Science Quote by Wilhelm Ostwald

Ostwald is needling a certain kind of scientific complacency: the habit of filing away inconvenient facts by renaming them. He points to something any chemist knows in their bones - water can be ice, liquid, or vapor without changing its composition - and then skewers how a “formal view” neatly “disposed of” that knowledge by drawing a jurisdictional line. If it’s only “physical,” not “chemical,” then the conceptual disturbance is contained. The label does the policing.

The intent is less to rehearse phase changes than to criticize an overly bureaucratic partitioning of nature. Ostwald came of age when chemistry was professionalizing, defining itself against physics even as thermodynamics and energetics were remaking both fields. His own work pushed toward the idea that energy and transformation matter as much as composition, so the easy separation between “what something is made of” and “what it does” would have felt like a dodge.

The subtext is that scientific categories can become rhetorical shields. By declaring a process “physical,” investigators could treat altered properties as secondary - interesting, perhaps, but not philosophically threatening to chemistry’s core focus on composition. Ostwald’s phrasing (“disposed of,” “formal view”) drips with impatience at that maneuver: it’s an institutional reflex, not an intellectual triumph.

Context matters because this is a period when phase transitions, solutions, and colloids were forcing scientists to confront emergent behavior - properties arising from arrangement and state, not new ingredients. Ostwald is arguing, in effect, that reality doesn’t respect departmental borders, and that tidy classifications can delay the harder work of rethinking what counts as explanation.