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==History==
[[File:Boyle air pump.jpg|thumb|right|Boyle's air pump was, in terms of the 17th century, a complicated and expensive scientific apparatus, making reproducibility of results difficult.]]
The first to stress the importance of reproducibility in science was the Anglo-Irish chemist [[Robert Boyle]], in [[England]] in the 17th century. Boyle's [[air pump]] was designed to generate and study [[vacuum]], which at the time was a very controversial concept. Indeed, distinguished philosophers such as [[René Descartes]] and [[Thomas Hobbes]] denied the very possibility of vacuum existence. [[History of science|Historians of science]] [[Steven Shapin]] and [[Simon Schaffer]], in their 1985 book ''[[Leviathan and the Air-Pump]]'', describe the debate between Boyle and Hobbes, ostensibly over the nature of vacuum, as fundamentally an argument about how useful knowledge should be gained. Boyle, a pioneer of the [[experimental method]], maintained that the foundations of knowledge should be constituted by experimentally produced facts, which can be made believable to a scientific community by their reproducibility. By repeating the same experiment over and over again, Boyle argued, the certainty of fact will emerge.
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