Why aristotle was wrong

Already in antiquity John Philoponus pointed out that if one corrects for that the sole basis for Aristotle's conclusion disappears: " But this is completely erroneous, and our view may be completely corroborated by actual observation more effectively than by any sort of verbal argument.

For if you let fall from the same height two weights, one many times heavier than the other you will see that the ratio of the times required for the motion does not depend [solely] on the weights, but that the difference in time is very small. But you were taught that Aristotle was "holding back science" not because he was just wrong about falling bodies. As Philoponus pointed out, it was merely an illustration of a general attitude, unfortunately adopted by many after him, that facts about nature can be reasoned out of their heads with spotty and misconstrued observations, if any at all.

To be fair, Aristotle's contribution wasn't all negative, he gave first systematic descriptions in what now became established natural sciences, and tried to organize and structure what was known about the world in his time.

But his method of inquiry was wrong headed, and it took a lot of time and effort to overcome it. Aristotle was not necessarily wrong. As the abstracts announces it. If one agrees that falling occurs in a fluid, then it is not different from 'sinking'.

Heavier bodies sink faster. Buoyancy which can play a crucial role is also due to gravity. Yes, Aristotle was wrong about gravity. The ones who held back physics for centuries were the late-antique and mediaeval Christian, Muslim and Jewish so-called philosophers who transformed Aristotelianism into an ossified dogmatic doctrine. Aristotle himself was always willing to change his mind and to consider alternative explanations.

That Aristotle and you with your example are wrong is proved by the following simple argument: imagine two bricks of equal mass. Each of them falls with certain acceleration. Now glue them together and let them fall. According to Aristotle two bricks will fall faster than each brick separately. It is evident that this is absurd: what difference does it make whether the bricks are glued together or not? Aristotle concluded in his law of motion that the speed of an object depends on the viscosity of the medium it is in.

In keeping with this line of thinking, since a perfect vacuum has zero viscosity, the speed of a falling object should approach infinity, as viscosity approaches zero. Galileo in his incline plane experiment identified the role of gravity, explaining it to be Aristotle's attractive force pulling toward the " natural place".

In addition, Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment addressed the question: do falling masses of different sizes fall at the same speed?

He concluded that they will fall at the same speed. Newton corrected Galileo's conclusion with his own gravitational theory which states that the the force of gravity exert the same acceleration on objects regardless of size; an idea that has gained acceptance over the years. Just as Aristotle law of gravitation, ignoring the role of mathematics available to him at the time, was was the first approximation of the role of gravity on falling objects, Galileo, utilizing the same math that was available to Aristotle, came up with a second approximation of the role of gravity.

Newton with more advance mathematics came up with his law of gravitation, a third approximation to the law of gravitational motion; and of course, Einstein made a radical departure from all existing theories of the time with his upgrade. Consider a mass of specific gravity 2 falling through water. Of course the specific gravity of air is 0. Aristotle thought that in a zero dense medium the mass would fall infinitely fast and he was obviously wrong. Physics b.

People who think Aristotle's treatment was purely qualitative should try reading him. Look at Physics b and a in particular. There's plenty of calculation there. It seems to me that most of his problems arise from not understanding the concept of zero - hardly surprising since it wasn't introduced into maths for another thousand years by the Indians.

Maybe his horror of the void comes down to the same issue. Physicists now tend to think in terms of effective theories; that is a theory which is accurate in a certain energy regime but fails in another. Thus, for example we get super-gravity as a low energy effective ie approximate theory of string theory. It's not quite fair to compare Newton and Aristotle after all a span of two millenia separates them. This is a hefty amount of time by any measure; and the earlier work should be evaluated in its own terms, in the context of its time, as well as it's influence.

It was the later infatuation with Aristotle beginning in the Renaissance after Averroes rediscovery of Aristotles works and his commentaries on them; and also the close association of the Church with Aristotle and then then the rise of anti-clericalism in Europe after the bourgeois revolutions that our modern dislike of Aristotle stems from; the popular literature is littered with disdain for his works; this is not an accurate view of his importance; and nor, to be honest of the Greek work on dynamics of which Aristotle is the most prominent representative.

It's not that Aristotle himself who held back scientific thought; after all, he himself was not backward in critiquing Plato, Parmenides or Democritus when he felt their ideas hadn't sufficient justification.

He was not over-awed by them, perhaps due to the closeness in time to these giant figures, after all, he himself was a student of Plato. Had the early to late medivals understood this aspect of his critical activity and took it upon themselves then perhaps scientific thought might have been recovered more rapidly; instead, they found themselves over-awed by their achievements and on the whole, could do no more than tinker with them, and it took the time to the early moderns before general scientific culture in Europe had risen to a sufficient height and had become fluid and vigorous that they could begin to develop where the Ancient world had stopped.

After Einstein, we see gravity as the curvature of spacetime. This means that spacetime, far from being the passive theatre in which events happen, also has dynamical properties. Did anyone before Einstein forsee this possibility?

Well, Clifford did when he stated that this curvature was all that there was in terms of physical change in the world. Whilst Aristotle didn't forsee this, he was capable of asking the question: "does place itself have a place"? That question, if pushed further, suggests that space is dynamical. After all, a stone has a place, the place where we put it - here or there. To ask whether place has a place shows just how careful scientific questioning then was in questioning verities we would normally simply take for granted.

What was Aristotles answer to the question raised? The Enlightenment and its preceding Renaissance, in fact, represents the West finally throwing off of the iron shackles of Aristotelian thought after over a thousand years. Aristotle was wrong about physics. He was wrong about chemistry. He was wrong about biology. This proto-Freud was wrong about psychology. He was wrong about basic human rights.

