Robert Boyle

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Robert Boyle

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[b. Lismore Castle, Ireland, January 25, 1627, d. London, December 30, 1691]

Boyle's name is most closely associated with his contribution to the gas laws, but his greatest influence was on chemistry. He was the first to develop modern concepts of element and compound; to distinguish between acids, bases, and neutral substances; and to conduct and publish experiments along the lines now called the scientific method. In his work with a vacuum he demonstrated that all masses fall toward Earth with the same acceleration and that the vacuum does not conduct sound but does conduct the electric force.

The British chemist, physicist, and natural philosopher Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was a leading advocate of "corpuscular philosophy." He made important contributions to chemistry, pneumatics, and the theory of matter.

The seventh son and fourteenth child of the 1st Earl of Cork, Robert Boyle was born on Jan. 25, 1627, at Lismore Castle in County Cork, Ireland. His father was one of the richest and most powerful men in Ireland, and throughout his life Boyle enjoyed, in addition to his native talents, the advantages of position, family, and wealth. At the age of eight he was sent to school at Eton and then in 1638 to Geneva, Switzerland, where he was privately tutored for the next two years. Upon the death of his father, Boyle returned in 1644 to England, where after some initial delay he settled at the manor of Stalbridge in Dorsetshire, which he had inherited from his father.

Boyle devoted much time to study and writing, and although he wrote extensively on ethical and religious topics, he became increasingly interested in natural philosophy. He interested himself in nearly all aspects of physics, chemistry, medicine, and natural history, although it was chemistry that "bewitched" him and primarily occupied his time.

In 1652 Boyle left Stalbridge for Ireland, where 10 years of civil war had seriously disordered the family estates. During his stay he continued to pursue his scientific interests. In 1654 he settled in Oxford, then the scientific center of England. He there associated himself with a group interested in the "new learning." This group, including many of the leading scientific figures of the day, quickly recognized Boyle's exceptional abilities, and he became a regular participant in their activities, pursuing particularly his interest in chemistry.

Pneumatic Investigations

Soon after his arrival in Oxford, Boyle's researches took on an additional dimension. Having learned in 1657 of the vacuum pump recently invented by Otto von Guericke, Boyle immediately set Robert Hooke, his brillant assistant (and later an eminent scientist in his own right), the task of devising an improved version. Utilizing this improved pump Boyle immediately began a long series of investigations designed to test properties of the air and to clearly establish its physical nature. Boyle's first account of these "pneumatic" investigations was entitled New Experiments, Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air and Its Effects (1660). He continued his study of air and vacuum throughout the rest of his life, and although his experiments with the "Boyleian vacuum" (as it came to be known) were repeated by many, no one in the 17th century surpassed Boyle's ingenuity or technique.

Boyle made extensive studies of the elasticity of the air and of its necessity for various physical phenomena, such as combustion, the propagation of sound, and the survival of animals. He verified Galileo's conclusions about the behavior of falling bodies by studying the rate at which a light body fell, both in air and in a vacuum. By placing a Torricellian barometer in the receptacle of his pump, he also verified that it was indeed air pressure which supported the column of mercury. When his conclusions about the relationship between the pressure of the air and the weight of the mercury it would support were challenged, he produced a series of experiments demonstrating that for a given quantity of air the volume is inversely proportional to the pressure, a relationship now known as Boyle's law.

Corpuscular Philosophy

The Sceptical Chymist (1661), although one of Boyle's more theoretical works and suffering from his usual lack of organization, well illustrates his contention that all scientific investigation must be firmly based on experiment. Directing his attack at what he conceived as the erroneous foundations of contemporary chemical theory, he brought forth extensive experimental evidence to refute the prevailing Aristotelian and Paracelsian concepts of a small number of basic elements or principles to which all compounds could be reduced by chemical analysis. He demonstrated that common chemical substances when decomposed by heat not only failed to yield the requisite number of elements or principles, but that the number was a function of the techniques employed. Accordingly, he denied that elements or principles (as thus defined) had any real existence and sought to replace these older concepts of chemical change with what he termed the "corpuscular philosophy."

