Doubts and paradoxes
Robert Boyle's The sceptical chymist still holds lessons for the modern chemist - 350 years after its publication, as Mike Sutton discovers
In 1660, Robert Boyle would not have seemed the ideal candidate to launch a chemical revolution. He was a shy man with fragile health, poor eyesight and a stammer. Civil war and regime change had disrupted his formal education. And although he had wide-ranging scholarly interests, his early writings were mostly literary and theological. He only became interested in the sciences during his twenties, and the prospect of new medicines for his numerous ailments drew him especially to chemistry. Even so, his chemical expertise remained little known outside a small circle of friends.