Dr Anna-Marie Roos: On the Boyle: Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and early modern English science
An exploration of how Boyle's ideas before the Royal Society and the work that established him influenced his contemporaries.
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Dr Anna-Marie Roos, University of Lincoln |
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| Robert Boyle was the dominant figure in late seventeenth-century English science, his reputation only later overshadowed by Newton in the early 1700s. His discovery of his law that demonstrated the inverse relationship between the pressure applied to a gas and its volume, his work on acids and alkalis, his theories of corpuscularianism (a form of early atomism), and his dedication to experiment made him an iconic figure in the early Royal Society, the first government-supported scientific society in the world. An illustration of his air pump that refuted Aristotle's premise that nature abhorred a vacuum adorned the frontispiece of Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667). This is the Boyle familiar to most of us. But go beyond the air pump and pV =K, and we find that he was part of the scene of seventeenth-century science long before the Royal Society was founded in November 1660. This talk is going to analyse the scientific scene of that time and Boyle's role in it. |
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About the Speaker
Anna Marie is a historian of early modern England (the era spanning Boyle’s life) and is particularly interested in the history of science. She has also published on the history of magic and astrological medicine and the history of the Royal Society. Until her recent move to Lincoln, she was Lister Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Anna Marie has researched Boyle and many of his contemporaries and is ideally suited to talk about Boyle, his life and times with reference to his contemporaries and the state of science, and to consider Boyle’s place in history. website |
