[ShabbosGoy]

> I agree with Weinberg that Aristotle understood physics worse than many schoolchildren do today. Which is not to say that Aristotle was stupid, but just that your knowledge is a function of the times you live in and the volume of past human thought you've had the privilege to learn from.

Would physics as a discipline exist in its current form without thinkers like Aristotle? That’s the more important question for me.

[mannykannot]

The course of science is shaped by the natural world at least as much by people. It needs people with the curiosity of Aristotle, but how it proceeds depends also on what nature reveals to them, and on what they can pry from nature by using what they have learned so far. My guess is that something like our physics has emerged (or will, relatively shortly) on every world populated with intelligent beings.

[ShabbosGoy]

> My guess is that something like our physics has emerged (or will, relatively shortly) on every world populated with intelligent beings.

The anthropic principle states as much. I like that you used “intelligent beings” instead of humans, because I could imagine a scenario where synthetic or artificially intelligent beings would arrive to the same conclusions, upon making the same observations of their natural world.