Linus, Franciscus

[person]

An English Jesuit scientist, born Francis Line (1595 – 1675). Linus championed Aristotle’s idea that “nature abhors a vacuum” in the 17th century, and therefore proposed the idea of “funiculus,” a substance that materializes to extinguish a vacuum. The existence of funiculus was disproven by Robert Boyle in the mid-17th century.