Chemistry is one of the sciences that became important before it knew what it was doing. The old, half-magician alchemists of the Middle Ages were acquainted with many useful compounds and reactions, but they had no rational theories about them. Early chemists, dropping the magic, gradually developed general principles to explain what happened in their test tubes. The most useful of these was the concept of "chemical bonds": the forces that make atoms stick together as the molecules that form nearly everything on earth. Though the chemists learned a lot about the bonding...
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