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. Robert Boyle F. Boyle believed that chemical experiments could demonstrate the truth of the corpuscularian philosophy.
He was probably referring to the uniform corpuscles—which were as yet unobserved—out of which corpuscular aggregates were formed, not using elements as Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and others used the term in the 18th century to refer to different substances that could not be broken down further by chemical methods. In his experiments Boyle made many important observations, including that of the weight gain by metals when they are heated to become calxes. These projects were records of chemical experiments and other empirical observations concerning the given substance.
The goal was to create a sort of publicly accessible database of the chemical analysis of every known substance. Concerning salt, a basic chemical principle according to the Paracelsians, Boyle claimed to be able to distinguish three different kinds, each of which he could chemically produce.
Boyle believed colors were caused by the mechanical properties of material corpuscles. He also analyzed samples of phosphorous he had acquired, which produce light chemically. Boyle achieved significant success in these endeavors, though this pales in comparison to the success of later philosophers on the nature of color.
This line of investigation also led Boyle to discover things not directly related to color, such as a reliable method of distinguishing an acid from a base. Developing an interpretation of a laboratory accident of Hennig Brandt, in Boyle saturated some coarse paper in phosphorous and drew a stick coated with sulfur across it, creating a steady flame.
This was the first friction match. The creation of a reliable and eventually safe way to easily produce fire was a major technological advancement that changed the world. Boyle spent the last twenty years of his life engaged, often with the help of Ranelagh, in the chemical analysis of medical recipes.
These efforts did much to bring chemistry out of the shadows of alchemy and into the light of social respectability. Throughout his work in chemistry, Boyle advocated openness in the publication of experimental results, including even those experiments that were unsuccessful. Nonetheless, there were exceptions to this openness involving alchemy. Many of the early modern philosophers, most notably Isaac Newton, had a significant interest in alchemy, and Boyle was no exception.
Though Boyle often tried to distance chemistry from its alchemical association, many of his projects in natural philosophy were clearly alchemical. Boyle believed it was possible to transmute one substance into another, and this included the traditional alchemical quest of turning lead into gold.
He believed the possibility of transmutation directly followed from the mechanical philosophy. If there is only one universal type of matter, and the differences between the macroscopic substances we perceive are the result of structural differences at the microscopic level, then it follows that causing changes in the structure and arrangement of corpuscles might cause substantial changes at the macroscopic level.
Since gold and lead have similar macroscopic properties, there might be only a subtle difference between them at the microscopic level. Boyle claimed to have witnessed the transmutation of lead into gold on more than one occasion. Boyle also claimed to have turned gold into a base metal, using a powder given to him by a mysterious stranger. In some works, Boyle describes successful transmutation experiments on other substances. Boyle spent a great deal of time, effort, and financial resources in these pursuits, which included searching for the elixir of life, a medicine capable of curing all diseases and extending the human lifespan.
Boyle was hoodwinked on more than one occasion by charlatans who claimed to have alchemical knowledge or the rare substances required for his alchemical pursuits. The most notable incident involved a con man named Georges Pierre. Boyle eventually realized he was being had, and there is evidence that he was aware of the danger of such scams and viewed them as an unfortunate but necessary risk in the pursuit of alchemical knowledge, a risk that his unique wealth allowed him to take.
This allowed his experiments to be reproduced and the knowledge acquired to be used to help people, especially in areas such as medicine, where the benefit to the public was obvious and immediate. There were limits to this support of scientific openness, though. For example, Boyle was concerned that the publication of instructions for turning lead into gold could collapse the world economy, bringing social chaos. Boyle had anticipated this and left detailed instructions in his will to prevent it.
The sort of secrecy involved here, however, was a part of the cost of networking with other alchemists to share recipes and other experimental data, and was considered common practice in the world of alchemy.
Most alchemists were secretive, and would exchange recipes and materials only if their secrets were kept. Boyle was justified in believing that, if he had refused to make such promises, other alchemists would not have shared their work with him. Nevertheless, this is a notable exception to his otherwise deep aversion to taking oaths, as well as his Baconian belief that scientific data should be open to the public for the benefit of humanity. Boyle also had a deep interest in medicine.
