'Edme Mariotte' (c.
1620 -
May 12,
1684) was a
French physicist and priest.
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 [1].
Mariotte spent most of his life at
Dijon, where he was prior of St Martin sous Beaune. He was one of the first members of the
French Academy of Sciences founded at
Paris in
1666. The first volume of the ''Histoire et memoires de l'Academie'' (
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 of
guns, the freezing of
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 ''Traite de la percussion des corps'', the first volume of the ''Oeuvres 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 varies inversely as the pressure, which, though very generally called by the name of Mariotte, had been discovered in
1660 by
Robert Boyle. The fourth essay is a systematic treatment of the nature of colour, with a description of many curious experiments and a discussion of the
rainbow, halos, parhelia, diffraction, and the more purely physiological phenomena of colour. The discovery of the blind spot is noted in a short paper in the second volume of his collected works.
See also
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Mariotte's bottle
References
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