Things That Don’t Exist but We Still Name: A Vacuum

 

The vacuum. It’s that little area of nothing once we pump out all the air. We can measure it as a drop in air pressure, but like the other things we have visited, it’s a name for something that is essentially, nothing. The idea of a vacuum has been controversial since Aristotle’s days. To be clear, I mean the actual “lack of matter” vacuum. (This is not to to be confused with the commonly used short name of the vacuum cleaner, a vacuum.) Oxford defines a vacuum as a space entirely devoid of matter. Aristotle was quoted as saying “Nature abhors a vacuum”. This thinking was agreeable to the religious leaders because they said, Since God is everywhere, it made sense. Torricelli was proposing that a vacuum was devoid of matter. This idea did bothered most the church leaders at the time, but Torricelli did his best to walk carefully around them instead of challenging them, unlike his mentor Galileo. Galileo had just dropped the bomb of “the Earth was not the center of the universe because it orbits the Sun and used it to challenge the Church’s authority. Torricelli did end up in hot water at times, but it usually wasn’t about his science.

Torricelli’s experiment used a glass tube filled with mercury inverted in another pool of mercury. When inverted, the weight of the mercury was pulled down by gravity and created an empty space at the top. It was the first attempt at showing air pressure or the “principle of the barometer” . He didn’t really do much else with it, although he did make some important advancements in calculus. Later, Blaise Pascal would do more experiments at different levels, ocean, mountains, and in between, to help advance the use of the barometer.

Yet another piece of nothingness that impacts our lives on a daily basis, even though it doesn’t exit. You don’t even have to understand it, just let it do its work.

Here is a short video to help explain the science.