Was Torricelli's work on vacuum misunderstood?
Some of my contemporaries struggled with the concept of a vacuum, particularly the idea of air having weight and pushing down. They were accustomed to thinking of the 'horror vacui' – nature's abhorrence of empty space. My experiments with the barometer showed that air pressure could support a column of mercury, implying that the space above the mercury was not filled with 'aether' or 'vapors' in the way they imagined, but rather an absence of significant substance due to the pressure balance.
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