*FANFARE* It hath returned. Like that smell you can’t seem to shift from your shoes. Yes, YOUR shoes, you dirty person. I mean just look at you. Bathe every once in a while, for the love of god! And with that…

Well, wow. As his name suggests, he’s clearly excited. But, frankly this is so ridiculous that it tells its own story, so instead he’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia for chemist, physicist and philosopher Robert Boyle (not art director Robert F. Boyle, like what you was thinking). We may as well learn something from this shit.

Robert Boyle (25 January 1627 – 31 December 1691) was an Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor, also noted for his writings in theology. He is best known for Boyle’s law.[1] Although his research and personal philosophy clearly has its roots in the alchemical tradition, he is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of modern chemistry. Among his works, The Sceptical Chymist is seen as a cornerstone book in the field of chemistry.

Boyle was born in Lismore Castle, in County Waterford, Ireland, the seventh son and fourteenth child of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork. Richard Boyle had arrived in Ireland in 1588 as an entrepreneur, and had amassed enormous landholdings by the time Robert was born. While still a child, Robert learned to speak Latin, Greek and French. He was not yet eight years old when, following the death of his mother, he was sent to Eton College in England, at which his father’s friend, Sir Henry Wotton, was then the provost. After spending over three years at Eton, Robert traveled abroad with a French tutor. They visited Italy in 1641, and remained in Florence during the winter of that year, studying the “paradoxes of the great star-gazer” Galileo Galilei — Galileo was elderly, but still alive in Florence in 1641.

Boyle was an alchemist; and believing the transmutation of metals to be a possibility, he carried out experiments in the hope of effecting it; and he was instrumental in obtaining the repeal, in 1689, of the statute of Henry IV against multiplying gold and silver. With all the important work he accomplished in physics – the enunciation of Boyle’s law, the discovery of the part taken by air in the propagation of sound, and investigations on the expansive force of freezing water, on specific gravities and refractive powers, on crystals, on electricity, on colour, on hydrostatics, etc. – chemistry was his peculiar and favourite study. His first book on the subject was The Sceptical Chymist, published in 1661, in which he criticized the “experiments whereby vulgar Spagyrists are wont to endeavour to evince their Salt, Sulphur and Mercury to be the true Principles of Things.”. For him chemistry was the science of the composition of substances, not merely an adjunct to the arts of the alchemist or the physician. He endorsed the view of elements as the undecomposable constituents of material bodies; and made the distinction between mixtures and compounds. He made considerable progress in the technique of detecting their ingredients, a process which he designated by the term “analysis”. He further supposed that the elements were ultimately composed of particles of various sorts and sizes, into which, however, they were not to be resolved in any known way. He studied the chemistry of combustion and of respiration, and conducted experiments in physiology, where, however, he was hampered by the “tenderness of his nature” which kept him from anatomical dissections, especially of living animals, though he knew them to be “most instructing”.

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Crap Name of the Week! In this fascinating and indeed important series, we will be ridiculing characters with terrible, terrible names and, more importantly, the player-idiots who created them. We begin with…

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