Though he never formally studied it, much of his research in natural philosophy was either directly medical in nature or motivated by medical goals, both practical and theoretical. He nonetheless distrusted physicians, after an event in his youth in which he became gravely ill when a physician at Eton gave him the wrong medicine by mistake. Furthermore, he generally rejected their Galen-based theories in favor of mechanical ones. At the same time, Boyle knew, respected, and was respected by many of the leading physicians of his day.
He sometimes even asked Boyle and Ranelagh to accompany him on house calls. While the two should not be conflated, as Boyle worked on many nonmedical projects in natural philosophy, neither can be fully understood apart from the other. Though Boyle worked on medical projects throughout his scientific career, a renewed interest in medicine began in the late s.
He would go on to steadily publish books on medical topics for the rest of his life, including Memoirs for the Natural History of Human Blood , Of the Reconcileableness of Specifick Medicines to the Corpuscular Philosophy , Some Receipts of Medicines , Medicina Hydrostatica , Experimenta et Observationes Physicae , and Medical Experiments Boyle worked with Locke on a few medical projects that are worth noting.
Though early 21 st century scholars remember Locke primarily for his work in epistemology and political philosophy, he considered himself first and foremost a physician. Boyle and Locke collaborated for several years to create a Baconian experimental history of human blood. Their work was interrupted while Locke was travelling or Boyle was ill, but their persistence resulted in the publication of Memoirs for the Natural History of Human Blood A second medical project with Locke was the collection of data for testing the miasma theory of disease.
This is particularly noteworthy because this theory proposes the mechanical explanation that disease is caused by noxious vapors moving in the air. The theory holds that these vapors act as a contagion, penetrating the bodies of those who come in contact with them through respiration. Boyle believed the contagions were composed of corpuscles and might originate deep underground, being released by human activity such as mining.
Boyle and Locke hypothesized that these noxious corpuscular emanations were then spread far and wide by the wind. Believing disease and weather were linked, they collected data from physicians across the country on both the weather and the patients they had treated, looking for correlations.
Despite this, Boyle was still part of a general effort to cure the plague that included Ranelagh, Sydenham, Locke, and many others. Boyle spent the last twenty years of his life engaged in medical research with his sister, Katherine Ranelagh. Through their vast network of correspondents, they would find medical recipes which they would then chemically analyze.
Through medical research, Boyle found the clearest way to wed his passion for natural philosophy with his philanthropic goals. Although he sometimes exaggerated his poor health, Boyle also suffered from very real and serious ailments including malaria, edema, seizures, kidney stones, toothaches, and deteriorating eyesight. Boyle considered these ravings both a medical condition and a moral defect and spent years seeking a remedy. Since Boyle distrusted doctors and was an expert chemist, he often treated these illnesses with his own concoctions, sometimes making his condition worse.
In , Boyle suffered a severe stroke that left him partially paralyzed. He eventually recovered most of the mobility he had lost and continued working on his experiments. In , Evangelista Torricelli, a friend and advocate of Galileo, filled a glass tube with mercury, turned it upside down, and placed it in a basin of mercury. The level of mercury in the tube lowered, but some mercury remained in the tube, suspended by the weight of the air—the air pressure—pressing down on the surface of the mercury in the basin.
Since the tube was airtight, Torricelli reasoned that the area in the tube above the mercury must be a vacuum. Through Marin Mersenne and his vast correspondence network, news of the experiment quickly spread throughout Europe. Otto von Guericke heard of the Torricelli experiment and designed a pump capable of producing an evacuated receiver so strong, due to the outward air pressure, that sixteen horses could not pull the two hemispheres of the receiver apart.
