This name is in honor of Rene Descartes,
a French mathematician and philosopher who is a contemporary of Blaise Pascal.
They actually knew each other, but they didn’t get along so well.
They had philosophical differences.
This is said only half in jest. Pascal,
using a new fangled Italian invention called a barometer, discovered
that air pressure generally decreased as altitude increased. He guessed
that this decrease must continue forever, and eventually there must be an
altitude where air pressure is effectively (or even precisely) zero, which
would say the world is surrounded by a vacuum. Descartes couldn't agree;
the idea of "Nature abhors a vacuum" came from the ancient Greeks, so given
the early 17th Century understanding of natural science, several
specific problems dealing with the concept of the vacuum of outer space would
seem insurmountable. Why hadn't all the earth's air been sucked away
and evenly distributed throughout the universe? Since fires could be
put out in a vacuum due to lack of fuel, how did the sun still blaze away
in the vacuum of space? (Recall that gravity is not a very well understood
phenomenon before Newton, who does his great work in the late 17th
Century.) There were no experiments that could be run in this era to
prove either Pascal's or Descartes' view conclusively, so it is fair to call
their dispute philosophical. This dispute turned personal, as scientific
disagreements often do. In a letter to a friend, Descartes said Pascal
had "too much vacuum in his head".
