Johann Chrysostom Magnenus Explained

Johann Chrysostom Magnenus (French Jean Chrysostôme Magnen, c. 1590  - c. 1679^[1]) was a physician and advocate of atomism.

He was born at Luxeuil in Burgundy.^[2] He took a medical degree at the University of Dôle.^[3] He joined the medical faculty at the University of Pavia, where he published his scientific work Democritus reviviscens sive de atomis in 1646.He cited Daniel Sennert, but his ideas were distinct from Sennert's and those of Democritus. He considered that atoms were the indivisible parts of three of the classical elements: earth, water and fire.^[4]

In 1646, Magnenus estimated the number of atoms in a piece of incensefrom an argument based on the sense of smell (if a fraction of the grain is burned, the number of particles can be estimated from the volume within which the scent is still perceptible).^[5] His estimate for the number of particles in a piece of incense "not larger than a pea" was of the order of 10¹⁸.This estimate is remarkably accurate, within about three orders of magnitude of the true value (based on the number of molecules in the unburned incense) and thus only one order of magnitude off in linear dimension of the molecule.^[6] Magnenus was by far the earliest scholar to give a reasonable estimate for the size of a molecule; the first "modern" estimate was given more than 200 years later, in 1865, by Josef Loschmidt.^[7]

His other writings include De tabaco (1648), on the medical usage and effects of tobacco, and De manna liber singularis (1648). He apparently prescribed tobacco syrup as a standard remedy for his patients.

References

• J. Güsgens, Die Naturphilosophie des Johannes Chryostomos Magnenus, Bonn, 1910.
• Meinel 1988, "Early seventeenth-century atomism: Theory, epistemology, and the insufficiency of experiment"
• Meinel 1988, "'Das letzte Blatt im Buch der Natur'. Die Wirklichkeit der Atome und die Antinomie der Anschauung in den Korpuskulartheorien der frühen Neuzeit" (German)
• Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, Principles and Corpuscles. A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century, Kluwer Academic Publisher, 2000.
• Palmer 2017, "Humanist Lives of Classical Philosophers and the Idea of Renaissance Secularization: Virtue, Rhetoric, and the Orthodox Sources of Unbelief § The Next Generations"

External links

• WorldCat page
• CERL page
• Online Books page

Notes and References

1. These are the dates given in Dictionary of Scientific Biography; Güsgens (1910) estimated his birth at close to 1600 and his death close to 1670.
2. Web site: The Galileo Project. galileo.rice.edu. 2018-11-20.
3. [Francesco Bottin]
4. Daniel Garber, Michael Ayers (editors), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-century Philosophy, Volume 1 (2003), p. 556; Google Books.
5. Web site: The Concept of Law and Models in Chemistry . 2019-06-20 . cambridge.org., citing Alfred Stückelberger, Antike Atomphysik (1979) and Democritus Reviviscens: Sive Vita et Philosophia Democriti (1658), Disputatio II, Caput III (De Atomorum Proprietatibus), p. 207 (fuissent in hoc thuris grano, pisi magnitudinem non superante, atomi elementales ad minimum 777 600 000 000 000 000, ex quibus patet quantae sit parvitatis atomus una, concjicique potest, quantus sit atomorum numerus in toto universo). ["in this grain of frankincense, not exceeding the size of a pea, there would be at least 777,600,000,000,000,000 elemental atoms, from which it is clear how small a single atom is, and one can conjecture how great the number of atoms is in the whole universe"]
6. "only about one order of magnitude short regarding the length of an incense molecule" Klaus Ruedenberg, W. H. Eugen Schwarz, Three Millennia of Atoms and Molecules (2013), Chapter 1, pp. 1–45, .
7. Loschmidt, J. (1865). "Zur Grösse der Luftmoleküle". Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften Wien. 52 (2): 395–413.