This chapter delves a little more deeply into a particular experimental investigation from the seventeenth century. Robert Boyle’s air-pump allowed him to evacuate (nearly) all of the air from an enclosed chamber. He sought to investigate various phenomena, including the recent discovery that, in a tube filled with mercury and open at one end and then inverted into an open dish filled with mercury, an apparently empty space will appear at the top (closed) end of the tube. Boyle’s experiments are credited with having led to the modern conception of air pressure, but his conclusions were met with controversy.
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