In Our Time - Robert Boyle

Episode Date: June 12, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Robert Boyle, a pioneering scientist and a founder member of the Royal Society. Born in Ireland in 1627, Boyle was one of the first natural philosophers to conduct rigorous experiments, laid the foundations of modern chemistry and derived Boyle's Law, describing the physical properties of gases. In addition to his experimental work he left a substantial body of writings about philosophy and religion; his piety was one of the most important factors in his intellectual activities, prompting a celebrated dispute with his contemporary Thomas Hobbes.With:Simon Schaffer Professor of the History of Science at the University of CambridgeMichael Hunter Emeritus Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of LondonAnna Marie Roos Senior Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine at the University of LincolnProducer: Thomas Morris.

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Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. U.K. slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, on the 7th of January, 1692, a vast congregation filled the Church of St. Martin in the field for the funeral of one of the country's most celebrated thinkers. The Bishop of Sarsbury, Gilbert Burnett, preached to sermon in which he praised the deceased for his constant looking into nature and yet more constant study of religion and a directing and improving of the one by the other. The dead man was Robert Boyle, a founding member of the Royal Society in 1660, and a major force in 17th century natural philosophy.

His work covered many fields from theology to medicine and oceanography, but is best known for his original work on the nature of gases and his pioneering chemical experiments, which have led some to regard him as the first modern scientists. We need to discuss the life and work of Robert Boyle are, Simon Schaffer, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Cambridge, Michael Hunter, Emeritus Professor of History at Birkbeck College University of London, and Anna Marie Roos, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Lincoln.

Simon Schaepper, Robert Bow was born in 1627 in Ireland, the youngest son of 14 children. Would you say a bit more about his? childhood. He was the seventh son of one of the most powerful men in Ireland, Richard Boyle Earl of Court, the great Earl, who for a long time in Boyle's life represented a very major influence. Richard Boyle was a leader of the settler community in Ireland,

an enemy of some English. attempts to reign in their power, the purchaser of Walter Rale's estates, fabulously wealthy and landed. And it's clear that he played a major moral and exemplary influence in Robert Boyle's life. Not only that, but the direction that was given to the young Boyle's education comes from his father. Boyle's mother died when Boyle was but three, and Boyle was. sent at the age of eight to Eaton, where he would have studied the conventional curriculum. There are some, I think, very revealing stories

about his brief time at Eton, notably that he suffered from melancholy, he was offered romances to read, but they made him rave rather than cure him. And at the age of eight, again, very much under his father's influence, was sent overseas on the grand tour to be tutored. What did it happen on this overseas tour? Because he was put in the hands of tutors and taken abroad for quite a while. Yes, he was there for several years right up until 1644,

right up until he was 17. Much of that time he was in Geneva, the great fortress and headquarters of continental Calvinist Protestantism. His tutor was French Huguenot, Isaac Markhams, who clearly had an influence, probably a major one, on Boyle's practical orientation to religion. And together with his brother, Boyle was, while in Geneva then taken over the Alps to Italy, we know this, we know some of these details because of Boyle's autobiographical writings, which are fascinating. He visited Florence where he debated the Hebrew scriptures with the local Jewish community. He was allegedly propositioned by two monks. He visited Rome where he maintained or allegedly maintained a fairly hostile relationship to the Catholic establishment.

But it was that training in Orthodox religion and in the rudiments of traditional scholastic philosophy that I think lay the groundwork for what Boyle will then become. Michael Hunter, so we're not talking about a boy or a young man who became immediately interested in science, but he was immediately interested, it seems, or early interested in religion. Can you tell us of the significance of that at the time for him and in his later work.

One of the episodes that's reported in the autobiography that Boyle wrote that Simon has referred to was a conversion experience when, during a thunderstorm, he worried about his preparedness for the final judgment and made a commitment to serve God for the rest of his life. This was accompanied by the experience of religious doubt, and again, this had a... get an influence on the rest of his life because he felt it important

that he should understand and be a sort of powerful champion for Christian doctrine to those who doubted it or attacked it. So it does seem as if that was a formative moment in his life and that it was during those continental travels that he started to develop that commitment. When he got back to England in 1644,

after his travels, he put that into practice by writing effectively religious and moral treatises, trying to encourage his peers to pursue piety and morality. I mean, many of these writings survive, and I have to say they're quite hard to read. If that is all Boyle had ever written, he wouldn't be around this table. discussing him today. But nevertheless, you know, he thought that this was an important mission. At that point, he also developed an interest. Well, in fact, the interest that he developed in response to his raving in romances.

