[citation needed] Furthermore, insofar as a void would be featureless, it could neither be encountered by the senses nor could its supposition lend additional explanatory power.
Hero of Alexandria challenged the theory in the first century AD, but his attempts to create an artificial vacuum failed.
[3] The theory was debated in the context of 17th-century fluid mechanics, by Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle,[4] among others, and through the early 18th century by Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz.
The idea was restated as "Natura abhorret vacuum" by François Rabelais in his series of books titled Gargantua and Pantagruel in the 1530s.
Galileo was surprised by the fact that water could not rise above a certain level in an aspiration tube in his suction pump, leading him to conclude that there is a limit to the phenomenon.
[8] René Descartes proposed a plenic interpretation of atomism to eliminate the void, which he considered incompatible with his concept of space.
Blaise Pascal successfully repeated Galileo's and Torricelli's experiment and foresaw no reason why a perfect vacuum could not be achieved in principle.