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What was Aristotle's idea of a vacuum when he said that nature abhors one? How would any ancient have experienced/observed or created a vacuum beside, I guess, when one breathes or perhaps when water flows into an "empty" vessel.
I do not believe until the middles ages or later was anything like a vacuum pump created.
The main point is exactly that the ancient scientists could not create vacuum. So they believed that it does not exist. Probably Aristotle himself never really tried, but later ancients invented water pump, whose action they could explain only by assuming that vacuum cannot exist. Vacuum appears in a water pump only when the cylinder is more than 10 m high, and they did no build such large pumps.
