Phlogiston!

Hooray for the atavistic political climate we find ourselves in today. Rick Perry professes to believe that Social Security is a scam, when it is in fact one of the most stable and successful programs in the history if the United States. Paul Krugman notes that we have apparently abandoned reasoned economic theory in the current discussion of our country's fiscal woes. Krugman goes on to suggest that perhaps we will soon be reexamining other outdated hypotheses such as the following.

The Theory of Phlogiston:

The theory holds that all combustible resources contain phlogiston, a substance without colour, odour, taste, or mass that is liberated in burning. Once burned, the "dephlogisticated" substance was held to be in its "true" form, the calx.

"Phlogisticated" substances are those that contain phlogiston and are "dephlogisticated" when burned; "in general, substances that burned in air were said to be rich in phlogiston; the fact that combustion soon ceased in an enclosed space was taken as clear-cut evidence that air had the capacity to absorb only a definite amount of phlogiston. When air had become completely phlogisticated it would no longer serve to support combustion of any material, nor would a metal heated in it yield a calx; nor could phlogisticated air support life, for the role of air in respiration was to remove the phlogiston from the body."^[1]

Thus, phlogiston was described in a way basically the opposite of the real role of oxygen in combustion.

These are sad and interesting times we live in.