Robert Boyle

Robert Boyle was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher whose experimental work made him one of the central figures of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution. Robert Boyle is generally dated to 1627–1691.

A founding member of the Royal Society, he investigated air pressure, combustion, chemistry and vacuum phenomena and argued for an experimental, corpuscular approach to natural philosophy while remaining deeply committed to Christian theology. Boyle’s Oxford work on air, respiration and experimental method made him central to the community that became the Royal Society.

In Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost, Pears places the murder mystery among real Restoration scholars and scientists, including John Locke, Robert Boyle and Richard Lower, while showing how experimental knowledge, political surveillance and religious belief could all be used to establish authority.