Exploding Stars, Dead Dinosaurs, and Zombies by Andrew Root

Author:Andrew Root [Root, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-5064-4675-2
Publisher: Fortress Press
Published: 2017-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Wooton summarizes Aristotle’s position and Galileo moving beyond it. He says, “According to Aristotle there are two types of movement: natural movement, which is directed towards an end, and halts when an object arrives at its natural resting place; and forced movement, which continues only for so long as there is a mover acting on the moving object. As others had done before him, Galileo modifies the account of forced movement to include the idea of an impressed force. But he also invents a quite new type of movement, which he calls intermediate movement. Imagine a perfectly round ball standing on a perfectly smooth sheet of ice. The slightest touch will start it moving, and it will continue to move indefinitely. If this seems too much like an impractical abstraction, think of a river: it flows constantly, and yet the gradient is often minute. It seems that flowing water has almost no resistance to movement; otherwise one would be able to identify a slope that was not steep enough for a river to run down it. Aristotle held that the natural condition of all sublunary things is to be stationary, and that all movement naturally ends in the cessation of movement; Galileo was now suggesting that movement (if it is neither upwards nor downwards but sideways) might have no natural end.” Galileo, 43. ↵

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