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Jacobus van 't Hoff (1852–1911), an influential theoretical chemist and the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.. Theoretical chemistry is the branch of chemistry which develops theoretical generalizations that are part of the theoretical arsenal of modern chemistry: for example, the concepts of chemical bonding, chemical reaction, valence, the surface of potential energy, molecular ...
A scientific theory differs from a scientific fact or scientific law in that a theory seeks to explain "why" or "how", whereas a fact is a simple, basic observation and a law is an empirical description of a relationship between facts and/or other laws.
Scientific laws or laws of science are statements, based on repeated experiments or observations, that describe or predict a range of natural phenomena. [1] The term law has diverse usage in many cases (approximate, accurate, broad, or narrow) across all fields of natural science (physics, chemistry, astronomy, geoscience, biology).
The laws of thermodynamics are a set of scientific laws which define a group of physical quantities, such as temperature, energy, and entropy, that characterize thermodynamic systems in thermodynamic equilibrium.
The laws describing the behaviour of gases under fixed pressure, volume, amount of gas, and absolute temperature conditions are called gas laws.The basic gas laws were discovered by the end of the 18th century when scientists found out that relationships between pressure, volume and temperature of a sample of gas could be obtained which would hold to approximation for all gases.
The law of definite proportion was given by Joseph Proust in 1797. [2]I shall conclude by deducing from these experiments the principle I have established at the commencement of this memoir, viz. that iron like many other metals is subject to the law of nature which presides at every true combination, that is to say, that it unites with two constant proportions of oxygen.
The most fundamental concept in chemistry is the law of conservation of mass, which states that there is no detectable change in the quantity of matter during an ordinary chemical reaction. Modern physics shows that it is actually energy that is conserved, and that energy and mass are related; a concept which becomes important in nuclear chemistry.
In 1804, Dalton explained his atomic theory to his friend and fellow chemist Thomas Thomson, who published an explanation of Dalton's theory in his book A System of Chemistry in 1807. According to Thomson, Dalton's idea first occurred to him when experimenting with "olefiant gas" and "carburetted hydrogen gas" .