On 8/31/2015 3:19 PM, John Clark wrote:
On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 2:14 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>
Aristotle
believed that heavy objects fell more quickly than light ones, something
that
could have been easily disproved even on his own day but he understood it
so well,
or thought he did, that he didn't bother to make any observations on the
matter.
>
But he did observe that a rock fell faster than a leaf. He also believed
that an
active force was necessary to sustain motion because he observed that if
you stopped
pulling a wagon it came to a halt.
Pure logic can't prove that a physical theory is correct but it can prove that
it's wrong i
f
it's self contradictory and Aristotle's theory was.
If you take a heavy rock and tie it to a slightly lighter rock with some string that has
some slack in it and drop them then both rocks would fall slower than the big rock alone
because the slower moving lighter rock would bog it down, but the tied together object
would fall faster than the heavy rock because the new object is heavier than the heavy
rock alone.
Suppose he'd done this with a leaf and a rock. He'd have found it depended on whether
they were just tethered together or tightly bound.
Brent
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