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Boyle's Law states that at a fixed temperature and within a closed system, the volume of a fixed quantity of a gas is inversely proportional to the pressure it exerts: PV = k, where k is a constant. For example, the volume of air in a balloon exerts enough pressure to stretch the rubber but break that rubber, and suddenly the the artificially high pressure of the balloon is completely gone because the air it had contained under pressure has rushed out and filled the greater volume of the surrounding space. For another example, in pressing down a tightly-sealed plunger, the pressure (difficulty) increases as the volume of the air under the plunger decreases. Release the plunger, and it will rise (increasing the volume of the air within its enclosed space) to a point where the pressure of the sealed volume matches the air pressure outside.

The British chemist Robert Boyle understood this outcome to be a function of gas as a collection of 'corpuscles', or tiny particles. The corpuscular theory of matter, better known as atomism, actually goes back in Western thought as far as the late 5th century BCE, when Leucippus and his student Democritus first introduced the philosophical idea that all physical objects consist of different arrangements of indivisible particles and void, and that temperature exists only as an organism's sensation based on the manner of arrangement and scattering of these atoms. In fact, this is the source of the word atom, from the Greek "a-tomos", or not cuttable. In many ways this concept is not so very different from the modern molecular understanding of the nature of matter. However, both Plato and Aristotle objected to the cold randomness of the atomist concept. Plato felt that all matter was the reflection of perfect forms, which would logically exist of perfect geometry. Aristotle, in contrast, thought that all matter was composed of the four continuous elements of earth, air, fire, and water. This latter view took hold of the public consciousness, and was never entirely relinquished until the dawn of the scientific method during the Renaissance.

In 1612, following the 'scientific method' advocated by Francis Bacon whereby the natural philosopher should replace deductive syllogism (using reason to extrapolate from existing statements) with inductive reasoning (using observed fact to deduce axiom and then law), Gallileo Galilei theorised that all phenomena except sound resulted from "matter in motion". This is the basis of the corpuscular

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