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- His contributions to chemistry were based on a mechanical “ corpuscularian hypothesis”—a brand of atomism which claimed that everything was composed of minute (but not indivisible) particles of a single universal matter and that these particles were only differentiable by their shape and motion.
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Robert Boyle. Elements (Robert Boyle) The Greek concept of elements was popular for almost 2200 years and was the guiding force behind the alchemists' search for ways to turn cheap metals such as lead into gold. In 1661 the English scientist Robert Boyle raised an important objection to this model. In his book, The Sceptical Chymist, Boyle ...
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Every general-chemistry student learns of Robert Boyle (1627–1691) as the person who discovered that the volume of a gas decreases with increasing pressure and vice versa—the famous Boyle’s law. A leading scientist and intellectual of his day, he was a great proponent of the experimental method.
By contrast, Boyle thought theory must be epistemically subordinate to observation, so he used experiments to test a theory. Instead of using them in a reductive process of finding self-evident intuitions, he designed experiments specifically to falsify or corroborate a claim.
- Overview
- Development of atomic theory
- The atomic philosophy of the early Greeks
- The emergence of experimental science
The concept of the atom that Western scientists accepted in broad outline from the 1600s until about 1900 originated with Greek philosophers in the 5th century bce. Their speculation about a hard, indivisible fundamental particle of nature was replaced slowly by a scientific theory supported by experiment and mathematical deduction. It was more tha...
The concept of the atom that Western scientists accepted in broad outline from the 1600s until about 1900 originated with Greek philosophers in the 5th century bce. Their speculation about a hard, indivisible fundamental particle of nature was replaced slowly by a scientific theory supported by experiment and mathematical deduction. It was more tha...
Leucippus of Miletus (5th century bce) is thought to have originated the atomic philosophy. His famous disciple, Democritus of Abdera, named the building blocks of matter atomos, meaning literally “indivisible,” about 430 bce. Democritus believed that atoms were uniform, solid, hard, incompressible, and indestructible and that they moved in infinite numbers through empty space until stopped. Differences in atomic shape and size determined the various properties of matter. In Democritus’s philosophy, atoms existed not only for matter but also for such qualities as perception and the human soul. For example, sourness was caused by needle-shaped atoms, while the colour white was composed of smooth-surfaced atoms. The atoms of the soul were considered to be particularly fine. Democritus developed his atomic philosophy as a middle ground between two opposing Greek theories about reality and the illusion of change. He argued that matter was subdivided into indivisible and immutable particles that created the appearance of change when they joined and separated from others.
The philosopher Epicurus of Samos (341–270 bce) used Democritus’s ideas to try to quiet the fears of superstitious Greeks. According to Epicurus’s materialistic philosophy, the entire universe was composed exclusively of atoms and void, and so even the gods were subject to natural laws.
De rerum natura, which was rediscovered in the 15th century, helped fuel a 17th-century debate between orthodox Aristotelian views and the new experimental science. The poem was printed in 1649 and popularized by Pierre Gassendi, a French priest who tried to separate Epicurus’s atomism from its materialistic background by arguing that God created atoms.
Soon after Italian scientist Galileo Galilei expressed his belief that vacuums can exist (1638), scientists began studying the properties of air and partial vacuums to test the relative merits of Aristotelian orthodoxy and the atomic theory. The experimental evidence about air was only gradually separated from this philosophical controversy.
Anglo-Irish chemist Robert Boyle began his systematic study of air in 1658 after he learned that Otto von Guericke, a German physicist and engineer, had invented an improved air pump four years earlier. In 1662 Boyle published the first physical law expressed in the form of an equation that describes the functional dependence of two variable quantities. This formulation became known as Boyle’s law. From the beginning, Boyle wanted to analyze the elasticity of air quantitatively, not just qualitatively, and to separate the particular experimental problem about air’s “spring” from the surrounding philosophical issues. Pouring mercury into the open end of a closed J-shaped tube, Boyle forced the air in the short side of the tube to contract under the pressure of the mercury on top. By doubling the height of the mercury column, he roughly doubled the pressure and halved the volume of air. By tripling the pressure, he cut the volume of air to a third, and so on.
This behaviour can be formulated mathematically in the relation PV = P′V′, where P and V are the pressure and volume under one set of conditions and P′ and V′ represent them under different conditions. Boyle’s law says that pressure and volume are inversely related for a given quantity of gas. Although it is only approximately true for real gases, Boyle’s law is an extremely useful idealization that played an important role in the development of atomic theory.
Soon after his air-pressure experiments, Boyle wrote that all matter is composed of solid particles arranged into molecules to give material its different properties. He explained that all things are
made of one Catholick Matter common to them all, and…differ but in the shape, size, motion or rest, and texture of the small parts they consist of.
Robert Boyle FRS (/ b ɔɪ l /; 25 January 1627 – 31 December 1691) was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, alchemist and inventor. Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of modern chemistry , and one of the pioneers of modern experimental scientific method .
Overall, Boyle argued so strongly for the need of applying the principles and methods of chemistry to the study of the natural world and to medicine that he later gained the appellation of the “father of chemistry.”
Abstract. In her important and pioneering work on Robert Boyle’s contributions to chemistry Marie Boas Hall (Boas 1958; and Hall 1965, 81–93) portrayed Boyle’s advances as being tied up with and facilitated by his adoption of the new world view, the mechanical or corpuscular philosophy, as opposed to Aristotelian or Paracelsian ...
