4,994
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Line 176:
Line 176: + + + + + + + + +
→Galileo's experiments dropping objects?
:::: At best you can say Aristotle is correct in situations where the Reynolds number is very low. He's wildly incorrect for things like stones and cannonballs and blocks of wood falling distances of tens to hundreds of feet in air. I don't see anything obvious in the passage I linked to that shows he has any awareness of his statements being ''limited'' to things like inflated bladders or gossamer or feathers and not applying to stones and cannonballs and blocks of wood. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith]] 16:04, 6 May 2007 (EDT)
:::: At best you can say Aristotle is correct in situations where the Reynolds number is very low. He's wildly incorrect for things like stones and cannonballs and blocks of wood falling distances of tens to hundreds of feet in air. I don't see anything obvious in the passage I linked to that shows he has any awareness of his statements being ''limited'' to things like inflated bladders or gossamer or feathers and not applying to stones and cannonballs and blocks of wood. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith]] 16:04, 6 May 2007 (EDT)
Here's a very interesting link: [http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/16/2/2 The Legend of the Leaning Tower]:
:The finding mentioned by Commander Scott, namely that objects of different mass fall at the same rate in a vacuum, is associated with a single person (Galileo) and a single place the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The culprit is Vincenzio Viviani, Galileo's secretary in the final years of his life.
:We owe many of the Galilean legends to Viviani's warm biography of the Italian scholar. One is the story of how Galileo climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa and "in the presence of other teachers and philosophers and all the students" showed through repeated experiments that "the velocity of moving bodies of the same composition, but of different weights, moving through the same medium, do not attain the proportion of their weight as Aristotle decreed, but move with the same velocity"....
:Science historians find Galileo's early experiments with falling bodies fascinating, for several reasons. One is that Galileo was not the first. As far back as the sixth century, other scholars who doubted Aristotle's account of motion had also experimented with falling bodies and concluded that Aristotle was wrong. They included several 16th-century Italians and one of Galileo's predecessors as professor at Pisa.
:[[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith]] 16:14, 6 May 2007 (EDT)