[Verse 1] Seventeen-hundred, Georg Stahl made a claim, Burning things bleed out a ghost without a name, Phlogiston, he called it, fire's secret juice, Leaves the wood as ash, lighter, logic loose, Nobody put the smoke upon a careful scale, A hundred years of chemists swallowed that tale. [Chorus] Mass can't hide, mass can't run, Count it all before, count it when you're done, Lavoisier locked it in a glass cocoon, Nothing's lost, it's just rearranged like the moon, Weigh the flask, weigh the smoke, Conservation's the oath that nature spoke. [Verse 2] He sealed his metals in a bottle tight, Burned the mercury red in candlelight, Weighed it before, weighed the ash it grew, Heavier after—something sneaking through, Air itself held a hungry, nameless part, Oxygen was the thief with a chemist's heart. No feathers floating off, no spirit in the air, Just a gas from the room that was never truly spare, Stahl had it backwards, the scale don't lie, Matter doesn't vanish when the flames climb high. [Chorus] Mass can't hide, mass can't run, Count it all before, count it when you're done, Lavoisier locked it in a glass cocoon, Nothing's lost, it's just rearranged like the moon, Weigh the flask, weigh the smoke, Conservation's the oath that nature spoke. [Verse 3] Published eighty-nine, the Traité on the shelf, Tore the ghost story down and buried it himself, Atoms don't disappear, they just swap their seats, That's why every equation we write must repeat, Same count left, same count right, Balance or the whole page loses its bite. [Bridge] Marie-Anne Paulze, sketching every jar, Translating English papers from a distant shore, Her drawings held the data, her hand kept the proof, Behind the great discovery stood an unsung roof. Then the Revolution came with a blade so grim, Eighth of May, ninety-four, the silence took him, Lagrange said it took a second to take that head, A hundred years might not refill the space instead. [Chorus] Mass can't hide, mass can't run, Count it all before, count it when you're done, Lavoisier locked it in a glass cocoon, Nothing's lost, it's just rearranged like the moon, Weigh the flask, weigh the smoke, Conservation's the oath that nature spoke. [Verse 4] Now every classroom chalks the law on the board, Reactants and products in a balanced accord, Carbon counted, hydrogen too, Every single atom gets accounted and due, From a rusting nail to a rocket's blazing plume, The scale still holds steady in every single room, Students bent over beakers, learning it by heart, The lesson he died for was just the start. [Outro] No phlogiston, no ghost in the flame, Just oxygen and metal playing a weighted game, Nothing's created, nothing's destroyed, That's the law Lavoisier left we still employ.
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