Robert Boyle Robert Boyle. The following are some of the more important of his works: Among his religious and philosophical writings were: Robert Boyle Robert Boyle (; 25 January 1627 – 31 December 1691) was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor. Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of modern chemistry, and one of the pioneers of modern experimental scientific method. He is best known for Boyle's law, which describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, if the temperature is kept constant within a
Gas thermometer system. k is not a fixed constant across all systems and therefore needs to be found experimentally for a given system through testing with known temperature values. The constant volume gas thermometer plays a crucial role in understanding how absolute zero could be discovered long before the advent of cryogenics. Consider a graph of pressure versus temperature made not far from standard conditions (well above absolute zero) for three different samples of any ideal gas "(a, b, c)". To the extent that the gas is ideal, the pressure depends linearly on temperature, and the extrapolation to zero pressure occurs at