It is a subtle point: vacuums don’t suck; the atmosphere pushes. But Pascal’s simple experiment demolished Aristotle’s assertion that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascal wrote, “But until now one could find no one who took this . . . view, that nature has no repugnance for the vacuum, that it makes no effort to avoid it, and that it admits vacuum without difficulty and without resistance.” Aristotle was defeated, and scientists stopped fearing the void and began to study it.
