robert boyle created a law describing how the pressure and volume of a gas are related.
robert boyle created a law describing how the pressure and volume of a gas are related.
who created a law describing how the pressure and volume of a gas are related?
robert boyle
macroscopically, the gas characteristics measured are either in terms of the gas particles themselves (velocity, pressure, or temperature) or their surroundings (volume). for example, robert boyle studied pneumatic chemistry for a small portion of his career. one of his experiments related the macroscopic properties of pressure and volume of a gas. his experiment used a j-tube manometer which looks like a test tube in the shape of the letter j. boyle trapped an inert gas in the closed end of the test tube with a column of mercury, thereby making the number of particles and the temperature constant. he observed that when the pressure was increased in the gas, by adding more mercury to the column, the trapped gas' volume decreased (this is known as an inverse relationship). furthermore, when boyle multiplied the pressure and volume of each observation, the product was constant. this relationship held for every gas that boyle observed leading to the law, (pv=k), named to honor his work in this field.
gas
alongside these largely lab-based approaches, many other investigations have centered around large-scale natural or social systems that are known (or suspected) to display scale-invariant behavior. although these approaches were not always welcomed (at least initially) by specialists in the subjects examined, soc has nevertheless become established as a strong candidate for explaining a number of natural phenomena, including: earthquakes (which, long before soc was discovered, were known as a source of scale-invariant behavior such as the gutenberg–richter law describing the statistical distribution of earthquake size, and the omori law describing the frequency of aftershocks); solar flares; fluctuations in economic systems such as financial markets (references to soc are common in econophysics); landscape formation; forest fires; landslides; epidemics; neuronal avalanches in the cortex; 1/f noise in the amplitude of electrophysiological signals; and biological evolution (where soc has been invoked, for example, as the dynamical mechanism behind the theory of "punctuated equilibria" put forward by niles eldredge and stephen jay gould). these "applied" investigations of soc have included both modelling (either developing new models or adapting existing ones to the specifics of a given natural system) and extensive data analysis to determine the existence and/or characteristics of natural scaling laws.
self-organized criticality