeted community is scientists themselves, students in science, the general public, or school teachers and students.

According to several scholars, modern chemistry gave the definitive answer, in the 19th century, to the question about the composition of materials obtained from all three kingdoms of nature. Nevertheless, Lavoisier himself called the attention to the fact that in the case of organized bodies, i.e. animals and plants, things were not as simple as it seemed. The reason was that analysis resulted in a relatively small number of chemical elements, which could not account for the dramatic differences exhibited by the source materials.
Within such context, the idea arose of varying levels of analysis, consequently leading to different kinds of materials. For instance, some matters extracted from plants could be the active principles behind their healing effects. If that hypothesis was true, isolation and identification of such matters would allow for more accurate therapeutic uses of plants, as well as help distinguishing “true” healing plants from forgeries.
At the same time, a debate arose among chemists as to the origin of such intermediate products of analysis: were they originally present in plants, or did they arise as a result of chemical manipulation?
We will discuss those subjects through a long-lasting controversy on Peruvian bark involving Portuguese chemists in the early decades of the 19th century. In 1811, for instance, Bernardino A. Gomes isolated cinchonine, which existence Vauquelin had previously predicted. Nevertheless, Tomé Rodrigues Sobral rejected Gomes’ results, adducing that the antifebrile properties of Peruvian bark were not due to any single active principle, but to a combination of them.

Prof Ana Maria Alfonso-Goldfarb

The discovery and isolation of heavy water, a groundbreaking advancement in the field of chemistry, stands as a testament to the relentless pursuit of scientific understanding. At the forefront of this achievement was Gilbert Newton Lewis, whose pioneering contributions revolutionized the study of isotopes and their impact on chemical reactivity. This presentation explores the historical narrative of Lewis's pivotal role in the identification and characterization of heavy water, emphasizing his scientific journey and key publications.
Lewis's innovative work on the chemical bond and his meticulous research into the properties of isotopes paved the way for the discovery of heavy water. His landmark publications, "The Isotope of Hydrogen" (1933) and "Separation of the Isotopic Forms of Water by Fractional Distillation" (1933), are examined in detail to illustrate his contributions. These works reveal his groundbreaking application of isotopic fractionation techniques, which enabled the precise isolation and characterization of heavy water as a distinct substance.
Through both experimentation and theoretical insight, Lewis unraveled the unique properties of heavy water, demonstrating its significance in chemical processes. His achievements not only advanced the understanding of isotopic phenomena but also laid the foundation for future breakthroughs in nuclear chemistry and related fields. This presentation highlights the profound legacy of Gilbert Newton Lewis in the scientific exploration of isotopes and their transformative implications for chemistry.

This project takes an integrated HPS approach to analyzing the 20th century history of geochronology, the branch of geochemistry devoted to the dating of geologic objects. Philosophers of the historical sciences have focused to a significant extent on the problem of epistemic access facing these sciences: how do historical scientists overcome the relative scarcity of data about the past, compared to the present? Solving this problem requires solving another one, the ‘problem of ontic access:’ how do historical scientists get access to entities and processes with properties that are potentially informative about the past? The case of geochronology illustrates one solution to this problem: historical scientists can get access to entities and processes potentially informative about the past by exploiting the metaphysical structure of their domain. Beginning as the geological endeavor to quantify geological time-periods, during the 20th century geochronology was revolutionized by the discovery of radioactive decay and the importation of mass spectrometric techniques from physics. As a result, it experienced an explosion of its research boundaries in the 20th century. I explain this productivity by analyzing the ontology implicit in the new techniques. The productivity of isotope geochronology was based on (a) mereological decomposition in order to (b) exploit differences of properties between the parts and the whole, and (c) an exceptional complementarity between mass spectrometry and lower-level properties, allowing application to a wide range of geological contexts. The technologically mediated ability of the scientists to exploit the metaphysical structure of their domain was crucial to their success.