Robert Boyle (1627–1691) (1 Across) was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist and inventor. He is considered to be one of the first modern chemists and a pioneer of the scientific method. His influential book The Sceptical Chymist is seen as a founding text in chemistry, and he also made important contributions to theology.
Boyle was born to a wealthy family in Ireland. As a child he was educated at Eton College in England and later travelled around Europe, studying under Galileo Galilei in Florence. In the 1650s Boyle experimented with, and improved, the air pump in order to study the properties of air. In A-level physics he is best known for Boyle’s law, which describes the relationship between the pressure and volume of a gas. This law states that, for a fixed mass of ideal gas at constant temperature, the pressure is inversely proportional to the volume of that gas. You may remember the equation:
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