Boyle designed an improved model which featured a chamber made of glass, allowing direct observation of the phenomena within the evacuated receiver. Boyle first approached the scientific instrument-maker Ralph Greatorex to build it, but when he failed Hooke took up the difficult challenge and succeeded. From the spring through the fall of , Boyle and Hooke performed dozens of experiments using the air pump and published the results in New Experiments Physico-Mechanical Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects In this book, Boyle provides extremely detailed presentations of 43 of the experiments, giving compelling evidence for such claims as that air is a distinct substance from space, that air is elastic and has a spring, and that air pressure is so powerful that a glass vial of water placed in the receiver explodes when the air is removed.
They demonstrated that air is required for phenomena such as combustion, respiration, and sound. They even placed a Torricellian barometer in the receiver, showing that the mercury does not remain suspended in the vacuum.
With its success, Boyle went from being an amateur gentleman interested in natural philosophy to being the leading scientist of the day. At many of the early meetings of the Royal Society, Boyle was asked to replicate some of the experiments. Unlike other natural philosophers, Boyle had the financial resources to conduct the experiments and to repair the temperamental air pump when it broke. He even had an additional air pump made at considerable expense, which he gave to the Royal Society on May 15, The book was also controversial, and it remains so to this day.
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer explore the social construction of science, using the controversy between Hobbes and Boyle over the air pump experiments as their focal point in their influential book Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life The Jesuit Priest Francis Linus tried to replicate some of the experiments and offered an alternative Aristotelian interpretation of the results, defending the view that nature abhorred a vacuum in Treatise on the Inseparable Nature of Bodies Christiaan Huygens also reported that he could not replicate some of the experiments.
Boyle praised Linus for his use of experiment, but pointed out the defects in his experimental practice in A Defense of the Doctrine Touching the Spring and Weight of the Air He added that further experiments with a J-shaped tube corroborated his claim that the reciprocal proportion between the pressure and volume of air was constant. This is controversial because Boyle appealed to experiments with the J tube actually performed by other natural philosophers like Henry Power and Richard Towneley Furthermore, it was Hooke, rather than Boyle, who worked to find the precise numerical relation between air volume and pressure, while Boyle was more interested in the philosophical significance of the proportion being reciprocal and constant.
Hobbes offered a contrary mechanical interpretation that was consistent with observation. Since it is possible to give an alternative mechanical explanation consistent with observation, Hobbes argued one cannot use experiments to decide between them.
Furthermore, since multiple mechanical interpretations are possible for any experimental observation, observations are never completely independent of theory. In An Examen of Mr. Notably, by the early 21 st century compelling evidence had emerged that an evacuated receiver contains billions of subatomic particles, such as neutrinos, far smaller than the pores of the glass. Boyle also was motivated by a desire to show a theistic alternative to the equally mechanical materialism of Hobbes, Gassendi, and the ancient atomists, which was then strongly associated with atheism.
Boyle had tried to show, since the early s, that a mechanical philosophy could be compatible with Christianity. Eventually, though, his attention shifted to medical chemistry. Boyle was well known for his views on the role of experimental evidence in natural philosophy.
In Novum Organum and New Atlantis , Bacon had challenged natural philosophers to employ an inductive scientific method based on the careful application of technology to make detailed empirical observations, instead of relying on the syllogistic approach favored in the Scholastic tradition, which made deductive inferences from universal principles.
Bacon argued that if the universal principles themselves turned out to be false, the conclusions deduced from them would be unjustified. Instead of trying to anticipate what nature should be like according to reason, natural philosophers instead should make detailed observations of what nature is actually like. They should then interpret these observations and form inductive generalizations about the natural world. This approach to science allows observational evidence to have epistemic priority over theory, so that theories can be modified in the face of new empirical evidence.
This approach is apparent in his work in pneumatics, his chemical research to create experimental histories of substances, and his projects on cold, air, light, color, minerals, and gems. Many of these projects never came to fruition, but on some he worked steadily for years. Boyle would often develop mechanical explanations of phenomena that served as hypotheses, for which he would then design experiments to test.
He thought that testability was important in hypothesis development as well as in determining what questions science should pursue. He had a genuine talent for creating experiments designed to test theories, and in many cases this provided new scientific information. Following Bacon, Boyle tried to resist non-empirical metaphysical speculation and modify theories in the light of new experimental evidence.
