Boyle's Law

This relationship between pressure and volume was first noted by two amateur scientists, Richard Towneley and Henry Power. Boyle confirmed their discovery through experiments and published the results. According to Robert Gunther and other authorities, it was Boyle's assistant Robert Hooke, who built the experimental apparatus. Boyle's law is based on experiments with air, which he considered to be a fluid of particles at rest, with in between small invisible springs. At that time air was still seen as one of the four elements, but Boyle didn't agree. Probably Boyle's interest was to understand air as an essential element of life [4]; he published e.g. the growth of plants without air [5]. The French physicist Edme Mariotte (1620-1684) discovered the same law independently of Boyle in 1676, but Boyle had already published it in 1662, so this law may, improperly, be referred to as Mariotte's or the Boyle-Mariotte law. Later (1687) in the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica Newton showed mathematically that if an elastic fluid consisting of particles at rest, between which are repulsive forces inversely proportional to their distance , the density would be proportional to the pressure [6], but this mathematical treatise is not the physical explanation for the observed relationship. Instead of a static theory a kinetic theory is needed, which was provided two centuries later by Maxwell and Boltzmann.