Speaking of what Simon said about the raving, I didn't question him about the raving, because I wouldn't question Simon about the raving. But what does he mean by the raving? Remember you can discuss it between your efforts. Yes, raving, it seems to be a kind of, inability to concentrate on what he ought to have been concentrating on. He calls it raving. And I think that summarise that gives quite a good sense of it.

Sorry, I'm not quite clear, my fault. I'm being silly. He's reading these romances and he can't concentrate on them. He can't concentrate on the more serious things that he's supposed to be concentrating on. And his sort of imagination goes rampant. And that seems to be the problem, that he feels that what is important is to be able to control your thoughts. thoughts and to be able to put them to good use, whereas

the essence of this raving is the extent to which your thoughts are out of control. And so part of, I think part of writing these moral treatises is to enforce that control. We know that he, or we know from the him of his own writings that he had a religious experience, a great thunderstorm, it's supposed to have triggered his religiosity,

a religious conviction. And then he almost as suddenly swung to science in the 1640s, this man of a general European education, Simon said in Florence talking to Hebrews, scholars and so on. Did anything of a similar, dramatic nature caused that? Well, it's very interesting. You can pinpoint the time when he became seriously interested in science quite precisely. I mean, he had had a kind of general smattering of science as part of his education under Isaac Markhams. And in fact, he happened to be in, if he had a kind of general smattering of science, at the time when Galileo died,

and he mentions this in his autobiography, and commentators have sometimes attached great significance to that. But it really, that is really fairly, a fairly minor interest at that point. And so it is throughout the 1640s when he is writing these heavy treatises about how to pursue proper morality. But then suddenly, in the summer of 1649,

he discovers science in a really big way, and he writes ecstatically about it to his, sister, Lady Ranelor, who we may talk about more, and begins to write a new kind of book which is about books about the significance of understanding the natural world as an act of piety. Just for an act of sort of rather common curiosity, was there a thing?

You say he suddenly used, I think you used that word. Did he read something? Did he meet somebody? It's frustrating. It would be nice to be able to say there was one clear reason. It is, isn't it? And, I mean, this was the year, you know, could it have been due to external circumstances? This was just after the English Civil War.

It was the year that the king was executed. But I think that Boyle was never very concerned with political developments like that. And it seems to be a much more intellectual concern about a threat to religion that he thought came from intellectual activity, which he associated with traditional systems of natural philosophy. particularly that of Aristotle. And he becomes excited by the extent to which a new form of understanding the natural world, particularly associated with experiment and with chemistry, offers a better route to understanding God than what prevailed hitherto.

Anna Marie Russey, he wasn't a man to do things by half. Simon said at the very beginning, Simon Schaff, about the wealth of his father. The wealth of his father was he meant he gave this 14th child a huge, estate in Dorset, so he never had to work or in which he built himself a laboratory. But following up what you said, having got the science, he went to what was a melting part of modern science, he went to Oxford

in the 1650s. 1656 to 1668, he lived in Oxford. He lived on the high street in Deep Hall with a hotelier by the name of John Cross, also apothecary, because he had access to a chemical laboratory. And his older sister

Lady Ranada actually had. helped him secure those lodging. She watched out quite a lot for him. He was part of a experimental club that was at Wadham College, presided over by the warden of Wadham, John Wilkins. John Wilkins is a very interesting figure. Although he was married to a relative of Oliver Cromwell and obviously had parliamentarian ties, he also was friends with high Anglicans and royalists. So he sort of was a diplomat, is it between the two factions. And he formed this experimental club to, explore the new natural philosophy outside of political and religious concerns. Boyle was exposed to the thinking of Thomas Willis, who was a member, who was a physician discovering the

circle of Willis and fermentation, wrote some works on fevers, which are very interesting. He was other members for Christopher Wren, and more importantly for Boyle, Robert Hook, who was a servitor at Christchurch, but also actually ended up lodging with Boyle and helping him develop his new experimental science. This is where the work on the air pump and the barometer really get going as part of this experimental club. And I think Boyle experienced a tremendous amount of intellectual stimulation.

