History of the Mass Conservation Law The discovery of the law of conservation of mass was made in 1789 by the French scientist Antoine Lavoisier; others had come up with the idea before, but Lavoisier was first to prove it. At the time, much of the prevailing belief in chemistry about atomic theory still came from the ancient Greeks, and thanks to more recent ideas, it was thought that something within fire (" phlogiston ") was actually a substance. This, scientists reasoned, explained why a ... The law of conservation of mass can only be formulated in classical mechanics, in which the energy scales associated with an isolated system are much smaller than , where is the mass of a typical object in the system, measured in the frame of reference where the object is at rest, and is the speed of light in a vacuum. The law can be formulated mathematically in the fields of fluid mechanics and continuum mechanics, where the conservation of mass is usually expressed using the continuity ... Law of Conservation of Mass: The law of conservation of mass states that the mass can neither be created nor destroyed in a chemical reaction. This implies, in a closed system the mass of the elements involved initially in a chemical reaction is equal to the mass of the product obtained by the reaction. Hence, for any type of chemical reaction, the total mass of the reactants and the products involved is conserved. This concept of mass conservation is widely used in chemistry and other ... The law of conservation of mass or matter says that the total mass of products is equal to the total mass of reactants in a chemical reaction. Hence, there is no change in the mass during the chemical change.