| | Kolker: Had he done something simple like drop two rocks of similar shape but of disparate weights from a high enough place at the same time, he would have seen immediately that his assertion that heavier things fall faster than lighter things (disregarding air resistance) is total non-sense. This is something any ten year old kid might have thought of. Why not Aristotle?
Drop a feather; drop a stone. Drop a hair; drop a rock. Drop a bird; drop a horse. Light things -- things of the air -- are not attracted to the Earth as much as are earthy things. Where is the surprise in that? No, the surprise was that air is something. In other words, there is not "nothing" between the atoms, but "something" between the atoms. So, how do we move through this "something"? Hmmmm tough question... in fact, given the speed of light this "something" must be extremely dense. Now, there is a poser! You cannot blame the ancient Greeks in general or Aristotle in particular for knowledge they did not have. You might as well beat up on Thomas Young for failing to reconcile his diffraction experiment with the obvious fact that light has pressure, which is impossible for a wave. Would you blame Thomas Young for retarding science for 100 years?
You say "disregarding air resistance" as if that were conceptually easy, but air resistance was a big deal! Understanding it was a real discovery. For the ancient Greeks, the big discovery via Empedokles of Akragas, was that air is a substance that has weight. And it still took about 400 years for someone to invent a water-driven air-activated musical instrument.
On the other hand, I will grant that some Greek engineering works -- the tunnel at Samos; all those temples; see L. Sprague DeCamp's classic, The Ancient Engineers -- showed deep insight from which Aristotle and most others seemed not to have benefited. The example given to me was pile drivers. They used them to establish foundations in soft soils, so they must have known a bit about falling bodies from dropping rocks on trimmed tree trunks. Still and all, the failure was not limited to Aristotle. No one "got" it, apparently.
Finding where a meteor had fallen -- the story goes -- Anaxagoras of Klazomenai concluded that the sun is a ball of hot metal (or rock), larger than the Pelopponesus. Of course, this is ridiculous... but that is not the point, is it? It is not that this or that theory was right or wrong, but that the method of rational inquiry (versus mythology and religion) was the way to go.
We learn in our tax-funded schools that the Greeks did not perform experiments because they denigrated physical labor. Plato might have felt that way about craftsmen, but that was not the general view. Even in Plato's Dialog of Protagoras, we read that if a question comes up in the assembly that requires specific knowledge of craftsmenship, then the craftsman is called to speak. If anyone attempts to speak on a technical subject he has no working knowledge of, no matter how good-looking or high-born, he is shouted down. So, the Greeks did honor craftsmen over the "aristocrats." Also, the Greek philosophers did perform experiments. Again, Empedocles of Acragas showed by experiment that air is a substance.
Aristotle was a medical doctor first and foremost. His biological works still merit praise. And, while we have had at least two paradigm shifts since then, the fact is that Aristotle's Physics does show the parallelogram of forces. They knew. He knew. But no one took that one critical fact and followed it where it would lead... until Newton... 2000 years later... and Newton did not start from that, but from other considerations, entirely. The Greeks almost had the differential and derivative and almost had that connected to the area within a curve. Would you blame Apollonius of Perga for the failure of everyone else not to invent calculus?
Leave Aristotle alone, Bob. He did just fine.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 2/20, 7:16pm)
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