I mean, Wilkins himself was building flying machines in the courtyard of Walton College and wrote this wonderful book called Discovery of the World and the Moon or he was trying to, working with Hicks to develop machines that had springs and were sort of buoying you off the magnetic pull of the earth and launch you off to the moon and then pull you in by the magnetic atmosphere they thought was surrounding the moon. And Wilkins said, of course there's another world in the moon.

I mean, why would God have provided us with a planet in such a convenient habitation if we weren't to explore it? So these are the types of things that Boyle was being exposed to when he was in Oxford. It couldn't have been more intense and more felicitous for him, could it really? Because there you are, like almost all of them, nobody is richer as aristocratic as he was, but gentlemen who had time and leisure and, waywardly as it seemed at the time followed rather what seemed like the idiotic pursuits in Wadham College Gardens and so on.

And it was just made for him because he came in from a different angle. He wasn't a university man. He worked it out for himself, but he fitted in very closely. In fact, centrally, he was a founding member of the Royal Society, what became out of that garden of the Royal Society? Yes. Well, we're having a little celebration at Wadham in September about Wilkins, and we're exploring issues like that to what extent were the men there leaning to the Royal Society.

society people like Christopher Wren. I think what was interesting, it gave Boyle the ability to be part of the university, while also being outside of the university. It gave him the intellectual freedom. He didn't have to be steeped in the Aristotelian classics and follow a prescribed course of action. Boyle also had the imagination to see the ability of somebody like Robert Hook and take advantage. Well, mutual advantageous relationship of Hook's mechanical genius. This is something Boyle talks about a lot in his development of experimental philosophy, how important it is to cultivate the talents of

what he called tradesmen. But what I think he's really saying is engineers. He started learning the importance of constructing really good experimental apparatus. Can we concentrate for a moment or two on hook, Simon Schaffer, the most extraordinary man?

And Boyle worked closely with them and it's doubtful that Boyle could have done as much as he did without hook. So I think that's right. isn't it? Anna Marie's mentioned it. Can you just take on the Hook Boyle connection a little further, please? At the time, so from the later 1650s onwards, their relationship is absolutely fundamental to a very large range of Boyle's projects, and also one shouldn't forget to Hook's projects, as Anna Maria has said, there is an enormous amount of mutual benefit to a relationship between a, let's not understate it, fabulously wealthy, young, Anglo-Irish aristocrat of great piety and great moral and civil status,

and perhaps a slightly more prickly, certainly more self-assertive figure of the most extraordinary mechanical ingenuity to use the language of the time. And there's a range of... There's a range of experimental projects which involve really very very very... very sophisticated and very complex setups, often using glass and mechanical gearing, to achieve artificial ends. And the relationship between the two has often been subject to controversy afterwards because historians and scientists tend to get really very hung up on questions of priority. And an intimate dynamic and quotidian relationship like that will generate priority problems.

what seems to me to be striking in retrospect is that with one or two very notable exceptions, one doesn't see those kinds of issues as ferocious or salient at the time. Can I get to the air pump? Why was it significant to work on the air pump and how did they crack it? The air mattered in Oxford for that group

for several reasons, climatology, human nature, life and so on. Perhaps above all, William Harvey, who had been the late King's physician and a huge influence, both at the time and posthumously, on the group in Oxford, had shown that the blood circulates around the human body. And the reason for that is so that something that enters the blood from the air in the lungs can be carried round the body. which suggests the question, what is it in the air that enters the lungs and thus the blood that makes us and all animals live? And part of Boyle's genius was to see that if you were worrying about what there is in the air that's special, a really good idea would be to get rid of the air and see what happens. And that, in a way, is the essence of an experimental approach.

If you're really worried about the difference something makes, get rid of it and see what happens. In 1657 and 8, Boyle heard from Germany of the existence of a machine which could apparently remove the air from a closed space. And with hook indispensable for this and an instrument maker called Ralph Greatwrex, they design and build through 59 an air pump, which not only gets rid of the air from a space, but, and this is crucial, makes a space without air, but in which you can act.

