Boyle’s law Atomic kinetic thermodynamics Ideal gases Commentary

Richard Towneley, Henry Power, Robert Boyle chemistry

Boyle’s law

• For a given mass of confined gas,
• if you keep its temperature the same,
• its pressure times its volume is constant.
• So had Richard Towneley and Henry Power asserted,
• and so, with the help of Robert Hooke,
• Robert Boyle established by experiment
• and published in 1662.

Atomic kinetic thermodynamics

• Towneley and Power used a barometer
• and made their observation of air
• at different altitudes up Pendle Hill.
• Hooke built an air pump for Boyle
• with which they experimented
• with different pressures and volumes.
• Isaac Newton showed mathematically,
• for an elastic fluid at rest,
• that density is proportional to pressure.
• Daniel Bernoulli derived Boyle’s law
• from Newton’s laws of motion
• applied to the movements of molecules.
• John James Waterston generalized the equation
• by showing that pressure times volume
• divided by temperature is constant.
• Boyle’s law was the first step
• in the kinetic theory of gases, but at the time
• they thought that air was one of the four elements.
• Much later, physicists still thought
• that the existence of atoms and molecules
• was hypothetical and controversial.

Ideal gases

• You can sometimes see a thing
• even though you don’t believe it,
• and, seeing it, understand its essence,
• not as it actually is, transparent and invisible,
• but like a glass clock, whose glass gears
• turn incrementally to count the seconds.
• However, such events are rare and magical.
• They can’t be counted on and won’t be believed.
• Only years later can we distinguish
• the genius from the madman.