Galileo’s parti non quante seem to account for his curious physical treatment of vacua. His attention had been directed to failure of suction pumps and siphons for columns of water beyond a fixed height. He accounted for this by treating water as a material having its own limited tensile strength, on the analogy of rope or copper wire, which will break of its own weight if sufficiently long. The cohesion of matter seemed to him best explained by the existence of minute vacua. Not only did he fail to suggest the weight of air as an explanation of the siphon phenomena, but he rejected that explanation when it was clearly offered to him in a letter by G. B. Baliani. Yet Galileo was not only familiar with the weight of air; he had himself devised practicable methods for its determination, set forth in this same book, giving even the correction for the buoyancy of the air in which the weighing was conducted.
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发表于 2011-6-7 17:17:21
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