You can do experiments in a space from which the air is removed. And that was Hook's design, Great Rex's ingenuity, and Boyle's Vision coming together in 1659 to make this extraordinary machine. Michael Hunter, how important is that? Well, it was important in all sorts of ways. I mean, for one thing, it provided experimental evidence concerning the characteristics of the air, Simon. said so that it turned out that, you know, that sound could fail to be transmitted if you

created a vacuum or animals died if the air was taken out and they were inside the receiver or a candle went out, etc. And so, you know, for the first time there was sort of tangible evidence about the actual effects. Did this lead to Boyle's law? Well, Boyle's log came as a slightly secondary development because it isn't actually based on the air pump but on the J-tube, which is another piece of apparatus which was developed and which Boyle you saw the potential of relating to the vacuum

in which the relationship between the pressure and volume of air turned out to be a constant. But what I was actually just going to say about the book, new experiments, that I mean it was in a sense a new kind of book. It was published in 1660, new experiments concerning the spring of the air and its effects, and it set out a

series of experiments. And I don't think there had ever really been a book quite like it before. It created a kind of model of a scientific book, which I think was absolutely fundamental to the progress of science in England at that time. With Boy, we're going to have to keep a balance between

his intense interest with who are in a particular and in experimentation and his great, great success there. And his view of, he says, we might call it just for the sake of a word, a larger view of life, religious and idea of the universe. So how did he think, what was his views on how the universe worked, given that he was doing this particular experimentation? The, in a sense by moving forward to the experiments with the air pump in 1658 and 1659, we've slightly fast forwarded from the development.

that had been going on during the time when Boyle went to Oxford. He went to Oxford to be part of this very rich, intellectually rich group that Anne-Marie's has described. And I think that encouraged him to read widely in the findings of science as they existed at that time. And I think he became fascinated by the idea that the world was a machine, that the universe operated through matter in motion, was an idea that was being put forward, particularly by French natural philosophers in this period, particularly Pierre Garandi and René Descartes. And their views on the nature of the mechanical universe differs slightly,

but the fundamental idea that the universe was a machine was what appealed to boil. And in fact, he tried to capitalize on that at the expense of disagreements between those who took a mechanistic view of how the world operated. Anna Mirrors, how did his approach to experimentation? How was that influenced by his philosophy? This is very interesting. Michael's mentioned the idea of the machine, and one thing that Boyle said is that you can look at a clock mechanism,

but unless you open up the clock, you really can't just know what's happening, unless you really look underneath. And he has a passionate commitment to experimentation. His book on the Spring of the Air was a very, new treatise. The spring of the air. Yes, an atmospheric pressure. When you pushed it in it would spring back.

It spring back because that's the interrelationship between pressure and volume. Yes. And that book, when you read that book and you read these account of the experiments, you can actually recreate them. It was a form of I think Simon has mentioned some virtual

witnessing where you can actually read through those things and recreate that experiment if you were doing it in another laboratory. And that's very new. This is what modern scientific papers are based upon. That's what materials and method sections are. We took this much of the super

Nathan, we ran it through the centrifuge, we did this, it's all described in passive voice because we're trying to show you what we have done so you can recreate it and test it yourself. And so Boyle used that prolix writing style that he had in his moralistic treatises and he applied it to experiment. And

in that sense he was creating a majority. Because he had a three stages in an experiment, Eddie, who was quite firm about it. The, when you tell Well, he thought that there had to be a blend between reason and between experiment. And the first thing that one had to do is not be full. You know, he said, you can never have preconceived ideas about what you're going to find. You have to do your experiment. You have to test for one variable.

This is when he did his air pump experiments. When he did the Torocellian, recreated the Torocellian barometers, he made sure that he had a constant temperature. gas rather than so he could test the inverse relationship between pressure and volume. So you have to eliminate variables. Then you make your conclusions from your experiments. You repeat your experiments and then you go forward from there. But he did the second thing was he did this experiment in front of witnesses so as they could see it was being done.

