[graemep]

IF he was the first to do the rolling balls down the slope it is still important.

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.