MOST IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES
Boyle-Mariotte law. History and essence of scientific discovery Directory / The most important scientific discoveries Research of the great English scientist Boyle laid the foundation for the birth of a new chemical science. He singled out chemistry as an independent science and showed that it has its own problems, its own tasks, which must be solved by its own methods, different from medicine. By systematizing numerous color reactions and precipitation reactions, Boyle laid the foundation for analytical chemistry. He also became the author of one of the first laws of the emerging physical and chemical science. Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was the thirteenth of fourteen children of Richard Boyle, the first Duke of Cork, a ferocious and successful money-gruiser who lived in the time of Queen Elizabeth and multiplied his lands by the seizure of foreign lands. He was born at Lismore Castle, one of his father's Irish estates. There Robert spent his childhood. He received an excellent home education and at the age of eight became a student at Eton University. There he studied for four years, after which he left for his father's new estate, Stolbridge. As was customary at the time, at the age of twelve, Robert and his brother were sent on a trip to Europe. He decided to continue his education in Switzerland and Italy and stayed there for six long years. Boyle returned to England only in 1644, after the death of his father, who left him a considerable fortune. In Stallbridge he set up a laboratory, where by the end of 1645 he began research in physics, chemistry and agricultural chemistry. Boyle liked to work on several issues simultaneously. He usually explained in detail to the assistants what they had to do for the day, and then retired to the office, where the secretary was waiting for him. There he dictated his philosophical treatises. An encyclopedic scientist, Boyle, dealing with the problems of biology, medicine, physics and chemistry, showed no less interest in philosophy, theology and linguistics. Boyle attached paramount importance to laboratory research. The most interesting and varied were his experiments in chemistry. He believed that chemistry, having spun off from alchemy and medicine, could well become an independent science. At first, Boyle was engaged in obtaining infusions from flowers, medicinal herbs, lichens, tree bark and plant roots. The most interesting was the purple infusion obtained from litmus lichen. Acids changed its color to red, and alkalis to blue. Boyle ordered paper to be soaked with this infusion and then dried. A piece of such paper, immersed in the test solution, changed its color and showed whether the solution was acidic or alkaline. It was one of the first substances that Boyle even then called indicators. An observant scientist could not pass by another property of solutions: when a little hydrochloric acid was added to a solution of silver in nitric acid, a white precipitate formed, which Boyle called "cornea moon" (silver chloride). If this precipitate was left in an open vessel, it turned black. It was an analytical reaction, reliably showing that the substance under study contains the "moon" (silver). The young scientist continued to doubt the universal analytical ability of fire and looked for other means of analysis. His many years of research showed that when substances are affected by certain reagents, they can decompose into simpler compounds. Using specific reactions, it was possible to determine these compounds. Some substances formed colored precipitates, others emitted a gas with a characteristic odor, others gave colored solutions, etc. Boyle called the processes of decomposition of substances and the identification of the resulting products using characteristic reactions analysis. It was a new way of working that gave impetus to the development of analytical chemistry. In 1654, the scientist moved to Oxford, where he continued his experiments with an assistant, Wilhelm Gomberg. Research was reduced to one goal: to systematize substances and divide them into groups according to their properties. After Gomberg, the young physicist Robert Hooke became his assistant. They devoted their research mainly to gases and the development of corpuscular theory. Having learned from scientific publications about the work of the German physicist Otto Guericke, Boyle decided to repeat his experiments and for this purpose invented the original design of an air pump. The first example of this machine was built with the help of Hooke. The researchers were able to almost completely remove the air with a pump. However, all attempts to prove the presence of ether in an empty vessel remained futile. “There is no ether,” Boyle concluded. He decided to call empty space vacuum, which means "empty" in Latin. In 1660, on his estate, Boyle completed his first major scientific work - "New Physico-Mechanical Experiments Concerning the Weight of Air and Its Manifestations". The next book was The Skeptic Chemist. In these books, Boyle left no stone unturned from Aristotle's doctrine of the four elements, which existed for almost two thousand years, Descartes' "ether" and the three alchemical principles. Naturally, this work provoked sharp attacks from the followers of Aristotle and the Carthusians. However, Boyle relied on experience in it, and therefore his evidence was undeniable. Most of the scientists - followers of the corpuscular theory - enthusiastically accepted Boyle's ideas. Many of his ideological opponents were also forced to recognize the discoveries of the scientist. The young physicist Richard Townley becomes his new assistant in the Oxford laboratory. Together with him, Boyle discovered one of the fundamental laws of physics, establishing that the change in the volume of a gas is inversely proportional to the change in pressure. This meant that, knowing the change in the volume of the vessel, it was possible to accurately calculate the change in gas pressure. This discovery was the greatest discovery of the 1662th century. Boyle first described it in XNUMX ("In Defense of the Doctrine of the Elasticity and Weight of Air") and modestly called it a hypothesis. The concept of air elasticity, which corresponds to the current concept of pressure, was decisive in the plans and in the