About the time of the Pascals’ conversion, a friend of Étienne’s—a military engineer—came to visit and repeated Torricelli’s experiment for the Pascals. Blaise Pascal was enthralled, and started performing experiments of his own, using water, wine, and other fluids. The result was New experiments concerning the vacuum, published in 1647. This work left the main question unanswered: why would mercury rise only 30 inches and water only 33 feet? The theories of the time tried to save a fragment of Aristotle’s philosophy by declaring that nature’s horror of the vacuum was “limited”; it could only
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