To be fair, we must cite here that many consider "the atom as the basic building block of matter" as the biggest paradigm in chemistry. The existence of atoms, championed originally by Dalton (and maybe Democritus if we extend ourselves), applied theoretically by Boltzmann, and then finally proven by Einstein and Perrin, is at the heart of chemistry. From there it was natural to think of a "field" that bring those atoms together into molecules, even if its reason was hardly understood (it was considered a kind of blending of the "atmospheres of caloric" in the early 19 th century ).