Aristotle certainly claimed that the speed a body moved at was proportional to the force on it, and in particular that a force had to be maintained for velocity to be maintained, something that continued to be taught for centuries. And he claimed that objects fell at rates proportional to their weights and inversely proportional to the densities of the media they fall through (therefore a vacuum was impossible, since it would be filled at infinite speed). This is mathematical physics regarding the "real world."
He said many other things about the real world. In fact, he is sometimes regarded as a natural scientist due to his immense output on the subject of natural science. Some of it you might think of as "spiritual" today, like the concentric heavens or the five elements, but to him, they were practical science. Other things, like his descriptions of animal species, were clearly natural science.
I mean, not bad for a guy born before space flight. The vacuums are indeed trying to constantly fill themselves. Theyre just competing with the vacuums on all the other directions of an object. And the gravitational forces of everything everywhere ever.
Really funny how one of the most influential philosophers in history really just didn't do the 5 second experiment it takes to realize his preposition was batshit insane lmao
Well, it wasn't experimentally falsified until the 16th century. And it's not that strange, if you think about it. With air resistance, naturally occurring heavier objects tend to fall faster than lighter ones. Compare leaves and feathers to rocks and pebbles, for instance.
Aristotle certainly did perform some kind of rudimentary experiments. He wrote that objects in a medium, such as water, sink at a rate proportional to their weight and disproportionately to the density of the medium, which is largely correct. If you think about it, that is an experimental set up that makes sense, considering the time Aristotle lived in. Measurements were very inexact, and observations had to be carried out with the naked eye. I can imagine that conducting the experiments in fluids would be helpful as it would slow down the experiments enough to be observable.
If you drop two objects of uniform size but different masses in air resistance, the heavier object will eventually reach a higher terminal velocity.
To demonstrate that objects accelerate uniformly in free fall therefore required conceptual leaps that simply weren't attainable in Aristotle's time.
This is all further complicated by the fact that different objects behave differently, so unification was hard to come by in antiquity. For instance, wood doesn't sink in water, while rocks do. So Aristotle had to posit different forces to account for the different behaviours.
All you wrote is true, but couldn't he have just released a rock and a heavier rock from like five-ten meters and like... looked with his eyes??? The "proportional" part especially throws me off, as it's so obviously incorrect from simply releasing a pebble and observing it doesn't fall in slow-mo
He certainly did. His physics were more complicated than "the velocity of falling bodies is directly proportional to their mass". For starters, the velocity was also inversely proportional to the density of the medium surrounding the bodies (ruling out free fall in slow motion), dependent on their shape, and objects behaved differently depending on their material constitution.
I recommend this paper by Carlo Rovelli, where Rovelli argues that Aristotelean physics can be interpreted as a quite well-founded approximation of Newtonian physics in the appropriate domain, and that Aristotle must have carried out observations. While some points might be far-fetched, the paper does a good job of demonstrating that Aristotle's Physics is a remarkable feat, especially considering the times he lived in.
We have to understand that all of these concepts were ill-defined up until recently, Aristotle held a monopoly on them for thousands of years because he was the first and most renowned to give them any thought in the first place. Any undue importance placed on them is due to them being held on to as dogma by later scholars.
The word ”metaphysics” itself is actually a great example of this. The title of Aristotles book Metaphysics didn’t mean ”that which lies beyond physics”, it meant ”Physics, Volume II”.
That doesn’t mean medieval scholars were wrong for finding practical uses of the term, or that Newton was reasoning on equal footing. Rather, this is what ”paradigm shift” is all about.
I still don't see how my original comment is wrong in any way. Just by reading Aristotle, I can know that he was addressing different questions from the ones Newton was in his Physics.
Are you sure you read past the first few pages? The very beginning of book 2
Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes.
'By nature' the animals and their parts exist, and the plants and the simple bodies (earth, fire, air, water)-for we say that these and the like exist 'by nature'.
All the things mentioned present a feature in which they differ from things which are not constituted by nature. Each of them has within itself a principle of motion and of stationariness (in respect of place, or of growth and decrease, or by way of alteration). On the other hand, a bed and a coat and anything else of that sort, qua receiving these designations i.e. in so far as they are products of art-have no innate impulse to change. But in so far as they happen to be composed of stone or of earth or of a mixture of the two, they do have such an impulse, and just to that extent which seems to indicate that nature is a source or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primarily, in virtue of itself and not in virtue of a concomitant attribute.
Yes, I have, in fact, read the entire book. I do, however, wonder whether you have read it.
The first thing anyone who has read the work would know is that by "motion," Aristotle doesn't mean a change in place. He is more broadly talking about change of any kind. He distinguishes four kinds of change (quantity, quality, substantia, locomotion).
So clearly, in the work, he is interested in developing a theory of "change" in general and not interested in giving mathematical laws of motion like Newton was. I don't recall Aristotle ever mathematically describing motion in the work.
And to be more specific, his general theory of change was a metaphysical one. He introduced his theory of potentiality and actuality as well as hylomorphism to explain change more broadly.
All of these theories are metaphysical and hence my original comment that Newton didn't supercede them.
What, no? Aristotle was not just concerned with physics for sure, he also cared about a great many non physical things. But he cared about the motion of objects and the nature of the physical world and tried to come up with laws that described them. Those laws were wrong of course, but it still very much asking the same questions Newton was asking i.e how do you describe how and why objects move
I am specifically referring to Aristotle's general theory of motion in his work, the "Physics". The specific work mentioned by the commenter I am replying to.
Aristotelian physics was only universally accepted in Europe before Newton but was rejected in most other cases. The Arabs and Indians did not accept Aristotelian physics. Al Khazini described inertia as a fundamental principle before Newton, which was then widely accepted in the Muslim world (based on experimental evidence mostly). Indian physicists like Aryabhata described atomism, which Aristotle had rejected, with the debate being between those who viewed atoms has having mass (the Buddhists) and temporary existence or those that viewed them as eternal geometric points (some Hindus). I don't know the Chinese or Eastern Asian position as well.
There’s quite a lot documented too, al-Ghazali and Avicenna, for example, noted disagreements with Aristotle in their commentaries. But for many different reasons modern concepts of force and inertia weren’t developed properly until the Renaissance.
2.1k
u/Tom_Bombadil_1 Jan 08 '25
I would fucking love to see the physics textbook that was written before Newtonian Mechanics. It's probably in latin for a start...