![]() Science History Instituteīoyle believed that chemical experiments could demonstrate the truth of the corpuscularian philosophy. The Honourable Robert Boyle, undated mezzoprint of a portrait bust. Instead of defining physical reality and analyzing change in terms of Aristotelian substance and form and the classical four elements of earth, air, fire, and water-or the three Paracelsian elements of salt, sulfur, and mercury-corpuscularism discussed reality and change in terms of particles and their motion. Corpuscularism and Elementsīoyle was an advocate of corpuscularism, a form of atomism that was slowly displacing Aristotelian and Paracelsian views of the world. The second edition of this work, published in 1662, delineated the quantitative relationship that Boyle derived from experimental values, later known as Boyle’s law: that the volume of a gas varies inversely with pressure. Boyle’s LawĪlthough Boyle’s chief scientific interest was chemistry, his first published scientific work, New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air, and Its Effects (1660), concerned the physical nature of air, as displayed in a brilliant series of experiments in which he used an air pump to create a vacuum. At the time of the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660, Boyle played a key role in founding the Royal Society to nurture this new view of science. This group was committed to the New Philosophy, which valued observation and experiment at least as much as logical thinking in formulating accurate scientific understanding. ![]() He spent the later years of the English Civil Wars at Oxford, reading and experimenting with his assistants and colleagues. ![]() As a young man of means, he was tutored at home and on the Continent. Science History Instituteīorn at Lismore Castle, Munster, Ireland, Boyle was the 14th child of the Earl of Cork. Title page of Occasional Reflections, a compendium of moral essays written by Robert Boyle and dedicated to his sister, Lady Ranelagh, 1665.
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