Abstract
Aristotle’s idea of a heavenly element (quinta essentia) and his arguments against a void were generally accepted in the ancient world and through the middle ages. However, other ideas circulated as well, such as the active pneuma postulated by Stoic philosophers. Following experiments with barometers and air-pumps in the seventeenth century, the hypothesis of a natural horror vacui lost credibility. Empty space had been discovered in the laboratory—but was the space without air found by Robert Boyle and others really empty?
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Of particular interest is the Stoic contrast between the outward-directed tension associated with pneuma and the innate tendency of the cosmos to move “toward its own center” (Sambursky 1959), which anticipate in a metaphorical way the contrasting dynamical effects of dark energy and gravitating matter on large scales in modern cosmology.
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Kragh, H.S., Overduin, J.M. (2014). Early Ideas of Space and Vacuum. In: The Weight of the Vacuum. SpringerBriefs in Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55090-4_1
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