Although he emphasized the necessity of basing scientific research on experiment, Boyle was not a simple empiricist. Behind his more specific and detailed work was a general theory of the structure of matter; and his continued advocacy of the mechanical philosophy - that is, explanation in terms of matter and motion - was one of his most significant contributions. According to Boyle's corpuscular philosophy, God had originally formed matter in tiny particles of varying sizes and shapes. These particles tended to combine in groups or clusters which, because of their compactness, had a reasonably continuous existence and were the basic units of chemical and physical processes. Any change in the shape, size, or motion of these basic clusters altered the properties of the substance involved, although chemical reactions were generally conceived as involving primarily the association and dissociation of various clusters.

Boyle also made significant contributions to experimental chemistry. He made extensive studies of the calcination of metals, of combustion, and of the properties of acids and bases. He emphasized the application of physical techniques to chemical investigation and developed the use of chemical indicators which showed characteristic color changes in the presence of certain types of substances. His pioneering study of phosphorus, during which he discovered nearly all the properties known for the next two centuries, well illustrates the effectiveness of his experimental techniques.

Science and Religion

An influential public figure, Boyle was often at court and was among those who in 1662 used their influence to obtain a charter for the Royal Society. He was a charter member of the society, as well as one of its initial council members, and provided the society with two of its most influential early officials: Henry Oldenburg, who had been tutor to Boyle's nephew, was appointed the society's first secretary, and Robert Hooke became its first curator.

In 1668 Boyle moved to London. As a leading figure of English science and a member of a prominent family, he was offered numerous honors, including a peerage and a bishopric, all of which he declined, insisting that he preferred to remain a simple gentleman. In 1680 he even refused the presidency of the Royal Society on the grounds that his conscience was, as he said, "tender" about subscribing to the necessary oaths.

Throughout his life Boyle maintained a deep and pervasive religious commitment. As an active supporter of missionary work, he was appointed by the King the governor of the Corporation for Propagating the Gospel in New England. He was particularly concerned, however, with demonstrating that science and religion were not only reconcilable but in fact integrally related, and in his effort to promote this belief he produced numerous essays and tracts on religion and natural theology. He died on Dec. 30, 1691, and in addition to leaving much of his estate for the furtherance of various Christian endeavors, he provided in his will for the establishment of an annual series of sermons, in his words, "for proving the Christian Religion against notorious Infidels." These sermons, known as the Boyle Lectures, became by tradition one of the primary platforms for promoting the belief that in the study of nature could be found much of the evidence for religion.

Further Reading

Boyle's better-known writings are collected in Thomas Birch, ed., The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (5 vols., 1744; new ed., 6 vols., 1772), together with an account of his life which is the principal source of all subsequent biographies. Although not entirely satisfactory, the standard biography is Louis Trenchard More, The Life and Works of the Honorable Robert Boyle (1944). A briefer account, with extensive selections from his more important works, is Marie Boas Hall, Robert Boyle on Natural Philosophy (1965), while the significance of Boyle's chemical studies is discussed at length in her Robert Boyle and Seventeenth-Century Chemistry (1958). A case study of his work in pneumatics is contained in James Bryant Conant, ed., Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science (2 vols., 1957).

Boyle, Robert (1627-91). Famous for his work on air pressure, Boyle was the youngest son of the 1st earl of Cork. During the 1650s he belonged to the ‘invisible college’, so called because they never all met together, associated with John Wilkins at Wadham College, Oxford. Crucial in the scientific revolution in England, this was a nucleus for the Royal Society.

Boyle, Robert (1627-1691), scientist; a son of Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork. Born in Lismore, Co. Waterford, he was a founder-member of the Dublin Philosophical Society (later RDS), best remembered for ‘Boyle's Law’, regarding the volume of gases under pressure. His writings include The Sceptical Chymist (1661) and Occasional Reflections (1665). He studied Scripture in the ancient languages and funded William Bedell's Irish Bible.