That's right. And I presumably that it would be done fairly. There was no cheating. But it wasn't magic. There it was. And then he wrote it up very carefully saying this is what happened. That's right. So that other people could do it.

That's exactly right. So very much three stages. I presume that's what you were referring to earlier when you were saying something new. Yes. And I think he's also very painstaking in his exposition of the experimental method. That's right. One of his most important books is called Certain Physiological Essays.

And this has essays on how experiments should be done on the problems that can arise with experiments on the need to record even experiments that failed, etc. And I think that sort of systematic and painstaking quality of his work is one of his crucial contributions. Briefly, I know. Yes, I mean, he also takes us from, of course, the Baconian idols, doesn't he? They were all influenced by Francis Bacon. And Bacon wrote very clearly about how nature can trick you.

She could make an absolute fool out of you if you're not very careful how you do your experiments and eliminate your variables. And the Boconian program was all about what the Royal Society was. You know, find it out for yourself. Now, something turns up here in the notes that I made. And it's very, I think it's fascinating, and you're the man to take it on. He had a major disagreement with Hobbes, Hobbes' materialism, thinking it would lead to anti-religion and so on. Is it possible to find a connection between the way in which Boyle thought about his religion

and the way Boyle thought about his science? Can I just say one more sentence without becoming completely boring? Because the idea was that along comes science, religion is redundant, and science goes on. Now that does not seem to have happened in terms of people's beliefs. But was there an intellectual connection? I think there was a fundamental connection in Boyle's projects between the project of piety,

not simply investigating nature because it is made and organized and run by God, though he certainly believes that, but also perhaps even more importantly, and hence his great disagreement with Thomas Hobbes, that to show people the way in which nature is organized and runs is to show them God's activity in the world. In other words, nature is a way in which God preaches to us. So any account of nature which doesn't show what is divine,

what is created, what is powerful, is therefore dangerous. But is the way that he believes in religion, which is a belief system, and the way that he takes to science, which is a different system, what connection do you find between them? I'll come to you in a moment. I'm just pounding away. Is there a connection? Does you say, the religious way I think makes me think scientifically in that way,

is there a seamless? I don't think it's seamless, but I think it's anachronistic, perhaps, for us now to imagine that there are two worlds, that of religion, that of science, which are by that very fact separated in the 17th century, it's almost the opposite. Natural philosophy must at this period, or so it seems to me, define itself in terms of piety, devotion and the doctrine of the deity. And vice versa. Major theologians must, in a very important way, give an account of what is the relation between the deity and his creation. So one sees, and Boyle is the superb example of this. He's the author of a book called The Christian Virtuoso. One sees a public image being constructed,

not uncontroversially for these experimenters and natural philosophers, which makes them seem, and many of them are, pious, virtuous Christian believers. Can I tell you, Michael, Michael, can you take up the row with Hobbes, which is very bitter and quite extended? Can you give us a synopsis of what was a time? the core of it. Thomas Hobbes, great British philosopher, Leviathan, so on, materialist, where we go. Yes. Can I just, could I just make a, just, just go back slightly to what time

I'm saying. I mean, I just want to offer a slightly different relationship between Boyle's religion and his science, namely that Boyle is interested in a form of religiosity, which we've now almost completely forgotten, called casuistry, the examination of cases of conscience, whereby you meticulously examined the rationale of the actions that you took or decisions that you made and to be sure that you had taken the

step that would please God most. And he spends hours and hours examining his conscience in that way and being advised on it, in fact, by churchmen who helped him on this. What is interesting is that he transfers that terminology to the

laboratory. He says to Bishop Burnett that he made conscience of great exactness in experiments. And he uses the terminology of casuistry when describing his experiments. He explains how he had to satisfy his scruples about some phenomenon that he observed, etc. And so I think there is a very close link between his sort of practical religious life and his practical scientific life in that sense, which it's perhaps, you know, it may seem almost a small thing, but in fact, I think it is very important in understanding the relationship between the two. But shall I now return to the Hobbs question? Yes, I've got a bit, if you could briskly, that would be great. I mean, I think that he thought it very important to refute Hobbs because of Hobbs's

reputation as causing a religion. And in fact, he is very explicit in saying that in the preface to his attack on Hobbs. He specifically says this could do good in religious affairs because there are many people who don't really understand these technical scientific disputes and if I could show that my reasoning is better than Hobbs in science, it may discourage people from following Hobbs in religion. Anna Marie, what were his most important contributions in chemistry, do you think? Well, I mean, obviously, we discussed it, the Boyle's law.

