The idea that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects start with Aristotle. From what I can dig up, he believed that all objects moved toward their natural places (smoke up, rocks down). Does anyone know if he had any other wisdom to go on when he made this bold and mistaken claim?
I got nuttin’, but that isn’t going to stop me from posting this:
Isaac Asimov made the statement in one of his books that the main job of Greek scientists was to get everybody off on the wrong foot.
I’m not slamming the Greeks, they did the best they could with what they had to work with, which wasn’t much. But it seems you can reason out almost any conclusion you desire if your starting assumptions are whatever you want them to be. The idea of checking your ideas against reality didn’t catch on for another 1,500ish years.
I really thought Isaac Asimov was smarter than that, and actually knew something about the history of science. Its sad when you discover former idols had feet of clay.
Of course it is also possible you are taking what he said it radically out of context, or misreporting it altogether.
Any other wisdom? Yes, as one of the greatest thinkers in the history of humanity, as anybody who has actually studied his work and its influence cannot fail to agree, Aristotle had much other wisdom, about a wide variety of topics. Modern science, for one thing, would not exist without him.
If you are asking where he got the idea that heavy bodies fall faster than lighter bodies (which almost certainly did not start with him), it was probably from observation, as, in practice, they mostly do. Galileo’s view that bodies of all weights fall at equal speeds only really holds if they are falling in a vacuum.
If you are asking how he developed his theory about different types of substances moving to their natural places, he developed it through constructive criticism of the theories of earlier Greek thinkers, without whom his more sophisticated theory would not have been possible, just as modern science developed largely through the constructive criticism of Aristotle’s theories, without which it would not have been possible.
Only read a bit of Aristotle, back in my Phil major days. But you have to admit, he did kinda spout a fair bit of rubbish here and there, which then went unquestioned for a very long time. Like, say, that flies only had four legs. And that hedghehogs did it missionary style. I don’t doubt his importance in the history of philosophy and science, but when it comes to statements of “fact”, he (and other ancient “natural philosophers”) were often just a bit off.
Aristotle’s greatest positive contribution to the history of science was in undoing a little bit of the damage that Plato did to science. Most of what he got right, any competent farmer of the time could have told you. Heck, much of what he got wrong, the competent farmer would have gotten right.
Flies: did he mean they had four legs and two arms ? because they use the front pair like arms ?
Hedgehogs: Was it Sherlock Holmes logic ? When you exclude all other possibilities, the one remaining possibility must be it… … or you made a mistake in excluding other possibilities
I am also no expert on the ancient Greeks and their thoughts but it won’t stop me either . . .
If nothing else, Aristotle was one of the key players, really the key player, introducing what was essentially a new way of looking at things, a paradigm if you will.
More to the point, he asserted that there were reasons why things happened they way they did; there was an order, a system, to the Universe and not just a collection of rules-of-thumb and the like. The fact that he got the specifics wrong (often) misses the point that he sought to organize and explain phenomena. And that is a pursuit that is still ongoing.
Women having fewer teeth than men is the one that always amuses me.
The problem with Aristotle, as I see it, lies with the succeeding generations who treated his specific observations as gospel rather than building upon and refining the underlying ideas of system and organization. It would be as if psychiatrists followed Freud’s theories for 1500 years, largely out of veneration of the man, rather than building and revising the discipline based on continuing study.
That may well be a mistake, but the observation may have been reasonable in Athens at his time. First, dental care being non-existant, many people did not have a full set of teeth. Secondly, women in Athens probably were likely to be missing more teeth because they suffered more from malnutrition than men.
That sounds wrong. I think the idea would have seemed like stating the bleedin’ obvious, because everyone in history would have come to the same conclusion through observation.
It is a far more surprising fact that (in a vacuum) all objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass. It takes a while for kids (and probably a good percentage of adults) to accept it even now, because very few humans have experienced the combination of gravity and a vacuum. At least now we can conduct experiments to prove it.
It’s been a long time and I might be misremembering, but I seem to recall that he thought objects went up in a straight line, then sort of just fell out of the sky…sort of like a triangle. Again, this is from memory, but I recall something about his projections for the flight of an arrow looking like basically an obtuse triangle. Silly, really, when even in his day he could have simply gone out and watched an archer shoot the thing and gotten a better insight into the actual flight path.
(This is all from the memory of a lecture in physics in, I think, high school, so a perhaps rather largish grain of salt is needed here)
I have the utmost respect for Aristotle, more than any other philosopher, considering what he had to work with . . . especially trying to fix all the mistakes Plato made. Aristotle basically taught us how to think.
Regarding his thoughts on falling objects: he was totally empirical. He looked at a rock falling, and he looked at a feather falling, and drew logical conclusions based on his observations. What else would you expect him to do?
Well, for starters he could have maybe looked at a small rock falling, and a big rock falling.
If the “he” in those sentences referred to “Einstien” or “Darwin” or “Hawking”, they would be equally true, i.e., scarcely at all.
Have you actually read any Aristotle? Most of his work is highly theoretical and closely, densely, and often brilliantly reasoned. It is based upon an intimate knowledge of the previous couple of centuries of Greek philosophical thought (which had progressed from fairly simplistic to a highly sophisticated over that period), and usually marks a considerable step forward in rigor, coherence and comprehensiveness from the work of his predecessors. What is more, most of it was not surpassed in these regard for anoterh two thousand yeas or more.
