George+Week+Two

Aristotle's work in physics just emphasizes the importance of mathematical evidence for anything related to physics. His contributions to biology and philosophy may have been great, but his ideas about physics set back science. If he used the observational and experimental techniques that he used for his biological research for physics Copernicus and Galileo would not have been ostracized. Aristotle's ideas dealing with motion had so many flaws and could be picked apart in numerous ways, but people did not challenge his ideas because of his reputation. If Aristotle had based his ideas of physics on math instead of philosophy, his ideas of motion would have crumbled and science would have been able to progress much earlier than it did. The biggest problem I have with Aristotle is with his ideas on gravity. His ideas were basically just a wild guess, but somehow it was accepted as fact, despite being so simple to disprove. Although Aristotle did come up with bogus ideas and passed them off as fact, he is not the only person to blame. People blindly accepted his ideas as fact and did not try to disprove or reconfirm what he said. This just shows the importance of backing up scientific claims with facts and evidence, and for physics that means backing up ideas with math.

In Dr. Robert Hatch's article he states that "Copernucus: Bequeathed the problem of explaining away Aristotelian physics in moving earth system"(Hatch, 1A), but I think this is incorrect. In either the book that he published or in his short paper, Copernicus gave and example that tried to bring up questions about Aristotelian physics. He said that if someone dropped something from the top of a moving ship, that the item would not be left behind the ship as the Aristotelian view of physics would predict.