User:Onchesilbeach/sandbox

Before the emergence of modern scientific disciplines, those who observed and studied all aspects of the natural world were natural philosophers, who used philosophical thinking to understand their observations of the world. This then evolved into natural sciences: sciences that involve the study of the physical world, following the scientific revolution. Natural sciences can now be divided into two main branches: life sciences (biology) and physical sciences (to include physics, chemistry, astronomy and Earth science). Chemistry, although one of the physical sciences, can be seen to bridge the gap between the biological and the physical, as a central science.

In terms of modern scientific disciplines, however, biology and chemistry have become distinct branches of science, each encompassing a number of sub-disciplines, despite their common ancestry in the natural sciences. Before the development of biology as a separate field, the study of animals and plants came under natural history and natural philosophy. Similarly, early ideas that are still prevalent in modern chemistry came from natural philosophers such as Aristotle. In the 19th century, biology became a separate entity following vast advancements in the study of the subject such as the development of the microscope and cell theory. Biology as a modern scientific discipline is described as the study of “life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, and distribution.” Slightly earlier, in the 17th century, Robert Boyle is credited to have made a distinction between chemistry and its protoscience, alchemy in his book The Sceptical Chymist. What set apart chemistry from alchemy, was that chemists made use of scientific method. The word chemistry, is also derived from alchemy, which has been traced to have both Greek and Arabic origins, to mean “cast together” and “Egyptian art” or "black art", respectively. The definition of chemistry has continued to evolve with the discipline, and modern chemistry can now be defined as the study of the “composition, structure, and properties of substances and with the transformations that they undergo."