In the seventeenth century, Descartes rejected the concept of the vacuum, which is one big thing he got wrong, we say. He believed that an invisible liquid, like a very fine olive oil filled all the empty spaces in the universe, so there was no void anywhere. In his model, planets are carried around by swirling vortices in this fluid. Now, is not this surprisingly close to modern discoveries, like evidence of the presence of dark matter, which resembles Descartes's fluid? Might be more in his theory.

Dark matter is just a name of an unknown phenomenon.

There is no evidence of a medium.

Dark matter distribution is not uniform in space. Current idea is that it consists of some sort of particles.

He believed that an invisible liquid, like a very fine olive oil filled all the empty spaces in the universe, so there was no void anywhere.

 

This is reminiscent of quantum fields which fill the vacuum. Classically such fields can take value zero, which would be the classical vacuum, but quantum fluctuations mean that the "vacuum" is not actually empty.

 

However, I don't think that Descartes was thinking along these lines, or the lines of dark matter. It sounds to me that he was looking for a fluid dynamics like theory. This must have seemed a reasonable thing to do, compare corks floating down a river with the motion of planets.

 

In the seventeenth century, Descartes rejected the concept of the vacuum, which is one big thing he got wrong, we say.

 

 

You don't think Dualism was a rather large mistake?

I remeber this.. it has been a while lol