The results are mixed, but when he did engage in metaphysical speculation, such as in his treatment of the arguments for body-to-body occasionalism, he prefaced his remarks by noting that none of the theories he discussed could be empirically tested. Comparison with Descartes on the role of experiment in natural philosophy is insightful.
Experimental observation played a much different role for Boyle than it did for Descartes. Descartes is famous for conducting ingenious experiments, but rather than being used to test or falsify a hypothesis, they often played a part in the reduction of a complex scientific question into more basic ones. In the English scientist Robert Boyle raised an important objection to this model.
In his book, The Sceptical Chymist , Boyle noted that it was impossible to combine the four Greek elements to form any substance and it was equally impossible to extract these elements from a substance. He therefore proposed a new definition of an element that became the basis for the modern definition of this concept. Boyle's definition of an element was based on the observation that many substances can be decomposed into simpler substances.
Water, for example, decomposes into a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen when an electric current is passed through the liquid. Several battles in left both King and parliament somewhat in disarray.
Boyle had property in England, the manor of Stalbridge, left to him by his father but the situation in the country made things difficult. He wrote in a letter see for example [ 3 ] :- [ I ] got safe into England towards the middle of the year , where we found things in such a confusion, that although the manor of Stalbridge were by my father's decease descended unto me, yet it was near four months before I could get thither.
In fact although Boyle inspected his new home after four months, it was much longer before he was able to move in. This happened in March after he had spent more time with his sister and made a return trip to France to repay his debts to his tutor who continued to live there.
Although Boyle did not intend to spend long at Stalbridge, he remained there for around six years. He probably studied harder than he admits in a letter sent to his old tutor in France in October see for example [ 3 ] :- As for my studies, I have had the opportunity to prosecute them but by fits and snatches, as my leisure and my occasions would give me leave. Divers little essays, both in verse and prose, I have taken pains to scribble upon several subjects. The other humane studies I apply myself to, are natural philosophy, the mechanics and husbandry, according to the principles of our new philosophical college This "new philosophical college" is also called by Boyle the "Invisible College" later in the letter.
It is the society which would soon became the " Royal Society of London " and it provided Boyle's only contact with the world of science while he lived a somewhat lonely life at Stalbridge. He would look forward to his visits to London where members of the College [ 3 ] Boyle had from the time of his visit to Italy favoured the ideas of Copernicus and he now held these views deeply, together with a deep belief in the atomic theory of matter.
In the Invisible College these views were considered to be those of the new natural philosophy. This period was a difficult one for Boyle for he tried hard not to be forced to take sides in the civil war. His loyalties were somewhat divided, his father having been a staunch Royalist, his sister Katherine a staunch Parliamentarian.
Basically he had little sympathy with either side, but the final outcome of the civil war turned out to his advantage.
Charles I was defeated and executed but, in , Charles II landed in Scotland and tried to regain power. Cromwell, leading the parliamentary forces, defeated the Scots in , again in , and the Irish were also defeated by Cromwell in Boyle went to Ireland in to look after his estates there.
He ended up a very rich man when Cromwell apportioned Irish lands to the English colonists. From that time on he was able to devote himself entirely to science without the need to earn money. It should be noted, however, that Boyle was a very generous man with his money, and many around him benefited from this generosity. Boyle met John Wilkins , the leader of the Invisible College, in London when he visited there in At this time Wilkins had just been appointed as Warden of Wadham College in Oxford and he was planning to run the Invisible College from there.
He strongly encouraged Boyle to join them in Oxford and invited him to live in the College. Boyle decided to go to Oxford but preferred not to accept Wilkins ' offer of accommodation, choosing instead to arrange his own rooms where he could carry out his scientific experiments. From Boyle lived in Oxford, although he never held any university post. He made important contributions to physics and chemistry and is best known for Boyle's law sometimes called Mariotte's Law describing an ideal gas.
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