He wasn’t busy “bullshitting”. In regard of this of this stuff he was he was busy collecting and cataloging varius people’s reports of natural historical facts. He was doing, alone, or perhaps with a small number of helpers, teh sort of work that it now takes thousands of Wikipedians to do, and this in teh time he had left over from doing philosophical analysis of a scope and sophistication that has yet to be surpassed.
And now you are bullshitting. I think you well know that this is not how Galileo proved his point. i also think the highly simplistic experiemnt you propose will will not convince anyone who does not already accept eh point, and who is presented with evidence of this sort in an unbiased way. Show such a person the experiment with a rock and and a feather and as well as the experiment with two rocks; I think you find they are more likely to say the balance of the evidence favors Aristotle rather than Galileo.
You also need to remember that the whole issue of the speed of falling bodies was a point of very minor significance for Aristotle, and, indeed, for everyone who came after him up to Galileo’s time. We think it is important now because it was the tiny loose thread which Galileo was able to pick at and eventually unravel much of the edifice of Aristotelian mechanics, but nobody knew it was going to turn out that way before Galileo did it.
Gosh no, Aristotle never seriously or carefully thought about anything, ever. :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
And a “mere thought experiment” huh? Do you know why Galileo is considered a towering genius, huh? Because he was able to think of a thought experiment to prove the point that nobody else in all of human history had come up with.
Now, as you are apparently so much smarter than Aristotle and Galileo put together, and would have known exactly what the important experiment to do would have been back in the 4th century BC, and would have been able to confound Aristotle with Galileo’s thought experiment, which you could easily have come up with yourself, why don’t you get up off your lazy butt and get fusion power and time travel and the warp dive invented? I am sure it would be easy for you if only you weren’t wasting your time arguing on message boards about stuff you clearly haven’t given any serious thought to.
As a matter of fact, I did independently come up with the gossamer-thread thought experiment, before I read of Galileo doing the same. I don’t mean to brag by saying this, because it’s a really simple thought experiment, that’s probably been thought up by a great many people.
Nor is the two-stones experiment difficult. Yes, you need to drop them from “a height”, but six feet works just fine for that height. You pick up two stones off the ground, hold them out at arm’s length, and let go. It’s literally that simple.
And even if he was too lazy or apathetic to do either of those, why is he writing on the topic at all? I could understand if he didn’t care about how fast things fall… But in that case, he should have remained silent. He wasn’t “too busy laying the foundations of rationality”, because what he was doing was just pulling things out of his nether regions with no support, which is the exact opposite of rationality.
You’re missing the point. The issue of what the difference is between science and philosophy is a philosophic question not a scientific one. So it can be legitimately addressed by philosophic means like rhetoric.
What Aristotle did wrong was apply philosophic means to what were scientific questions. Trying to use rhetoric to answer a question like how many teeth does a horse have or why does it rain or what is matter made out of is the wrong way to do science, even if you somehow stumble on the right answer. By tying together philosophical means and scientific questions, Aristotle pointed science in the wrong direction for over a thousand years.
That wasn’t my point.
What I meant was that while the Greeks argued philosophy, something odd emerged during the renaissance and onward. The scholars did in fact start “getting their hands dirty” (even if they were above washing them). Kepler developed and refined tools to do precise measurements of star and planet positions. People like Watt and his ilk built and refined large machines. Galileo took lens-making from the Dutch and applied it to viewing the heavens.
We have the greek mechanical astronomy computer ( Antikythera mechanism - Wikipedia ) so there were some very bright and talented craftsmen/scientists in that time, it seems - or, at least one. Yet these “practical scientists” do not seem to have crossed paths with the philosopher scientists. The only one I recall was Archimedes and his displacement principle for measuring density, but he was technically Hellenist not Greek. The philosophers could speak of all sorts of great principles but nobody even gives a passing reference to “like those geared wheels gizmos some ship captains have” or any other throwaway line that references technology. (With all the mighty talk of levers, did anyone even mention gears?)
It was this fatal separation of practical and philosophical that hampered further progress IMHO; just as in the dark ages, the tendency to explain the unexplained with religious mumbo-jumbo in place of serious investigation - and condemn those who questioned this answer - was also a serious impediment.
Meanwhile, by the 1700’s the engineers were part of the Royal Society in Britain, and searches for the scientific explanations to emerging practical technology helped drive progress. Galileo’s demonstration (by dropping things, and also to explain pendulum action) that gravity accelerates all things equally, was the foundation for Newton’s “aha!” moment that “that applies not only on earth, but in the heavens”. And so on. Kepler’s observations, and calculus, just made it easier to show that it wasn’t just a philosophical observation but a mathematically provable fact…
Here’s the Wikipedia entry on Aristotelian physics:
It worked well enough to explain things at the time. As you can see in the article, there were various people during the Middle Ages who did recognize that it wasn’t good enough. The scientists from Galileo to Newton didn’t come out of nowhere. They came from a tradition in the Middle Ages that had tried to fix the problems in Aristotelian physics.
I think that part of the problem was that there were actually few people in the two thousand years between Aristotle and Galileo who were thinking about the problems with Aristotelian physics. In comparison, in the two hundred years between Newton and Einstein there were many more people thinking about the problems with Newtonian physics and thus they were able to make much faster progress. The change from Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics was just as large as the change from Aristotelian physics to Newtonian physics. I personally suspect that we’re not long from another major change. The messy current body of physical theory and miscellaneous anomalies with it - relativity, quantum theory, the Big Bang, dark matter, dark energy, cosmic inflation, the Standard Model of particle physics, the flyby anomaly, baryonic asymmetry, and various other fudges - suggest that our current model isn’t the simplest one. Here’s a list of some of these problems:
If this major change happens soon, then it will have taken only a hundred years this time to completely revise physics this time. There have been many more scientists in the past one hundred years than in the two hundred years before that. So let’s quit pretending that we’re brilliant and people before our time were stupid.
I disagree. Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics are both science; Newtonian physics led to Einsteinian physics.
Aristotelian physics was something completely different from both. And it didn’t lead anywhere. Look at history. Fifteen hundred years after Aristotle died the “science” he created was at the exact same point it had been at when he died. It’s like astrology - you can decades working on it but it doesn’t get any better than when you started. Newton’s physics took off because it was science - he invented something that other people could improve on.
Yes and no.
Newtonian physics is counter-intuitive in a world full of friction and air resistance. You can heave on something and it does not move; anything moving tends to slow down; heavy objects fall faster, some really light objects fly away in the wind…
While Newtonian physics is consistent, the initial explanations of it are counter to real-world experience and require simplifications along the lines of “assume a spherical chicken”. I’ve seen a feather and a metal ball dropped simultaneously in a vacuum (science Museum demo), but that behaviour is very counter to normal experience.
Of course, to explain exceptions like “why doesn’t an arrow slow down the way things sliding on the ground do?” Aristotle and his buddies had to dance through hoops…
Nitpick: Tycho Brahe developed the instruments and took the measurements; Kepler interpreted those measurements to develop his mathematical model. But the important point is that both of them recognized the importance of actual observation.
You likely had a thorough education in modern science in childhood, so you can’t take credit for this. It would only be indicative if you (or anyone) had come up with this thought experiment before Galileo himself did.