4,994
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Line 75:
Line 75: + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
→The burning of Galileo's books
::: Works for me. (Eventually if someone finds sources convincing to everyone it could always be amended to "Most copies" or "A few copies" or "Many copies" or "About 80% of all the copies" or "522 out of 760 copies" or whatever...) [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith]] 10:50, 5 May 2007 (EDT)
::: Works for me. (Eventually if someone finds sources convincing to everyone it could always be amended to "Most copies" or "A few copies" or "Many copies" or "About 80% of all the copies" or "522 out of 760 copies" or whatever...) [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith]] 10:50, 5 May 2007 (EDT)
==Galileo's experiments dropping objects?==
The article says:
:Galileo tested Aristotle's theory that heavy objects fall faster than light ones and found it was a consequence of air resistance, not gravity.
How much is really known about this? ''Dialogues on Two New Sciences'' certainly implies that someone did some experiments. It is Sagredo who says
:"I who have made the test can assure you that a cannon ball weighing one or two hundred pounds, or even more, will not reach the ground by as much as a span ahead of a musket ball weighing only half a pound, provided both are dropped from a height of 200 cubits."
Is he supposed to be the pseudonymous voice of Galileo? And how much ''did'' the cannon ball weigh? And, forgive me, but how, exactly would one have observed whether the difference in which they reached the ground was "a span?" I who have not tried the experiment don't know how easy this is to see by eye. (Certainly one could tell that the cannon ball didn't fall two hundred times as fast as the musket ball).
A few page later, Salviati quotes Aristotle as saying "an iron ball of one hundred pounds falling from a height of one hundred cubits reaches the ground before a one-pound ball has fallen a single cubit. I say that they arrive at the same time. You find, on making the experiment, that the larger outstrips the smaller by two finger-breadths... now you would not hide behind these two fingers the ninety-nine cubits of Aristotle."
Galileo's writing is so detailed in these matters as to convince me that he really must have done some experiments, but their details are far from clear. Is more known from other sources, or is everyone else just inferring it from what he writes ''Two New Sciences?''
(It's completely clear that he does understand falling, accelerated motion, and air resistance in a modern way...)
I guess what I'm leading up to is that if nothing else is recorded about those experiments, the sentence should be reworded just a bit, something like
:In ''Two New Sciences,'' Galileo implies that he experimentally tested Aristotle's theory that heavy objects fall faster than light ones... [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith]] 11:03, 5 May 2007 (EDT)