How Did Pre-Modern People Understand Gravity?
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- Опубліковано 6 жов 2024
- When we think of gravity, we tend to think of Isaac Newton. But even before Newton, people knew that things fell down towards the ground. But did they ever ask why? Well, yes they did! But to understand how they understood gravity, we have to understand how they understood the universe more broadly.
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Works cited and recommendations for further reading:
-M.R. Wright. Cosmology in Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1995).
-Thomas Aquinas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Translated by Richard J. Blackwell, Richard J. Spath, and W. Edmund Thirlkel (London: Routledge, 1963).
All images used in this video are either my own, in the public domain, under fair use, or under creative commons (whence they shall be credited appropriately)
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Outro music: Laid Back Guitars by Kevin MacLeod, CC BY-SA 4.0
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#medievalhistory #medieval #middleages #history #educational #antiquity #ancienthistory #ancientphilosophy #aristotle #plato #philosophy #historyofscience #elements #gravity #isaacnewton
My main thought at the beginning when you were talking about fire and air rising, and the sun and stars being made of fire and whatnot, was “Huh this actually makes more sense than I thought it would” (I know it’s not true, but like let’s be real, we all thought the sun was made of fire as kids)
Forgive the ancients for not using their nuclear reactors as a better metaphor for what the sun does. 😅
idk, I consider the Sun to be made of fire, and I've had dinner with Hans Bethe.
History is full of people who were at the top of the heap and made whole careers out of being wrong but for good reasons. Logic is a tool that can hit you in the thumb sometimes.
@@brianedwards7142 Kettering's Law: Logic is an organized way of going wrong with confidence.
I had a solar system book, very early.
-It does look like a fireball.
Once upon a time in university I took a great course in history of technology/technique, and there it was explained that sure the Aristotelian speculations were propagated in scholastic circles, but the working of gravity and classical mechanics were way better understood in the professions that actually used classical mechanics: architects, civil engineers, shipbuilders and military engineers - with one notable example that the working of ballistic trajectories were well understood already in Roman times.
Yes. It’s interesting that we can often use what we don’t understand.
Competence before comprehension...
I read recently that the invention of gunpowder artillery stimulated the invention of new techniques for calculating trajectories. Interestingly though, the math quickly surpassed the manufacturing abilities of gun makers, so for a long time in the 16th century, the knowledge of how to accurately aim guns over long distances far outstripped the abilities of any gun.
@@johnoglesby-vw7ck Yeah, but in this historical context it was a very sad condemnation of the scholastics hanging on to the obviously nonsense of the Aristotelian mechanics.
@@KitagumaIgen Gotcha, and understood... my pondering lately is more cognitive, hence that vague c9
Why can’t conspiracy theories be something cool like the 4 spheres of elements
Perhaps that would be considered too outlandish and mystical compared to deliberately ignoring or circumventing a few key details in modern understandings.
I guess because the people who wrote these cool theories in the past were actually smart people, trying to use their brain to the best of their ability and general knowledge of their era to explain a real phenomenon. People like them today will learn modern science and agree with it, and then focus on the fringes. Modern conspiracy theorists, by exclusion, are not the brightest of us, and can't really imagine fun and interesting ways to explain stuff.
The Illuminati are concealing the truth of the luminiferous aether from us. My evidence of this is that the luminiferous aether is a beautiful idea and a really great word that deserves to be correct.
There is some cool stuff, one that i like is a dlc of flat earth. The ICE wall. Basically it's antartica wich is a wall with only 2 door who leed to a lot of New continents.
@@MrBeiragua
Psychological studies show that conspiracy deniers are the ones with the intellectual deficit.
Simply believing everything spoon fed to you by corporate media does not pass for intelligence with those of us who can think for ourselves.
Your self serving superiority is of no use to anyone, least of all yourself, ironically.
what I love about these older theories is that while they do get some elements hilariously wrong compared to our understanding there are a lot of theories and qualities that they get so close to what we understand now.
The elements being a big one, dividing reality into earth, wind, water and fire is not far from solid, liquid, gas and plasma, and while one obviously led to the other its fun to hear other theories they have that still held some logic even if they do go off on some pretty wild tangents.
It reminded me more of ACTUAL elements, in which their intrinsic heaviness kinda gets converted to their atomic weight, and the more dense something is of the same volume the heavier it is, and from that point we aren’t actually too far off from where we came
Things like that is why dumb questions like “why does gravity exist” are important questions
That struck me too. I thought it was actually a pretty sensible explanation. Even if it wasn't the fully developed reasoning, it is almost as fully developed as we have today in that we can describe the effect and predict gravity, but we still don't have a carrier like gravitons. Even if we agree that curvature of space-time is the root cause, such as why two falling objects will accelerate towards each other as they fall, in their own inertial frame of reference, they will be drawn together with increasing velocity, somewhat akin to how two bodies of mass would be drawn together -- or exactly. We can describe this as the field, but is that any different than the ether? Earth, water, air, and fire seem to match their observations and do so in an intelligent way. What I'm more curious about is how biomass fits into that view of the world. How are plants and animals created from those elements? The act of burning wood produces smoke (air), and fire, so I guess plants and trees must be a combination of those, and animals with their blood (water) must be a combination of water and earth I guess? At least gravity in these terms seems to bring some order to the chaos.
