The paper really doesn’t seem to affect my main points, aside from giving details that would be relevant to asking why Aristotle didn’t get to Gailileo, and what in detail he said? I am not denying that he gave a qualitative description of motion in a fluid. What I am denying is that this can be characterized as “the domain in which humanity conducts our business” or “everyday life” or similar. It is at best a medium chunk of everyday life, and the schoolboy playing football would be completely correct in saying “You can barely say anything about how the football moves!”.
As an example, the paper gives the following challenge:
This shows that a heavier body falls faster than a lighter body, precisely as Aristotle states in (f) and that equal bodies fall faster in a less dense medium, as Aristotle states in (g). The last relation must in fact be compared with Aristotle’s relation (h). Finally, at equal weight and density, there is also an effect by the size of the body, as Aristotle states in (i) … His factual statements are all correct. Hard to claim this is not based on good observation. If the reader thinks all this is “intuitive” and “self-evident”, he should ask himself if he would have been able today to come up with such an accurate and detailed account of the true motion of falling object
I claim that plenty of clever schoolchildren, who have no knowledge of Newtonian physics, would’ve figured out that heavier bodies fall faster, that denser mediums slow bodies more, that larger bodies of the same mass are slowed more, and that “once the effect of the agent causing a violent motion is exhausted, the violent motion ceases”. The hardest part of this to figure out is the effect of size—otherwise the difficulty isn’t in knowing these facts, but rather in realizing that you know them and codifying them (which, to be clear, is extremely valuable!), and in hypothesizing that these are the only factors (e.g. blue objects don’t fall faster, all that matters is weight, density, and size (bonus points if you deduce that shape matters)).
There is one thing that plenty of children wouldn’t know: that the heavenly bodies move in circles in the sky over the course of a day (I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of adults, when asked “how do the stars move in the sky over the course of a day?”, wouldn’t know the correct answer). I’m not sure how much of this is an artifact of sleeping indoors—maybe hunter gatherer children all find that obvious.
The paper really doesn’t seem to affect my main points, aside from giving details that would be relevant to asking why Aristotle didn’t get to Gailileo, and what in detail he said? I am not denying that he gave a qualitative description of motion in a fluid. What I am denying is that this can be characterized as “the domain in which humanity conducts our business” or “everyday life” or similar. It is at best a medium chunk of everyday life, and the schoolboy playing football would be completely correct in saying “You can barely say anything about how the football moves!”.
As an example, the paper gives the following challenge:
I claim that plenty of clever schoolchildren, who have no knowledge of Newtonian physics, would’ve figured out that heavier bodies fall faster, that denser mediums slow bodies more, that larger bodies of the same mass are slowed more, and that “once the effect of the agent causing a violent motion is exhausted, the violent motion ceases”. The hardest part of this to figure out is the effect of size—otherwise the difficulty isn’t in knowing these facts, but rather in realizing that you know them and codifying them (which, to be clear, is extremely valuable!), and in hypothesizing that these are the only factors (e.g. blue objects don’t fall faster, all that matters is weight, density, and size (bonus points if you deduce that shape matters)).
There is one thing that plenty of children wouldn’t know: that the heavenly bodies move in circles in the sky over the course of a day (I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of adults, when asked “how do the stars move in the sky over the course of a day?”, wouldn’t know the correct answer). I’m not sure how much of this is an artifact of sleeping indoors—maybe hunter gatherer children all find that obvious.