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Wednesday 19 March 2014

Article on Robert Boyle postulated Boyle’s law

Robert Boyle, (25 January 1627 – 31 December 1691) ” was an Anglo - Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor..Although his research clearly has its roots in the alchemical tradition, 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. He is best known for Boyle’s law, which describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, if the temperature is kept constant within a closed system. Among his works, The Sceptical Chymist is seen as a cornerstone book in the field of chemistry

Boyle was born at Lismore Castle on 25 January 1627, the youngest son of Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, an ‘adventurer’ who made his fortune in Ireland and who, as Lord High Treasurer of that country, was one of the richest and most influential men in Britain. Boyle’s background was thus a wealthy, aristocratic one, and he undoubtedly carried the marks of this for the rest of his life, displaying an patrician demeanour to which his contemporaries almost automatically deferred. Indeed, one recent author, Steven Shapin, has argued that it was primarily to this that the extreme trustworthiness that contemporaries imputed to his science should be attributed. Boyle’s upbringing was fairly conventional. He was educated partly at home and partly at Eton College, completing his education by travelling to France, Italy and Switzerland, where he spent several months and where he received further instruction. It was during these continental travels that Boyle had a conversion experience, occasioned by an awe-inspiring thunderstorm, which he recounted in his autobiography. This had a formative influence on his entire subsequent life; his profound religiosity, the subject of much comment by contemporaries, is equally, if not more, important in understanding his later intellectual personality than his aristocratic background. Not only did Boyle’s deep theism inform his outloook in natural philosophy, as in life in general; in addition, it may be argued that the obsessiveness which he showed in his pursuit of his goals grew directly out of the religious imperatives which dominated his life…."

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