Boyle

Robert Boyle ranks with Newton and Einstein as one of the world's most important scientists. Aristocrat and natural philosopher, he was a remarkably wide-ranging and penetrating thinker - pioneering the modern experimental method, championing a novel mechanical view of nature, and reflecting deeply on philosophical and theological issues related to science. But, as Michael Hunter shows, Boyle was also a complex and contradictory personality, fascinated by alchemy and magic and privately plagued with doubts about faith and conscience, which troubled the rational vision he heralded. This…