"Looks at the history of synthetic organic chemistry and challenges long-held beliefs that theory drove the experiments, asserting that it was actually the lab work that birthed the theory"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
According to existing histories, theory drove chemistry's remarkable nineteenth-century development. In Molecular World, Catherine M. Jackson shows instead how novel experimental approaches combined with what she calls “laboratory reasoning” enabled chemists to bridge wet chemistry and abstract concepts and, in so doing, create the molecular world. Jackson introduces a series of practice-ba…