Most Noted For:

• 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. Boyle's law appears in an appendix written in 1662 to his work New Experiments Physio-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects (1660).
• The 1660 text was the result of experimenting three years with an air pump. Hooke, his assistant, had designed the apparatus. By using it, Boyle had discovered a whole series of important facts. He had shown, among other things, that sound did not travel in a vacuum. He proved that flame required air as did life, and he investigated the elastic properties of air.
• The 1662 appendix did not only contain Boyle's law, which relates volume and pressure in a gas, but it also contained a defense of Boyle's work on the vacuum, which appeared in the main text.
• • Many scientists argued that a vacuum could not exist and claimed that Boyle's results obtained with the vacuum pump must be the result of some as yet “undiscovered force.”
• Another book by Boyle in 1666 was called Hydrostatic paradoxes. It is a penetrating critique of Pascal's work on hydrostatics, full of acute observations upon Pascal's experimental method, and a presentation of a series of important and ingenious experiments on fluid pressure.
• In The Sceptical Chemist (1661) Boyle argued against Aristotle's view of the four elements of earth, air, fire and water. He argued that matter was composed of corpuscles which themselves were differently built up of different configurations of primary particles. Boyle's ideas that the primary particles move freely in fluids, less freely in solids, followed Descartes. However, Descartes did not believe in a vacuum, rather he believed in an all pervading ether. Boyle rejected that idea as he had conducted many experiments which led him to believe in a vacuum however, found no experimental evidence of the ether. He did concur with Descartes in his overall belief that the world was basically a complex system, governed by a small number of simple mathematical laws.
• Boyle also studied optics. In particular color. However, he was not so successful. He published Experiments and considerations touching colors in 1664 but completely acknowledged that Newton's ideas, published in 1672, should replace his own.
• Boyle was a founding fellow of The Royal Society. He published his results on the physical properties of air through this Society.
• His work in chemistry was aimed at establishing it as a mathematical science based on a mechanistic theory of matter. While Boyle did not develop any mathematical ideas himself, he was one of the first to argue that all science should be developed as an application of mathematics.
• Although there were others who had applied mathematics to physics, Boyle was one of the first to extend the application of mathematics to chemistry. This he tried to develop as a science whose complex appearance was merely the result on simple mathematical laws applied to simple fundamental particles.

Notable Works Ascribed to Robert Boyle:

• 1660 - New Experiments Physico-Mechanical: Touching the Spring of the Air and their Effects 
• 1661 - The Sceptical Chemist 
• 1663 - Considerations touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy (followed by a second part in 1671) 
• 1663 - Experiments and Considerations upon Colors, with Observations on a Diamond that Shines in the Dark 
• 1665 - New Experiments and Observations upon Cold 
• 1666 - Hydrostatical Paradoxes 
• 1666 - Origin of Forms and Qualities according to the Corpuscular Philosophy 
• 1669 - a continuation of his work on the spring of air 
• 1670 - tracts about the Cosmical Qualities of Things, the Temperature of the Subterraneal and Submarine Regions, the Bottom of the Sea, &c. with an Introduction to the History of Particular Qualities 
• 1672 - Origin and Virtues of Gems 
• 1673 - Essays of the Strange Subtilty, Great Efficacy, Determinate Nature of Effluviums 
• 1674 - two volumes of tracts on the Saltiness of the Sea, the Hidden Qualities of the Air, Cold, Celestial Magnets, Animadversions on Hobbes's Problemata de Vacuo 
• 1676 - Experiments and Notes about the Mechanical Origin or Production of Particular Qualities, including some notes on electricity and magnetism 
• 1678 - Observations upon an artificial Substance that Shines without any Preceding Illustration 
• 1680 - the Aerial Noctiluca 
• 1682 - New Experiments and Observations upon the Icy Noctiluca 
• 1682 - a further continuation of his work on the air 
• 1684 - Memoirs for the Natural History of the Human Blood 
• 1685 - Short Memoirs for the Natural Experimental History of Mineral Waters 
• 1686 - A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature 
• 1690 - Medicina Hydrostatica 
• 1691 - Experimentae et Observationes Physicae 

Among his religious and philosophical writings were:

• 1648/1660 - Seraphic Love, written in 1648, but not published until 1660 
• 1663 - an Essay upon the Style of the Holy Scriptures 
• 1664 - Excellence of Theology compared with Natural Philosophy 
• 1665 - Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects, which was ridiculed by Swift in A Meditation Upon a Broom-Stick, and by Butler in An Occasional Reflection on Dr Charlton's Feeling a Dog's Pulse at Gresham College 
• 1675 - Some Considerations about the Reconcileableness of Reason and Religion, with a Discourse about the Possibility of the Resurrection 
• 1687 - The Martyrdom of Theodora And Didymus 
• 1690 - The Christian Virtuoso
  
  Biographical Composite adapted from articles by J.J. O'Connor, E.F. Robertson   

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