Edme Mariotte

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Edme Mariotte
Edme Mariotte (1620 - Dijon (Francia); 12 de mayo de 1684- (París)), abad y físico francés.
-Estudió la compresión de los gases y llegó a descubrir la ley hoy conocida como ley de Boyle - Mariotte: A temperatura constante, el volumen de un gas es proporcional al inverso de la presión. Dicho de otro modo, el producto de la presiónpor el volumen es constante cuando la temperatura no varía. Hoy se sabe que este producto es además proporcional a la temperatura absoluta, expresada en kelvin.
Ambos científicos Boyle y Mariotte, de forma independiente llegaron a la misma ley. Como curiosidad, Boyle en sus escritos no especificó que la temperatura debía ser constante para que la ley fuese válida, seguramente realizó susexperimentos y así lo daría por hecho. Mariotte si especificó esta constante. (Breve Historia de la Química, Isaac Asimov)
Edme Mariotte fue un pionero de la física experimental y profesor de física en 1654-1658, y uno de los fundadores de este dominio en Francia. Estudió también la óptica, las deformaciones elásticas de los sólidos y la hidrodinámica.
Edme Mariotte was the youngest son of SimonMariotte, administrator at the district Til-Châtel (†16 Augustus 1652), and Catherine Denisot (†26 September 1636 due to plague). His parents lived in Til-Châtel and had 4 other children: Jean, Denise, Claude, and Catharine. Jean was administrator in the Parlement of Paris from 1630 till his death in 1682. Denise and Claude, both married, stayed in the Dijon region, where as Catharine married Blaise deBeaubrieul, advisor of king Louis de XIV. Catherine and Blaise lived in the same street, perhaps on the same address, where Jean lived.[2] The early life of Edme Mariotte is unknown. His title "Sieur de Chazeuil" was probably inherited from his brother Jean in 1682. It refers to the estate of his father, which was first given to Jean. This estate was in the region Chazeuil.[3][4] It is not clearwhether Mariotte spent most of his early life at Dijon, and whether he was prior of St Martin sous Beaune. There are no references to confirm this. In 1668 Colbert invited Mariotte to participate in the "l'Académie des Sciences", the French equivalence of the Royal Society. From that time on he published several articles.
In 1670 Mariotte moved to Paris. The address on a letter found in the Leibnizarchive shows that Edme lived in the rue de Bertin-Poirree, near the chapel of the guild of the goldsmiths in the rue des Orfevres in 1677. Perhaps he lived together with Jean and the couple Catherine and Blaise de Beaubreuil. Leibniz wrote that Edme stayed at Mr. Beaubrun's address, but probably he meant Beaubreuil, which sounds quite similar. Edme quitted the Academy in 1681 and died on the12th of May 1684.
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[edit]Work
Mariotte is best known for his recognition in 1676 of Boyle's Law about the inverse relationship of volume and pressures in gases. In 1660 he had discovered the eye's blind spot.[6] A small coin placed in the blind spot disappears from vision, a seemingly magical event that amazed the French royal court when firstpresented by Mariotte. He was one of the first members of the French Academy of Sciences founded atParis in 1666. The first volume of the Histoire et mémoires de l'Académie (1733) contains many original papers by him upon a great variety of physical subjects, such as the motion of fluids, the nature of colour, the notes of the trumpet, the barometer, the fall of bodies, the recoil ofguns, the freezingof water etc. His Essais de physique, four in number, of which the first three were published at Paris between 1676 and 1679, are his most important works, and form, together with a Traité de la percussion des corps, the first volume of the Œuvres de Mariotte (2 vols., Leiden, 1717). The second of these essays (De la nature de l'air) contains the statement of the law that the volume of a gas...