By Lida Prypchan
Robert Boyle, the precursor of modern chemistry, was a child prodigy who at age eight spoke three languages: English, which was his mother tongue, Latin and French.
He was the fourteenth son of the Count of Cork, born in Lismore Castle, Ireland, on January 25, 1627 and died in London on December 30, 1691. Boyle is one of a set of key figures in the history of the sciences, who include Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, Gassendi and Descartes. In 1681 he published his book “The Skeptical Chemist”. That day Boyle ignored the almost sacred authority of Aristotle, amended his writings regarding the basic elements of matter, signed the death certificate of alchemy, and certified the birth of chemistry and separated it from medicine.
Nobody disputes the amazing genius of Aristotle, whose powerful intuition, along with his capacity for organization and work, allowed him to cover all the fields of knowledge.
The vast majority of his concepts maintain some validity in biology, logic, physics, politics, literature and ethics. But there was a historic instant, during the Middle Ages, in which that giant of thinking slowed the advance of the sciences.
His conceptual errors were considered as immutable truths and whosoever disputed the classical master committed the sin of audacity. In this manner, the Aristotelian shadow, with the weight of his enduring conceptions and his manifest errors, darkened and overwhelmed efforts in favor of the development of knowledge.
Aristotelian Chemistry:
To measure the scope of Boyle’s revolutionary declarations, it is necessary to try to synthesize Aristotelian thinking regarding chemistry.
This line of thought believed that the universe was composed of four basic elements: water, earth, air and fire. It followed in this way the lines of Thales of Miletus, Anaximander and Heraclitus, ordered by Empedocles. All things were made of different compositions of those four elements, to which Aristotle added a fifth element, ether. Aristotelian ether was part of the composition of the universe, whose laws and nature were different to those of our planet.
Forces similar to human love and hatred acted on the basic elements, determining their combinations.
This notion, enshrined by Aristotle, remained as a basis of chemical theory for over two thousand years.
Authority to not be disputed:
The works of Aristotle were collected and published many years after his death. Following the fall of Rome, those works were lost, with the exception of “Organon”, which includes his works on logic, basic for mathematics.
However, the Arabs took care to preserve that inheritance, and they returned it to Christian Europe. In the 12th century, Aristotle had replaced Plato, and his ideas, sifted by Christian thought, were considered almost divine. If Aristotle said that something was so, that something was so, with no possible discussion. Because of a strange fatality, of all his conceptions, the most accepted were the most erroneous.
In this climate, it fell to a group of notable figures of thinking to attempt the necessary corrections. Among them was Boyle.
The Works of Boyle:
In 1657 Boyle built, with the help of Robert Hooke, a vacuum pump. For a while, that vacuum was called “Boyle’s vacuum.” Aristotle’s statement that “nature abhors a vacuum” was shaking. With that pump and a sufficiently large cylinder, Boyle demonstrated that “in the vacuum, two bodies, whatever their nature, fall with the same speed.” This statement had already been made by Galileo, and also contradicted Aristotelian belief.
Later he did more experiments related to air, discovering that it could be compressed. He used a curved tube that was closed at one end, into which he put mercury. The mercury compressed the air. He put more mercury in and the air lost more volume. Thus he discovered the law of gases which states that, with temperature constant, the product of volume V times the pressure of a perfect gas is a constant (pV-constant). This is known as the Boyle-Mariotte law given that the latter, a French physicist, made the same discovery independently, although several years later.
The Doctrine of Democritus
Aristotle was the most powerful enemy of the old doctrine of Democritus, which preached the existence of atoms as ultimate and indivisible components of matter.
Boyle, upon considering the results of his experiments on the compressibility of air, signaled that gas must be composed of particles immersed in the vacuum and that the pressure was joining those particles together more, reducing their volume in the recipient. Boyle had read Pierre Gassendi, a French thinker who was a contemporary of Galileo, who advocated scientific experimentation, and was furthermore a convinced atomist.
In his book “The Skeptic Chemist”, Boyle gathered all the information derived from his experiences, and recommended the immediate abandonment of the Greek theory which considered elements as mystical substances. He stated that an element was a material substance that could be identified by means of analytical methods. An element, he added, is any substance that cannot be broken down into two other simpler ones.
In 1680 Boyle isolated phosphorus from the basis of urine, without knowing that the German H. Brand had gotten ahead of him. The controversy sparked by the discovery of phosphorus allowed Boyle to attack scientific work. He held, very firmly, the idea that all experimental work should be published clearly and quickly so that others could repeat it and confirm it. This thinking of Boyle’s was the source of a scientific rule, which is still in force, despite the so-called military and industrial secrets.
The Religious Sense
Considered as one of the scientists who managed to scatter a wave of fresh air in an atmosphere filled and overwhelmed by the shadow of Aristotle, Boyle was, in his private life, a quiet man, sober, hardworking and held profound religious beliefs.
His biographers recount that his father, to reward his dedication to study, sent him to travel across Europe at 12 years of age accompanied by a tutor. At 14, he read Galileo’s books, who had recently died. During his visit to Genoa, Boyle had the opportunity to witness a terrible electrical storm. The impression that that phenomenon produced in him was such that his attitude changed definitively, and he became an almost mystical youth. His religiousness accompanied him throughout his life and, in his will, he left a considerable part of his estate in order that the “Boyle Conferences” be established, which would have the purpose of promoting Christianity and demolishing the arguments of non-believers.
Influenced by Francis Bacon, who preached the experimental method, Boyle formed along with other scientists the “Invisible School,” an association of erudite that later became the Royal Society, following recognition given it by King Charles II.
Summary of His Work
Boyle discovered (Boyle-Mariotte Law) that the volume of a gas varies inversely with pressure. He indicated that it is air that propagates sound. He spoke of the expansive strength of ice and did experiments on refraction, crystals, electricity, colors, hydrostatics and specific gravity. His most important contribution is related to chemistry and the development of the atomic theory. He developed the technique to separate the elements of a given substance, naming it chemical analysis. He demolished the old Aristotelian theory of basic elements, air, water, earth and fire, and the notion that all matter was composed of salt, sulfur and mercury.
Boyle has been named the father of chemistry. The title that really should be given him is that of precursor of modern chemistry and atomic theory. The honorable fatherhood of that discipline belongs without a doubt to Antoine Lavoisier, the extraordinary French chemist, who did not hesitate to recognize that one of his teachers had been the Englishman Boyle.
Boyle was president of the Royal Society and resigned because he did not agree with the oath that was used. He financed the travel of Christian missionaries to the Orient and wrote essays on the Christian faith. He never married and he dedicated his entire existence to science and religion.