implementation of Boyle's experiments. "Air elasticity," writes Gliozzi, "has been demonstrated Pascal in an experiment repeated by the Academy of Experiments and Guericke. An air bubble inflates when placed in a barometric chamber or in an evacuated tank. Guericke's experiment with two communicating vessels also testified to the elasticity of air. "We note by the way that the theory of elasticity was born from the described experiments with air. This term, introduced by Pekke in 1651, was widely used by Boyle, who also made the first studies of the elasticity of solids. Francesco Lino (1595-1675) took up arms against such an understanding, who essentially defended the ideas put forward by Fabry, as well as Mersenne, who tried to attribute the Torricelli effect and the suction of water by a pump to the adhesion of "hooked" particles of water and air colliding with each other. In his work "On an experiment with mercury in glass tubes ...", published in 1660, Lino notes that if you lower a tube open at both ends into mercury, and then cover the upper end with your finger and partially pull the tube out of mercury, then it is felt that the pad of the finger is drawn into the tube. This attraction, Lino argues further, testifies not to external atmospheric pressure, but to an internal force due to invisible threads ("funicles") of material substance, attached at one end to a finger, and at the other to a column of mercury. Now such ideas cause only a smile, but then they needed serious consideration, which Boyle did in his work "Defence against Lino", where he aims to prove that the elasticity of air is capable of more than simply holding the "Torricellian column". Boyle describes his research in great detail: “We took a long glass tube, which, with a skillful hand, with the help of a lamp, was bent in such a way that the part bent upwards was almost parallel to the rest. The hole in this shorter elbow ... was hermetically sealed. The short elbow divided along its entire length into inches (each of which is also divided into eight parts) by means of a strip of paper with divisions printed on it, which was carefully glued to the tube. The same strip of paper was glued to the long knee. Then "mercury was poured into the tube in such quantity that it filled the semicircular or curved part of the siphon" and stood at the same level in both knees. “When this was done, we began to add mercury to the long leg ... until the air in the short leg was reduced by compression so that it occupied only half of the original volume ... We kept our eyes on the longer leg of the pipe ... and we noticed that the mercury in this longer elbow was 29 inches higher than in the other." Summing up these experiments, Boyle noted: “When the air was compressed so much that it was condensed in a volume that was one quarter of the original, we tried how cold the air from the linen cloth moistened with water would thicken the air. And sometimes it seemed that the air was somewhat compressed but not so much that any conclusions could be drawn from it. Then we also tried whether the heat would... action than the previous cold." Interestingly, it was not Boyle who drew the conclusions from the studies, but Townley. Boyle points out that Richard Townley, reading the first edition of his work "New Physico-Mechanical Experiments Concerning the Elasticity of Air," hypothesized that "pressures and extensions are inversely proportional to each other." Ya.G. Dorfman writes: "Fifteen years after the publication of these studies by Boyle, i.e. in 1679, Abbot Edme Mariotte's "Speech on the Nature of Air" appeared in France, in which, along with other questions, experiments similar to Boyle's experiments on studying the relationship between pressure were described. of air and volume occupied. Mariotte does not mention his predecessor in a word, as if he was completely unaware of Boyle's work on pneumatics. Meanwhile, Boyle's works were widely known: they were published in Latin and English. However, Mariotte did not for the first time forget to mention his predecessor, because likewise in 1673, in a work on collisions, he did not say a word about the work Huygens, borrowing from the latter not only the methodology of the experiment, but also the foundations of the theory. Mariotte's work is significantly inferior to Boyle's in regards to the thoroughness of the experiment. Boyle, as we have seen, measures the heights of the mercury column to sixteenths of an inch, compares the actual observed values with calculations, and points out the inevitable error in the measurements. Mariotte measures the heights of the mercury column in whole inches and confines himself to reporting that the experimental data are in strict agreement with the calculated ones. Cautious and critical, Boyle calls the law he discovered only a "hypothesis" requiring experimental confirmation. Mariotte proclaims it a law or rule of nature. So in fairness, "Boyle-Mariotte's law" should be called "Boyle-Townley's law" or "Boyle-Townley-Hooke". Unfortunately, sometimes in physics courses it is erroneously stated that Mariotte "refined" Boyle's research, which is completely untrue. Nevertheless, it was Mariotte (1620–1684) who predicted the various applications of the law. Of these, the most important was the calculation of the height of a place from barometer data. The calculation, carried out by operating with infinitesimal quantities, led to failure due to the weak mathematical training of the scientist. Later, in 1686, the English astronomer Edmond Halley (1656–1742) turned to the problem of determining altitude from atmospheric pressure. He is known to most readers by the comet he discovered, which bears his name. So, Halley found a formula that is essentially correct, if you do not take into account changes in temperature. The essence of Halley's formula boiled down to the statement that as altitude increases in an arithmetic progression, atmospheric pressure decreases exponentially. Author: Samin D.K. We recommend interesting articles Section The most important scientific discoveries: ▪ Theory of evolution of the organic world See other articles Section The most important scientific discoveries. Read and write useful comments on this article. Latest news of science and technology, new electronics: Artificial leather for touch emulation
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