Boyle, Robert (1627-92) Irish scientist. Born the fourteenth son of the first earl of Cork, Boyle was able to pursue an independent life devoted to scientific and academic matters. He was the most important British chemist of his time, whose work on gases is remembered in Boyle's law. He was an important figure in the 17th-century rejection of Aristotelian emphases on final causes, believing that all the properties of materials can be explained by the size, shape, and motion of particles, and the textures to which their associations give rise. His major work was The Sceptical Chemist (1661), but he wrote widely not only on chemical but on philosophical and theological matters. His General History of the Air was published in 1692. His conception of the qualities of things, and the division between primary and secondary qualities, was a major influence on Locke.

Boyle, Robert, 1627-91, Anglo-Irish physicist and chemist. The seventh son of the 1st earl of Cork, he was educated at Eton and on the Continent and conducted most of his researches at his own laboratories at Oxford (1654-68) and London (1668-91). He invented a vacuum pump and used it in the discovery (1662) of what is now known as Boyle's law (see gas laws). Boyle is often referred to as the father of modern chemistry; he separated chemistry from alchemy and gave the first precise definitions of a chemical element, a chemical reaction, and chemical analysis. He also made studies of the calcination of metals, combustion, acids and bases, the nature of colors, and the propagation of sound. Although he was especially noted for his experimental work, Boyle also contributed to physical theory, supporting an early form of the atomic theory of matter, which he called the corpuscular philosophy, and using it to explain many of his experimental results. His extensive writings contributed greatly to the dominance of the mechanistic theory following Newton's work. Boyle was one of the group at Oxford that later became the Royal Society, but he refused the presidency of the society in 1680, as well as many other honors.

Bibliography

See his works, ed. by T. Birch (6 vol., 1772; repr. 1965-66); biographies by R. E. W. Maddison (1969) and M. Hunter (2009); study by M. B. Hall (1958, repr. 1968).

Boyle, Robert (1627–1691), natural philosopher and lay theologian. Boyle was born in Ireland, the youngest son of Richard Boyle (1566–1643), earl of Cork, and was raised as an aristocrat. After attending Eton, Robert Boyle embarked on a grand tour. When his travels were cut short as a result of the economic upheavals caused by the Irish Rebellion, he made his way back to England, where he found his sister, Katherine Ranelagh, living in London. After a brief stay with her (during which he became acquainted with the Puritan reformers of the Dury Circle), Boyle moved in 1645 to "Stalbridge," the estate in Dorset he had inherited from his father. There he wrote a number of ethical treatises and other moralistic pieces before becoming more interested in experimental philosophy. In 1649 he set up a laboratory at Stalbridge and began systematic studies in chemistry (and alchemy).

In 1655 or 1656 Boyle moved to Oxford, where he became a part of the experimental natural philosophy group. There he published some of his more important works in natural philosophy, including New Experiments Physico-Mechanical Touching the Spring of Air and Its Effects (1660), The Sceptical Chymist (1661), and The Origin of Forms and Qualities according to the Corpuscular Philosophy (1666). In 1668 Boyle moved back to London, where he became one of the founding members of the Royal Society of London. He established a laboratory in his sister's home and lived with her for the remainder of his life. Boyle continued his experiments and publications in natural philosophy and in addition published a number of works that were either primarily theological in nature or works in which it is impossible to separate his theological concerns from his work in natural philosophy. Among these are The Excellency of Theology Compar'd with Natural Philosophy (1674), A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature (1686), A Discourse of Things above Reason (1681), A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things (1688), and The Christian Virtuoso (1690).

As a natural philosopher, Boyle is best remembered for Boyle's Law, for advocating a corpuscularian matter theory, and for being extremely influential in the development of an empirical and experimental method. He had a marked aversion to speculative metaphysics, and in Notion of Nature argued against attributing any ontological status to either the Aristotelian notion of "nature" (as in "Nature abhors a vacuum") or to the "hylarchic principle" (or "plastick nature") of the Cambridge Platonists. Boyle argued that entities such as these are not needed to explain the phenomena and ought not be admitted into a theory of nature on the grounds of Ockham's razor (the principle that entities ought not to be multiplied beyond necessity).