He also was what was known as a corpuscularian, a corpuscularian. And there was a revival, even in the 16th centuries of ancient Greek atomism, that posited that you had small bits of matter that moved around in a vacuum, and those things would combine, some people said randomly, to make up everything around us. Now, Boyle didn't follow ancient Greek atomism, and mainly because of things they're combining randomly, you have no place for the deity, do you?

So what he does say, though, is he calls them minima natura. There are bits of matter. He wouldn't exactly say specifically how they interacted. He says, I can't see it with my own eyes, but I think that they do. I think there are certain particles in the air that have a spring that cause atmospheric pressure. I think they combine in different ways.

and you could have strong acids and bases, for instance, corpuscles that could interact with other corpuscles and cause chemical change. And that's another type of research program that he did. He formed, he did one of the first, what we would anachronistically call a pH indicator, usurp of violets, to delineate the difference between acids and alkalis, which was a powerful experimental tool. It was a new experimental tool in the chemical laboratory. Most people have done a lot of distillation. They did distillation apparatus. The litmus test? Yes, that's right.

That's all it was. It's a litmus test. But when you can use acids and bases to make reactions, that's very interesting. He actually did the protochemistry for the phosphorus match, although he didn't invent the match. And he worked with another one of these tradesmen who actually, tradesmen who went on to commercially manufacture phosphorus, which is of great interest to the virtuosity at the time.

So, Simon, Shav, we talk about this stage when the Sixers, he's incredibly prolific. He's everywhere. I mean, we're talking about a bit of science, but he's writing paper after paper after paper. Medicine, just one area, and so on. There's a book called The Skeptical Chemist. Is that very significant in his work?

Does he, do people around him feel something massive is happening in the intellectual world here? There are earthquakes every 10 minutes coming from the Mal, which he, Palma, where he lives now with his sister and from Dorset. Is that? I think that's right. I'm not sure the word earthquake is quite the restoration word here. Too easy to reach for.

But, yes, I mean, Boyle is the towering figure in the experimental philosophical community in London in the 1660s, or so it seems to me. And his reputation is absolutely extraordinary. The diarist John Evelyn, this is one of, I think, the most graphic evocations of Boyle's character, compares Boyle with a Venetian glass. which seems transparent and seems fragile, but is in fact robust and strong, and resists what might seem to be attack or pressure. The sceptical chemist that you've mentioned is, in my view, a fascinating work, because after Boyle's death, it became one of the most widely cited and perhaps slightly less widely read of his works.

It's fantastically difficult to read, I think, but it's set up part of Boyle's repute. It's a dialogue with five voices in which the questions of chemistry and alchemy of the elements that make up chemical materials are all discussed. And above all, I think, what sceptical chemist does is to argue,

on the one hand, for the nobility of chemistry, that it should not simply be the work of artisans and tradesmen, but that it can aspire and should and must aspire to the status of a certain kind of philosophy. And at the same time, certainly in the second edition of Skeptical Chemist, Boyle teases apart, fascinatingly for us, a kind of vulgar chemistry, which is merely interested, as it might be,

in transmutation and profit, and a nobler form of chemistry, which is clearly alchemical, from which Boyle hopes the greatest things in philosophical enlightenment. So as a programme and a vision of what experimental projects might achieve in the chemical word, it's a really remarkable text. To stick to this for a moment, with you, Michael Hunter, the idea we've put the Royal Society now. We've got Olenberg publishing the transaction,

which was remarkable. Very soon they're being published and people in Europe are taking up these transactions and it is the oldest philosophical transactions in the world and very, very influential all over the place. What is his involvement in the society? Are they still grouped together as they were in High Street, Oxford or are they split into their different places?

