Literary notes about Vacuum (AI summary)
The term “vacuum” appears in literature with a remarkable range of senses—from the strictly physical and technical to the profoundly metaphorical. In early philosophical and scientific treatises, authors like Diogenes Laertius and John Locke explore the concept as an abstract container or backdrop for bodies and ideas, questioning its finitude or infinitude ([1], [2], [3], [4]). In more modern contexts, the term shifts to denote practical applications in machinery and food preservation, as seen in the detailed descriptions of vacuum processes in coffee production ([5], [6], [7], [8]). At the same time, writers employ “vacuum” as a metaphor for emptiness in both the psychic realm and societal structures, suggesting spaces where thought, emotion, or even political life may be absent ([9], [10], [11]). This broad usage underscores not only the scientific curiosity about physical space but also the symbolic power of the vacuum across genres and eras.
- If, on the other hand, the vacuum were finite, the bodies being infinite, then the bodies clearly could never be contained in the vacuum.
— from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius - And that men have ideas of space without a body, their very disputes about a vacuum plainly demonstrate, as is shown in another place.
— from An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1 by John Locke - The world, then, is finite, and the vacuum infinite.
— from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius - To determine this either way, is to beg the question for or against a VACUUM.
— from An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1 by John Locke - The heat and the vacuum reduce the extract to a dry powder in less than one revolution of the drum.
— from All About Coffee by William H. Ukers - By this time, the pumping percolator, working by steam pressure and by partial vacuum, was in general use in France, England, and Germany.
— from All About Coffee by William H. Ukers - By 1825, the pumping percolator, working by steam pressure and by partial vacuum, was much used in France, Holland, Germany, and Austria.
— from All About Coffee by William H. Ukers - At the same time he secured an English patent on a vacuum percolator, not unlike Durant's of 1827.
— from All About Coffee by William H. Ukers - It exists only in the psychic vacuum of antenatal life, or perhaps only in the potentiality of the germ plasm.
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. Burgess and Robert Ezra Park - Does not a stream, boundless as ocean, deep as vacuum, yawn between us?"
— from The Last Man by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Nature abhors a mental vacuum.
— from Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education by John Dewey