Robert Boyle: Beyond the Gas Law
The scientist, Robert Boyle, is famous for the gas law named after him. But he contributed to far more things in science, writes Paul Strathern in his wonderful history of chemistry, Mendeleyev’s Dream . For starters, he revived the atomic theory. Almost everyone agreed that that since gases could be compressed (without any increase in their weight), it implied that “gases consisted of particles separated by a void”. Boyle extended the reasoning as follows: the “particles separated by a void” principle should apply to water vapour, a gas. Therefore, shouldn’t the same principle apply to water in liquid and solid states as well? And if it applied to water in all states, shouldn’t it apply to all substances? And thus was revived the atomic theory. Boyle also defined what an element is: anything that could not be broken down into a simpler substance. But this definition had a problem: “When a substance was found to be an element, this could only be a provisional state of affa...