Boyle is still honored in introductory chemistry texts as the "father of modern chemistry," the natural philosopher who successfully separated chemistry from its alchemical antecedents. This claim, however, is based on the fact that the work in which he is supposed to have done this, The Sceptical Chymist, was misinterpreted until the late twentieth century. Rather than being an attack on alchemy, the work is instead an attack only on certain practitioners and textbook writers—most specifically those who divorced alchemy from any theoretical underpinning. Indeed Boyle was quite involved in alchemical pursuits throughout his life, both in attempts to transmute base metals into gold and in the investigation of alchemical processes for medicinal purposes.

During his lifetime and after his death Boyle was honored as much for his piety as for his work as an experimental philosopher. Boyle considered the investigation of the world God created as a way of worshiping God, seeing the created world as a temple and the investigator of that world as a priest. He was painfully aware of the growing suspicion that the revival of Epicureanism (in the form of the corpuscular philosophy) might lead to a materialist worldview and an accompanying atheism, and he published work after work in which he attempted to show that the astute natural philosopher would become a more devout Christian rather than being led to question God's existence or providence. He advocated a natural theology that was typical of the time, showing that reason alone could prove God's existence and the immateriality of the soul.

Boyle was quite clear, however, that this natural philosophy was only the first step toward belief and that its main purpose was to serve as a bridge to revelation. As Boyle expressed it, knowing that God exists and having come to admire his workmanship, one naturally wants to learn more about the deity, and fortunately God has provided that knowledge via revelation. Boyle wrote extensively in an attempt to privilege the mysteries of Christianity from rational scrutiny, arguing that just as there are aspects of nature that human beings cannot (yet) understand, so too are there mysteries revealed in Scripture that human beings cannot (yet) understand. Indeed Boyle went so far as to argue that, where revelation is concerned, it is sometimes necessary for human reason to affirm apparently contradictory truths, such as God's prescience and human beings' free will (emphasizing that God, in his infinite wisdom, understands how such apparent contradictions are in fact consistent).

The unity of Boyle's thought is revealed in his voluntarism (his emphasis on God's will and power rather than on God's goodness and reason). In Boyle's view God was free to create any world whatsoever. The only way to discover the nature of God's creation is to investigate it, and (because the world was created commensurate to God's infinite understanding rather than to finite human understanding), there will always be aspects of this world that humans are unable to comprehend. The same thing is true of the mysteries of Christianity. God has reserved a full understanding of both nature and theology for the afterlife, thereby providing an incentive for godly living and belief.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Boyle, Robert. The Correspondence of Robert Boyle. 6 vols. Edited by Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio, and Lawrence M. Principe. London, 2001.

——. The Early Essays and Ethics of Robert Boyle. Edited by John T. Harwood. Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ill., 1991.

——. Robert Boyle: By Himself and His Friends: With a Fragment of William Wotton's Lost "Life of Boyle." Edited by Michael Hunter. London, 1994.

——. The Works of Robert Boyle. 14 vols. Edited by Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis. London and Brookfield, Vt., 1999–2000.

Secondary Sources

Anstey, Peter R. The Philosophy of Robert Boyle. London and New York, 2000.

Clericuzio, Antonio. Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century. Dordrecht, 2000.

Hunter, Michael. Robert Boyle (1627–91): Scrupulosity and Science. Woodbridge, U.K., 2000.

Hunter, Michael, ed. Robert Boyle Reconsidered. Cambridge, U.K., 1994.

Principe, Lawrence M. The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest. Princeton, 1998.

"Robert Boyle (1627–91)." Robert Boyle Project, University of London. Directed by Michael Hunter. Available: www.bbk.ac.uk/Boyle/index.html.

Sargent, Rose-Mary. The Diffident Naturalist: Robert Boyle and the Philosophy of Experiment. Chicago, 1995.

Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago, 1994.

Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air- Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, 1985.

Wojcik, Jan W. Robert Boyle and the Limits of Reason. Cambridge, U.K., 1997.

—JAN W. WOJCIK

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