The Weight of the Air

When I was in graduate school in the 1990s I knew some people in the department of History of Science. At the time they seemed like fools to me, babbling about science instead of doing it. Part of that was perhaps because they seemed to put a lot of effort into puffing themselves up and looking at everything from a certain angle influenced by politics.

A lot of things are "obvious" to us today, just because they were taught to us as children. But at some point in history, these things were far from obvious. The idea that we're living at the bottom of an ocean of air that has weight is an example.

What fascinates me is the process of how people figured this out. Experiments help with that, but first you have to have the right frame of mind to come up with the right experiment, and draw the right conclusions from it. That people were capable of this is a fascinating illustration of the power of the human mind.

A similarly interesting story is the discovery of using lime juice to prevent scurvy, and how the knowledge was then lost and finally regained in the 1930s when Vitamin C was discovered. All of this seems "obvious" in retrospect, but at the time it wasn't.

[1] http://www.classichistory.net/archives/organ

Without accounting for this, it might not be so easy to get good agreement no matter how many times the drivers get on or off the big rigs.

Same reason the Goodyear blimp floats, the bigger it is the more negative weight.