In thermodynamics, Robert Hooke (1635-1703) (IQ=195|#22) (CR=100|#) was an English physicist, chemist, engineer, and natural philosopher noted for a number of achievements and inventions, firstly and foremost the construction of the gas law experimental device the "pneumatical engine", under commission of Robert Boyle (IQ=185), nature abhors a vacuum theorist, among numerous other theoretical insights, such as that heat is motion (volume expansion), evolution, cellular anatomy, discoverer of the inverse square law of gravity, light theory (wave theory of light), and others.

Shoulders of giants
English chemist Isaac Newton famously remarked in a letter to his rival Robert Hooke dated February 5, 1676 that: [21]

"What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking ye colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants [sic]."

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Education
Little, supposedly, is known about Hooke's early years. From about the time Hooke was ten, however, his father became ill and this contributed to Hooke being left to educate himself in the highly practical way that interested him. At age 13, Hooke was orphaned, following his father's suicide, and was left £40 inheritance by his father, together with all his father's books, after which his family sent him to London to become an apprentice to the Peter Lely, a portrait painter. [18] Hooke soon decided, however, that it would waste his money studying under Lely, and he made the decision that what he really needed was a school education.

Hooke thereafter shortly, circa 1650, age 15, enrolled in Westminster School, boarding in the house of the headmaster Richard Busby. Busby is said to have realized he had a quite remarkable pupil, noting, e.g., that Hooke had mastered the first six books of Euclid's Elements by the end of his first week at school and so encouraged Hooke to study by himself in his library. [16