Thinking about Nothing: Otto von Guericke and the Magdeburg Experiments on the Vacuum

Thinking about Nothing contains, in addition to a new translation from the Latin of Otto von Guerickes most important writings, an account of his life and a perspective on his thought. Amid the turmoil of the Thirty Years War and the pressures of life as politician and diplomat, he was a pioneer investigator of the nature of space and the atmosphere, and was, most famously, the inventor of the vacuum pump.