Question

2. Explain Van Helmont's experiment using the following points. Hypothesis: Supplies: Procedure: Results: Conclusions:​

Answer 1

Respuesta:

Van Helmont's experiment consisted in refuting that plants feed from the ground, as was previously believed. Jan Baptista van Helmont was a chemist, physicist, alchemist, doctor, and physiologist from the Belgian region of Flanders, who at the beginning of the 17th century carried out one of the first controlled experiments, which, although he was unable to understand the cause of the discovered phenomenon, was able to refute prevailing theories

Explicación:

The importance of this experiment lies in the fact that it was one of the first controlled experiments. It not only cares about measuring all the variables, but also isolates them. This experiment was also easily replicable.

Since the tree did not get its mass from the ground, it left the question open: where did the plants get their matter? Although Van Helmont was also the discoverer of carbon dioxide, curiously he did not relate it to the cause of the increase in mass of the plant. Van Helmont considered air and water as the basic elements of the universe, and the latter as the main constituent of matter, so the result of the experiment led him to think that it proved his hypothesis that it was water that was transformed in the matter. Later, photosynthesis and the process used by plants to take their food from the air would be discovered.