Do they still feel as if they're group working forward? Well, I think the core members of the Royal Society did. The issue is the extent to which Boyle, Form, of that core group. He undoubtedly is seen as the exemplar of the Royal Society. Oldenberg, both through the philosophical transactions and also through his assiduous correspondence, is constantly promoting Boyle as the model of how science should be done, right through until Oldenberg's death in 1677. But Boyle himself was always a bit sort of semi-detached from the Royal Society, partly because in the 1660s he remained quite peripatetic. He didn't move to London.

at the restoration, but only towards the end of the decade. And during that decade, he's constantly going backwards and forwards between Oxford and London. So there are long periods when he fails to go to meetings. And he becomes enthusiastic about some of the society's projects, but less concerned about others. He is, I think, influenced by the society himself, ironically. Although he had always been a Baconian,

I think he became a more precisely Baconian in his method, under the influence of the Royal Society, particularly through structured data collecting, which the society very much made a virtue of in its earliest years. Boyle had been a bit sort of random in his data collection in the Oxford period, but he becomes much more precise in the way he organises his work under the influence, I think, of Bacon via the Royal Society. So it's a very fruitful relationship in that way, although perhaps not quite what you might have expected.

Anna Marius, we've got science, well, not called science, a natural philosophy, we have religion, but we also have alchemy, in which he's intensely interested in right thought about, as does his great admirer in Newton, and it's around. So can you, what attracted him to alchemy? There were a few things that attracted him to alchemy. One thing is the potential of alchemy to make panaceas or medicines. Boyle was not only of a generous heart, he also was what we would call a valetudinarian, he was ill a lot, and, And he was always experimenting with medicines, particularly with his sister, Lady Rala. And so he thought that perhaps if we could invent something like the alchahest, we could break matter into its smallest component parts, and we could then recreate that matter how we wanted to make medicines that could cure us. And that was important to him. The second thing I think he thought was important is that he saw the potential for alchemical transmutation to relieve or to restore man to their prelapsarian state in the Garden of Eden.

I mean, if you can use science to give us all the benefits of technological improvement, that's a wonderful thing. But there's a tension in Boyle's works. And I think in most of the chemists we call them, we call it C-H-Y-M-I-S-T instead of alchemists versus chemistry, because this period is quite unique. We've got components of both. We've got ideas of transmutation and turning base metals,

into gold, but we also have the beginnings of what I would even call chemical stoichiometry. What you put in in the reactants must come out in the products. One of Boyle's colleagues, George Starkey, has this very explicitly. He realizes that you have to have some conservation of matter. So we're sort of in a transitional period here. Boyle, on the

one hand, sees the potential for alchemy, but he worries, as did Newton. If, for instance, the secret and Boyle thought he saw the transmutation of metals actually take place with Gilbert Burnett, they actually witnessed that they that they saw it in a journal book in the Royal Society. If that secret gets out, what's it going to do to the money supply?

How is it going to turn society upside down? And so he, for a while, there's always this back and forth in this work. You know, you can think that if he's writing other scientific books or he's incredibly explicit about what he's doing experimentally, then why not do that for alchemy, but yet there's a danger there as well. It does wonderful to spend the next hour on alchemy, religion, and national philosophy, but to stick to boil, can we talk about one more thing, the prism and colours?

Yes, so... Because Newton was very influenced by that, and of course, again, it's one of the many amazing things that this man did in his private laboratory with his ill health living with a sister. Along with the avalanche earthquake of books that he produced in the 1660s, one of the most fascinating, I think,

is this experimental history of colours, which is an extraordinarily rich survey of the phenomena and reports then known about light and colour. As Michael said, Boyle began to organise extraordinary data banks of information and stories, and his work on colour is no exception. He collected stories about a blind Dutch organist who could allegedly feel colours with his fingers and was sent a ribbon from Holland, which this Dutchman had used. He tells of his sister seeing coloured visions when she was ill. And above all, he uses the glass prism to make artificial colours,

which he calls irises. Both Samuel Pepys and Isaac Newton read this book very closely with very different effects. Sam Peep's read it on a boat trip every year. Sunday afternoon up the Thames and Newton read it in his study in Cambridge with revolutionary effect. Finally Michael Huntick

what would you say was his legacy now? I think well the emphasis on controlled and properly recorded experiment is the most crucial thing

