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On the shoulders of ancients
03 July 2009 — 03 July 2009
British Society for the History of Science
According to the entrenched wisdom, modern science began in the 17th century when Isaac Newton's dynamics based on the newly discovered law of inertia replaced Aristotle's outmoded dynamics. It's time for this wisdom to be overhauled, says Alex Bellamy, a historian and philosopher of science from the London School of Economics.
The standard proofs that Aristotle denied the law of inertia are invalid, says Bellamy. Moreover, research published in the 1960s suggests that Newton himself argued that Aristotle and other ancients were already aware of his first law of motion, he says. "If Newton was right, the foundation of the conventional view of scientific and cultural modernity based on a 17th
century scientific revolution in dynamics collapses."
Bellamy will make his case in a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the British Society for the History of Science in Leicester on Friday 3 July. Newton's law of inertia, also known as his first law of motion, states that "Every body perseveres in its state of resting or of moving uniformly straight ahead, except insofar as it is compelled to change that state by
impressed forces."
Newton himself noted that "All those ancients knew the first law [of motion] who attributed to atoms in an infinite vacuum a motion which was rectilinear, extremely swift and perpetual because of the lack of resistance...Aristotle was of the same mind".
"Newton's insight requires a new radical reconstruction of the emergence of classical dynamics," argues Bellamy. "Rather than there being a sudden revolution in the 17th century, we need to think more of an evolutionary development of Aristotelian dynamics in its numerous problem-solving revisions over two millennia," he says.
http://www.bshs.org.uk