Aristotle apologists note how the old bastard wrote much of the underpinings of Western civilization. Yes he did — and that is precisely the problem. Aristotle was your drunk uncle who has to get his opinion in about literally everything while managing to be completely wrong each and every time.

And nowhere was Aristotle more egregiously, more catastrophically, more malevolently wrong than with women. Rabid misogyny is not a too uncommon thing with philosophers, as Nietzsche would later prove, but Aristotle brought it to a whole new level. But what makes Aristotle one of the most evil and destructive men in the history of humanity was the great influence he had on the medieval world, especially the Church.

Some Southern Baptists are guided less by Jesus and more by a follower of Zeus. It was Aristotle who laid down the formal rules for women becoming passive objects of dependence, first on their father and then on their husband. It was he who counseled the complete denial of legal rights to women, encoding their submission in all parts of society. He went so far as to literally advocate for women getting less food than their male counterparts, which sounds awfully similar to what modern misogynists say.

Pity the pregnant or breastfeeding woman in an Aristotelian society! He also codified many of the stereotypes we still hold of women today, and used them as excuses as to why women are literally inferior. Because castrated men become more feminine, Aristotle then asserted that women are therefore mutilated or damaged men.

No surprise that he would lead his personal estate to his illegitimate son and not his daughter by his wife. Oh, and did I also mention that he was a racist? Aristotle taught that only fair-skinned women are capable of orgasm. Welp, we already know he sucked at biology I guess? Now women often were second-class citizens throughout the history of civilization. But nobody formalized it, codified it, set down the rules of misogyny as harshly and as definitively as this dead white male.

Women have fewer teeth than men? So when some chauvinist bastards destroy a church rather than allow them to have a female minister, we have a pre-Christian pagan named Aristotle to thank more than anyone else. For he did more than relegate women to servants. He also served as a truly venomous example of masculinity, one that is followed to this day.

And few have ever been as wrong about everything, although some may try. Aaaand that concludes the misogyny trilogy. We return now to normal programming. Which still involves a lot of feminism, come to think of it. Sorry about that. Pingback: A defense of Western culture, in one photo.

Julian O'Dea said:. November 18, at am. RhapsodySea said:. April 23, at am. Alethes Sophia said:. August 25, at pm. Ogy said:.

February 8, at pm. Maybe we should all stop knowing it better? February 9, at am. Certainly no one person was responsible for the abandonment of reason in favor of superstition, but Aristotle was arguably the most powerful single influence in that direction.

His greatest crime was equating truth with what he wanted to be true — the very foundation of ignorant superstition, which took until the Enlightenment two millenia later to overcome. Aristotle was the greatest villain in recorded history. February 9, at pm. February 10, at am. The reason why this overproduction has come to be is, in my opinion, the result of publications on health benefits that certain foods have on human bodies.

Because of this focussing we are deteriorating our environment which ironically makes our previous scientific studies become obsolete because the nutritional value of our products changes like in the chicken-meat article there is a mentioning of the white stripes not the rockband having an influence on the amounts of lipids and proteins in the meat. This has been itself a focussed, subjective view and should therefore not be regarded as anything other than that. What will tomorrow bring? Arun Jetli said:.

March 3, at am. Hardly mentioned is his ethnocentric claims of Hellenes being superior. Aristotle suffered from an inferiority complex because Persians allowed more freed om to women, Cyrus had freed the slaves and was in love with diversity.

The greeks were rednecks. While Cyrus, Darius and Xerexes promoted philosophy and thus all the pre-socratics emerged, Pythagoras, Anaximaander, Anexamenes , Heraclitus Parmenedes all under Persian monarchy. And what about Athens. Death sentence on Anaximander, Themostecles, Socrates and Aristotle.

March 18, at pm. I guess knowledge is misogyny now. Casey said:. The first important thing to consider about the Greek philosophers is that they were philosophers and not scientists.

What is the difference? The Greeks approached ideas with some common and assumed truth and then deduced the details from that. For instance, take a heavy object and a light object like a rock and a feather and drop them.

Which will hit the ground first? I think we can all agree that the rock will fall faster than the feather. So, this is something we assume to be true and the rest of the details can be deduced from that.

With that general framework, Aristotle had the following ideas about force and motion. The first idea is that there are two kinds of interactions in nature. There are natural interactions and violent interactions. Natural interactions deal with the four elements: earth, wind, water, and fire. An object made of one of these elements wants to return to its natural position.

Rocks are made of earth, so they want to get to the Earth. If you let go of a rock, it "falls" as it moves to where it belongs. Fire wants to get to the place of fire—which I think is up, so fire goes up. Oh, there is one other important idea about the natural state of objects. An object in its natural place is also at rest and not moving. Objects "want" to be at rest. Most objects desire nothing more than to be left alone.

The other interaction is a violent interaction. This is when you make an object do something it doesn't want to do. If you push fire down, that's violent and also not very smart you will burn yourself. If you lift a rock, you move it away from the Earth. Finally, if you push a rock to the side and move it—that's violent.

You are making the object move when its natural state is at rest. This means that according to Aristotle's physics, you need a constant force to move an object at a constant speed. Now let's skip forward in time from Aristotle to Galileo. Yes, that same Galileo guy who used a telescope to support the idea that the Earth orbits the Sun rather than the other way around. But he also did some experiments with forces and motion.

Yes, actual experiments. Galileo didn't start with some assumed truth and then deduce the details. Instead, he set up an experiment to obtain results and then build an idea from there. OK, it should be clear that experiments are difficult. How do you look at the motion of a falling object? Does it fall at a constant speed or does it increase in speed?