Aristotle’s Errors
One of Aristotle’s predictions, which was passed down to the seventeenth century, concerned the behavior of falling bodies. Aristotle, adhering to his philosophy that all effects require a cause held that all motion (effect) required a force (cause), and hence that falling (a motion) required a force (the weight, or what we now know as mass, of the object falling). The Italian astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei was one of a number of scientists who questioned the Aristotelian view of the workings of nature and turned to experimentation to find answers. According to legend, Galileo dropped a bullet and a cannonball from the tower to show that all objects fall with the same acceleration.
Did Galileo really drop two objects from the tower?
I'll discuss this topic in details in my forthcoming post.
