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by mrguyorama
267 days ago
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Galileo may not have done the exact "drop balls off the tower" experiment but he did formally study gravity by rolling balls down a ramp and timing it, and that experiment would have shown that heavier things don't fall faster than lighter things (until you get to things being large enough that the gravity force between them is meaningfully increased, but they wouldn't have been able to do that). It still took like a thousand years for this to be experimentally demonstrated. The important part of this "thought experiment" in the history of science is that it is part of the shift to empiricism that really drove science. It was important to go from "Well they were smart and they said, so it must be true" to "I don't care how smart you are, what you say doesn't match the data" This is important, because "smart" people like Archimedes said a lot of stuff that was never true, but was taken as true for a millennia, often because it "sounded" right or obvious. More importantly, Archimedes could have done the exact same experiments that Galileo (and others) used to demonstrate he was not correct. There was no technological advancement required. He didn't, because the philosophy at the time was to "just think really hard about it" and "reason from first principles" and you would obviously get the right answer if only you are smart enough. Who needs data? You're smart and you thought hard about it, so you cannot be wrong! People should recognize how important that is to remember in the current world. |
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He still made a major contribution, but if other people had done the "drop balls of the tower" experiment before his time, then the move to empiricism was underway and that does make his contribution a lot less.
To be fair, I think we often think of things being achieved by a big breakthrough by an individual when the reality was that the big breakthroughs are the result of lots of small changes - Newton's "shoulders of giants".
Interesting, looking up that phrase, I find that was not original either, but goes back to at least the 12th century.