I think Boyle really did make that normal in science in a way that hadn't been the case before. And in that sense, I suppose he invented the experimental method that modern science has used ever since. I think if I were asked, I would say that was the most crucial thing. I could say more, but maybe. I think that he is a model to modern science

also in his sort of open-mindedness about explanation. He thinks it very important to establish factual data through experiment, et cetera, but is much more diffident about, how it's explained. Thank you very much. Thank you, Michael Hunter, Simon Schaffer, and Anna Marie Ruse. Next week we'll be talking about the philosophy of solitude. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

Well, we leave it to the people who listen to it to take it on, don't we? Exactly. They'll have to rush to the website or to your books or his books. I hope so. Although I don't know if they're reading Boyle in the flesh, they might go, whoa. What Peeps said about the book and colours? I couldn't, basically, I didn't understand much of it or any of it, but I know he's a brilliant man. Yes, that is.

He laughs, says Peep's, in one diary entry. And I always think, why? What's that about? As Michael said, Peep's is a major collector of Boyle. The Peep's Library in Mordland is a very good collection. I think that Boyle was Peep's is. I model scientists.

I think that that was... Boyle science was what Peep's thought was real science. I think ironically, Peep's gave the imprimatur to Principia, but I think that he was much more at home with Boyle Science. And I think he could understand. I think the diary is a bit misleading. He sort of slightly puts up its hands in a long when he comes across a difficult book.

But if he works at it, when Pete works at a book, he can get inside it. You know, I think he tends to be a bit patronised in retrospect. It is a bit self-deprecating. I mean, he is, after all, many Sundays on his boat trip from home up to Barn Elms. He spends the afternoon reading this book and that's serious. I mean, he just, peeps just had the intellectual imagination. I mean, he did everything from collect boil to sponsoring a big book on fish, you know,

and subsidized both of the plates. for it, you know. And so he has, he has that, but that's part of virtuosity, wasn't it? It was part of that interdisciplinary thinking. That's right. I mean, one of the things we didn't have time to get onto, which Michael's written about very well, is Boyle is

also an enormously important patron. I mean, he sponsors Boyle lectures. Extraordinarily important publishing ventures, lectures in the will, equipment. Yeah, I was just, I'm just,

amazed to discover recently that he paid for hooks 60-foot telescope. You know, it was so expensive that it looked as if no one in the UK was going to be able to afford it. This London instrument maker made this lens. But, you know, it was so, it was such a complex piece of work that it was so expensive that it looked as if it was not going to be available to the Royal Society at all. And Boyle just sort of stepped in and signed a check. And he was capable of doing that because he was essentially a millionaire, you know, the income that he got. It's not just lands in Dorset, but in.

It's the Irish rents mostly. I keep thinking about that income. What is it? It's about 3,000. 3,000 year, which is like being in an air. Unimaginable. 14 children. Did he settle them all as

as ample as he settled? He's actually the sons. I mean, obviously the daughters he didn't need to because they met, he married them well. In fact, but the sons, you know, the seven sons. Well, no, they didn't all survive, you see. One was going to settle war.

He married them all economically. There were four sons. And yes. they were all as well or better. I mean, the Earl of Burlington, the first son, was even better off than born. He marries them all economically, though. I think Lady Ronald got a bit of a raw deal with Arthur Jones.

She got the prickly end of the pineapple, that seems to me. That was a horrible marriage. She separated from him and went to live in London. So this wonderful father just took his daughters and said, you will marry this chap? Well, I mean, the point is he was a great, you know, had great ambition for the dynasty. And so he wanted to marry them well.

That didn't always mean happily. No, I mean, I think the most revealing thing is a lady Rinala writing and saying finding her husband was guilty of play. And I think somebody else wrote about him, the best thing that could be said about him, he's a churl who often goes to bed drunk. And so, I mean, but when she goes to London, you know, and it sets up an independent life for herself, of course.

And, you know, then she can get involved in things she's interested in. It's a lot of nash. It's a shame you didn't get to talk about her more. No, we should have a programme about her and the other sisters, like Anne and Mary are both extremely interesting figures. Tom Morris arriving on cue with Office of Tea. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.ukuk slash Radio 4.