Aristotle Vs Galileo

The concepts of mass and energy help explain the motion of objects and even describe how the planets move in an orbit. The very first theories postulated by the Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle built the foundation for what is to become the modern physics and started a unique paradigm on the world view. Followed by the disproval of his theories by the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, the English physicist Newton in turn came up with a new set of laws to accurately describe the phenomenons of the “Heavens” and the “Earth”. The core of the two different approaches of Aristotle and Newton were similar in that all objects had a “natural” state of motion, that objects tend to stay at rest. As Aristotle’s theories were intuitive and agreed …show more content…
The core of Aristotle’s theories were based on the belief that the Earth was the centre of the universe and it was at rest. He believed that every object in the universe had its destined position, or its natural state. His ideas suggested that the heavens represented perfection, that heavenly objects never change, and all heavenly motions were circular, a perfect shape according to him. He also claimed that elements, which he believed there were four: fire, air, water, and earth, in the order of increasing mass, on the earth were imperfect, that they change over time. Aristotle conceded that every object consisted of these said four elements and that they had specific properties. For instance, the air’s natural tendency was to go up into the sky and the earth would fall towards the centre of the Earth and thus, falling was considered a natural motion. He added that heavy objects fall faster than light objects because heavy objects contained more “earth” in them while light objects had more “air” in them. In order to prove his point, he carried out an experiment of dropping a cannon ball and a feather at the same height, where the feather ended up falling slower than the cannon ball. However, his experiment was flawed in that he did not take account of an important factor, air …show more content…
After about 2000 years had passed, the Italian Scientist Galileo Galilei was the first to challenge Aristotle’s theories and noticed that it was the Earth pulling the objects, not the objects’ natural tendency to fall towards the ground. In his experiment at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, he dropped two spheres of different masses to demonstrate that the speed of which the objects fall is equal and independent of their mass. In addition, he discovered that the accelerations of the two falling objects were practically the same if the air resistance was very small. However, he did not know why they would fall at the same rate of acceleration. Then Newton expanded on Galileo’s work and postulated his theories of motion to support this phenomenon and brought a complete shift in paradigms as a