An Ocean of Air Read Online Free

a vacuum was also declared heretical. According to the religious authorities, God had decreed that a vacuum would be so unnatural that air would always rush in immediately to prevent one from being formed. To say otherwise was to risk the wrath of the Inquisition.
    Having seen the effects of Galileo's mild outspokenness, Torricelli opted for discretion. He never published his results, except in one famous letter that he wrote on June 11, 1644, to his close friend Michelangelo Ricci. Though Ricci was a Jesuit, he was also a firm advocate of Torricelli's work, and Torricelli described his experiments in careful detail, with sketches of the apparatus. Mostly, he remained matter of fact, but once in a while he let his delight in his findings shine through. "What a marvel it is!" he wrote when he contemplated the invisible air pressing his mercury up into the tube. He spoke with awe of how our blanket of air, perhaps fifty miles high, constantly presses down on the planet beneath. And he encapsulated it all in this one glorious image. "
Noi viviamo sommersi nel fondo d'un pelago d'aria,
" he said. "We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air."
    ***
    With his experiments in quicksilver, Torricelli had proved the pressing power of air to his own satisfaction, but his secrecy about the results and the prevailing stubborn resistance to this extraordinary new notion meant that, for the moment at least, the old ideas continued to rule.
    Fortunately there remained the other person who had arrived in Florence just before Galileo's death and who, like Torricelli, was destined to pick up his mantle. His name was Robert Boyle, and when he reached Florence in October 1641, he was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy who had as yet no particular yen for science.
    Boyle was the son of one of Ireland's richest noblemen. He had ridden from Geneva to Florence that summer with his brother and tutor on a leg of their Grand Tour of Europe. But unlike the other privileged young gentlemen risking pox, plague, and bandits in the interest of gaining Continental polish, Boyle truly wanted to learn. He carried books everywhere; he read them walking along roads and stumbling down hillsides. He disputed philosophy and religion with fellow guests at the lodging houses and tried to make the deepest possible sense of everything he saw and heard.
    Soon after Boyle arrived in Florence, he came across a copy of Galileo's final book and was deeply struck. He was also struck with indignation by the fate of the man now dying in his villa just a few miles away. Boyle noted triumphantly in his journal how, when monks went to visit the "great star-gazer" and chided him that his blindness was a punishment sent by God, the quick-witted Galileo had replied that at least "he had the satisfaction of not being blind till he had seen in heaven what never mortal eyes beheld before."
    For Boyle, the Church was also suffering from blindness. He decided that religion was about revealing the wonders of God's nature, not hiding them behind dreary dogma. Boyle didn't want to be told what to believe about the workings of the world. He wanted to glorify God by discovering them for himself.
    Yet the seed Galileo's work had planted could easily have withered over the succeeding years. For shortly after Boyle left Florence, his home country, Ireland, erupted in rebellion, while England tumbled into its own civil war. It was more than two years before Boyle could make his way back home, and even then he got only as far as England, first to his sister's house in London and then to Stalbridge, a modest manor house that his father had bought for him in Devon.
    This would have been a good time for Robert Boyle to settle into the life of a country squire. England was by then a little less troubled. True, King Charles I had been arrested, then later arraigned and publicly beheaded, but the Protector, Oliver Cromwell, had taken control and, along with his New Model Army, had restored a large