Nicolas Guibert

Title page "De interitu alchymiae metallorum transmutatoriae tractatus aliquot ..."

Nicolas Guibert (* 1547 in Saint-Nicolas-de-Port , † 1620 in Vaucouleurs ) was a doctor and naturalist.

Life

Nicolas Guibert had studied medicine in Perugia and worked in Italy, Spain and Germany not only as a doctor, but also in various alchemical laboratories. In 1578 and 1579 he was in charge of the apostolic see pharmacies and then returned to France.

Scientific work

In 1603 his two-part work Alchymia - Ratione et Experientia appeared , in which he dealt very critically with alchemy . For him there was a close relationship between experiment (experience) and theory (reason). A theory cannot be correct if it is not confirmed by experiment. Since he could not find any evidence for the transmutation of metals, a central point of alchemy was obsolete for him. To this end, he carried out experiments on the cementation of copper and silver and showed that after dissolving copper and silver in nitric acid , the dissolved copper precipitated again with iron and the dissolved silver again with copper and thus a transmutation of iron into copper or from copper in silver, as was assumed at the time, was excluded. As a further confirmation, after dissolving a copper-silver alloy in nitric acid, he first precipitated the dissolved silver with copper and then the dissolved copper with iron. In his scientific thinking he was way ahead of the times. His writing from 1603 therefore met with broad rejection and was panned by Andreas Libavius , whose work Alchemia had appeared six years earlier. Guibert was an outsider, whose statements did not fit the school opinion of the time.

literature

• Friedemann Rex : Nicolas Guibert - a kind of chemical copernicus, chemistry in our time , 14th year 1980, No. 6, pp. 191-196, ISSN  0009-2851