Robert Boyle – Biography and Facts

Robert Boyle was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor who lived from 25 January 1627 to 31 December 1691. Boyle is often considered the first modern chemist, making him one of the founding fathers of modern chemistry and a pioneer of contemporary experimental scientific techniques. 

Boyle’s law, which defines the inversely proportional connection between absolute pressure and volume of a gas in a closed system if the temperature is kept constant, is his most famous work. 

Robert Boyle Discoveries

Boyle spent much of 1652–54 in Ireland, where he was in charge of his inherited lands and performed anatomic dissections. In 1654, he was invited to Oxford, where he lived from  1656 to 1668. He became acquainted with a group of famous natural physicians and philosophers, including Christopher Wren, John Locke, and John Wilkins, in Oxford, where he was exposed to the newest advancements in natural philosophy. These people and a few others founded the “Experimental Philosophy Club,” which met at Boyle’s place on occasion. 

This was when most of Boyle’s best-known work was created. He and Robert Hook, a brilliant inventor who later became the Royal Society’s curator of experiments, finished the building of their famous air pump in the year 1659. Boyle’s first scientific paper, New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, sensing the Spring of Air and Its impacts, detailed their findings on air pressure and the vacuum (1660). 

Several physical features of air were identified by Boyle and Hooke, including its involvement in combustion, respiration, and sound transmission. One of their results became known as “Boyle’s law” after it was published in 1662. The volume occupied by a fixed volume of air compressed by various weights of mercury was used to discover this law, which expresses the inverse relationship between a gas’s pressure and volume.

Boyle’s scientific work is notable for its dependence on experiment and observation and his aversion to formulating generalised hypotheses. He promoted a “mechanical philosophy” in which the universe was viewed as a massive machine or clock, with all-natural occurrences owing solely to mechanical, clockwork action. His input to chemistry was founded on a robotic “corpuscularian hypothesis”. According to a sort of atomism, everything was made up of minute particles of a single universal matter that could only be separated by shape and motion. 

The Origin of Forms and Qualities (1666) used chemical phenomena to support the corpuscularian hypothesis and The Sceptical Chymist (1661). This was one of his most influential works, as it challenged current Aristotelian and especially Paracelsian notions about the composition of matter.

Robert Boyle’s Atomic Theory 

This was something that Boyle agreed with. According to Galileo and René Descartes, all substances are made up of atoms, but Descartes felt there could be no vacuum. On the other hand, Boyle had proven via his studies that a void — and emptiness – could exist. As a result, he agreed with Democritus completely.

Boyle felt that chemistry, or the behaviour of substances, could be explained by the motion of atoms, which mechanics or Galileo’s mathematics of motion could then be comprehended. Boyle was eventually proven true because we can now comprehend chemistry mathematically because of quantum physics.

Boyle remained an alchemist, thinking that one element might be transmuted into another, notwithstanding his condemnation of mysticism. He was correct in his assumption that this could be accomplished by rearranging the element’s basic particles. Ernest Rutherford was the first to achieve this in 1919 when he converted nitrogen to oxygen.

What is Boyle’s Law?

Boyle’s law says that the pressure utilised by a gas (of a given mass and temperature) is inversely proportional to its volume. In other words, the pressure and volume of a gas are inversely proportional to the temperature and amount of gas present. Robert Boyle, an Anglo-Irish scientist, proposed Boyle’s law in 1662.

The relationship between pressure and volume in a gas can be stated mathematically as follows:

P ∝ (1/V)

The pressure applied by the gas is P, while the volume occupied by it is V. After adding a constant, k, in this proportionality, an equation can be created.

P = k*(1/V) ⇒ PV = k

Derivation and Formula

According to Boyle’s law, any change in the volume occupied by a gas (at constant temperature and quantity) results in a difference in its pressure. To put it differently, the product of a gas’s initial pressure and initial volume equals the product of its final volume and absolute pressure (at the constant number of moles and temperature). \

The mathematically represented of this law can be as follows:

P1V1 = P2V2

Where,

P1 refers to the gas’s starting pressure.

V1 is the gas’s initial volume of occupancy.

P2 refers to the gas’s final pressure.

V2 represents the gas’s final volume.

Boyle’s law suggests a pressure-volume relationship, which can be used to get this phrase. PV = k for a certain amount of gas at a constant temperature. 

Therefore,

P1V1 = k (initial pressure * initial volume)

P2V2 = k (final pressure * final volume)

∴ P1V1 = P2V2

When the capacity of a gas’s container is reduced, this equation can be used to anticipate the rise in pressure exerted by the gas on its container’s walls (and its quantity and absolute temperature remain unchanged).

Conclusion 

Every general chemistry student knows Robert Boyle (1627–1691) as the man who established Boyle’s law, which states that the volume of gas reduces as pressure increases and vice versa. He was a strong supporter of the scientific method and was a renowned scientist and intellectual of his time.