[ExI] Why Physics Needs Philosophy

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Fri Apr 1 17:02:19 UTC 2016


On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 11:52 AM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

​> ​
> Is there any reason to think that Aristotle/Bacon, many others,  would not
> be hard-nosed scientists today?
>


Aristotle's theories could have been easily refuted even in his own day but
nobody did
​,​
including Aristotle. Aristotle was supposed to be a master of logic but
when he applied it to physics the result was a complete muddle. Take his
theory that heavy things fall faster than lighter ones, even if he was too
lazy to perform the experiment he should have been able to figure out from
pure logic alone that it can't be right because it leads to self
contradiction. 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.

Bertrand Russell didn't think much of Aristotle either, he said:

"Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was
twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by
examining his wives' mouths."

​ John K Clark​
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