Most of the factual errors that historically ignorant people like to point to to prove how much cleverer than Aristotle they are for having been born two and a half millennia after his time (and thus being beneficiaries of two and a half millennia of further research, almost all ultimately inspired and guided by Aristotle’s thought, to some degree), come from his History of Animals, which is atypical of most of his works, being little more than an encyclopedic but fairly random collection of natural history facts, some probably based on his own observations or those of his close colleagues, but most gathered from other sources, both written and oral. As such it does indeed contain many inaccuracies (along with all the true information that it very likely records for the first time ever). Nevertheless, it is almost certainly the first ever attempt to record such facts in a systematic way, and thus marks the beginning of the scientific, observationally based study of living things. Without Aristotle, no Darwin (and no Galileo, or Newton, or Heisenberg either.)
Pioneers make many missteps. They do not have the benefit of hindsight. Aristotle, as to most intents, the most important pioneer of the whole scientific tradition, made many missteps (though he got quite a lot right too), but he deserves respect for his enormous achievement, not to be sneered at for trivial errors or hypotheses that turned out (once the means to test them became available, which often took a very long time) to be false.
Perhaps he was too busy with all his other work on ethics and politics and metaphysics and astronomy and meteorology and biology and literary analysis and logic and rhetoric and …
The breadth of Aristotle’s learning (never mind its conceptual sophistication) is pretty much unsurpassed before or since. I do not think it is much wonder he did not have time to check all the details, like personally counting a fly’s legs or a woman’s teeth, or buggering around with dropping rocks to triple check what seemed like obvious (and probably, from his perspective, rather trivial) facts.
And do you really think dropping two different-sized rocks would have told him anything significant? I think you know perfectly well that, mythology notwithstanding, that is not how Galileo eventually figured out that Aristotle had got this point (not a point that was at all, a priori, obviously particularly important or worthy of careful checking) wrong. It took Galileo (motivated, originally, by trying to figure out how to aim cannons better) years of careful and ingenious experimentation with inclined planes, and more years of deep cogitation and mathematical analysis, before he was able to show that Aristotle was indeed wrong on this point (under the idealization of things falling a vacuum). Certainly the significance of falling rocks never occurred to any of the people in the two-thousand plus years separating them, many of whom must have often seen rocks of different sizes falling down, and many of whom were not idiots.
I am not certain, but I think it is very likely that Aristotle never discussed the issue of the shape of a missile’s trajectory. Some people who did consider the issue before Galileo (notably Tartaglia, who made observations on the flight of cannonballs) did think that a missile would initially move in a straight line, but I do not think that anybody evre held thought it would then fall straight down. That is probably either you misremembering or your teacher greatly oversimplifying.
Galileo eventually did figure out that a missile, under gravity, moves in a parabola over its whole path, but it took him much ingenious, painstaking experimentation and detailed mathematical analysis to do so. Doing real science is actually quite hard and very time consuming. It takes a lot more than an open mind and open eyes.
Asimov’s comment was obviously tongue in cheek and I’m sure he wasn’t actually blaming Aristotle for getting so many things wrong.
Your comment acknowledges that it was thousands of years before modern science really took hold. You also seem to agree that it took that long for proto-scientists to actually work through Aristotle’s errors.
Of course it’s ridiculous to say that Darwin wouldn’t exist without Aristotle. “Darwin” (i.e., natural selection) didn’t even need Darwin. The claim against Aristotle is that he was so respected as a thinker that better ideas by lesser people failed to gain traction for thousands of years.
What we can say is that modern science would not have existed without embracing the notion that ideas have value independently of people. It wasn’t Aristotle that held back scientific progress; it was (possibly) respecting the man over the ideas.
The history of science is littered with examples of bad ideas held onto for too long because respected thinkers were advocates. Sometimes this manifests itself in subtle ways, such as biasing the rejection of outlying data. Aristotle is just the most egregious example.
It might be me misremembering, though I’d say that it’s more likely my HS physics teacher was incorrect…or, the text book (which was a physics text, not a history text) had it wrong. Or some combination of the 3. A lot of my physics classes, especially the early ones had little snippets of the history of physics in them, and Aristotle was certainly one of the early figures.
However, I’ll tell you that one of the first experiments I did taking Newtonian (non-calculus based) physics in HS was using a simple spring, a white background and some colored balls (though my favorite was the one where you shot a ball out to the side at the same time a ball dropped and you had to measure the impacts to show how gravity effects both the same). Now, obviously, this is standing on the shoulders of thousands of years of science and all, but it was pretty easy to detect the flight path of said colored ball across the white background using the mark one eyeball. I’ve also seen bright colored arrows fired in an arc, and you can’t tell me that, say, the Longbowmen of England didn’t have a good grasp of the flight paths of their arrows despite not having very sophisticated measuring tools.
In other words, he was so busy bullshitting that he didn’t have time to make even the most rudimentary of checks on what he was saying. Sure, OK, he didn’t have time to do all of the work that Galileo did… But he didn’t need to do everything Galileo did to disprove the notion that heavy objects fall faster than light objects. All he needed to do was, literally, drop two rocks. All the extensive work that Galileo did was to determine the exact rate at which things fell-- I don’t ask that of any individual. But I do ask that an individual exercise at least some bare modicum of inquiry.
Heck, even if he was too lazy to get a couple of rocks, you can cast serious doubts on the notion that larger objects fall faster with a mere thought experiment. Did Aristotle not have enough time to think about things, either? And if not, then why the heck was he writing about them?