That is why i love to look to the explanations ancient humans gave to the universe.
They gave perfectcly logical responses, that were yet incorrect. It makes me think how much of our current theories, that feel right and have logic by their side, will be proven wrong by humans in the future with a method superior to our current scientific one.
@@arthurcosta4643 There won’t be any new discovery that’ll disprove any of the established scientific theories…
The scientific method is already essentially trying to prove yourself wrong until you’re no longer able to do so.
Everything we “know” to be scientifically correct is 99.9% true.. and the stuff we *could* be wrong about, we admit we don’t fully understand.
Einstein’s Relativity didn’t make Newton’s theory on gravity wrong.. it just expanded on it.
Quantum Physics didn’t suddenly make all of Chemistry irrelevant.. it just provided a deeper insight into it’s mechanics.
@@R.B. No they don't. Cold smoke moves down, air doesn't move up as can be verified by climbing mountain and see there is less and less of it as you go up, water (vapor) somehow moves up when you heat it - their explanation was nonsense if you took more than 5 seconds to look at it, they just ignored all the evidence to the contrary...
The trifecta of a great UA-cam find for me:
1. An interesting question
2. that I don’t already know the answer to
3. that is answered in a complete and satisfying way
Well done!
4. Read by somebody who isn't just doing a version of the Jungle Cruise cadence.
This is one sentence
What Newton did was this:
1. explaining that moving things have an inertia that doesn't disappear, except by friction,
2. he determined that all orbits are conical sections depending on the quantity of the inertia and its direction,
3. he determined the formula F=G·M·m/r² for the force of two mutually gravitating bodies.
4. generalizing ballistic parables (objects on earth) and heavenly bodies (planets), so that the same laws governed the "heavens" and the "earth".
His contribution *_should not_* be underestimated, he use to be ranked much higher than Einstein.
so how the hell did this dude who had no high-powered telescopes or stuff understand that orbits are conical and figure out the formula that's genuinely amazing
@@piyo744Math
@@piyo744 i think kepler had already done that part
he should not be underestimated, but its clear why Eistein (and the poeple he worked with) is ranked higher - his view was very contrary to what we think when we look around.
@@xBINARYGODxthey are ranked higher because the stood on the shoulder of giants.
Holy shit. A clear title, clear presentation without theatre or filler. A rare treat indeed.
As the cherry on top he adds a proper description that is not just a copy paste of links and promotion of their own stuff. Subbed!
Great video. It helped me understand why the heliocentric model met so much resistance. The geocentric world-view was that the Earth is literally the centre of the universe and hence stuff "naturally" want to move towards there - and what we observe as gravity. So Copernicus would have to explain how gravity on Earth works in a heliocentric model. Thanks for the exposition.
what i really like about the elements is that all of them are different matter states
I wonder what the element for Bose-Einstein condensate would be.
@@hebercluff1665 Aether?
@@brainzpvz2592 in order of hot to cold, Bose-Einstein condensate is colder than "earth" / solids. If we translate this to the Greek elements, it would be a sphere even lower than earth. Aether was supposed to be higher fire / plasma.
Oh well. Aether is probably the best we're going to get.
Depending on what really counts for something to be a "state of matter", there are more than four, and I wonder if we just say that there's three or four because of that ancient historical theory of matter... Like how there are only five senses, five tastes on the tongue, seven colors in the rainbow, because there are seven planets... you know, all those mystical single digit numbers.
Is superconductivity a state of matter? Is crystalline structure? Is the triple point a state of matter? Is a colloid a state of matter? What is butter, a solid or liquid? At eight billion degrees centigrade, the weak force and electromagnetic force symmetry becomes 'unbroken' so weak bosons have infinite range; is this a state of matter? If you're not familiar with beta decay, imagine a form of light which is electrically charged and transforms quarks and electrons into each other when it shines on them. Is a quark-plasma condensate a state of matter? Does something need inertia to be "matter"?
This is the first video of your channel that I've watched, and I am really impressed by the quality of your research and presentation. This is the kind of content that makes the internet so great. Thanks!
Couldn't agree more. This is the first video on this channel I've watched also. So interesting, clear, and informative. Definitely going to watch it again so the heavy ideas sink through the air that makes up the rest of my brain!
I didn't know that Kepler suggested matter attracts matter, Learn something new every day.
Bullialdus suggested inverse square gravity when Newton was three years old.
Huygens derived his expression for centrifugal force in his 1673 paper. This expression plus Kepler's 3rd law made it trivial to demonstrate that inverse square works for circular orbits. Which had been done well before Principia by Hooke, Wren and Halley.
I believe it was Pierre Gassendi who made Kepler's model the mainstream model accepted by general consensus. Gassnedi observed the 1631 transit of Mercury predicted by Kepler, thus establishing his model made more accurate predictions than models from Galileo, Copernicus or Ptolemy.
But they did not have the mathematical prowess to demonstrate inverse square gravity implies all of Kepler's laws. Which is why Halley approached Newton in 1684. Halley was stunned to learn that Newton had already done this seven years earlier in 1677!
I like that you debunk the notion that the theory sprang forth solely from Newton's brain when he was sitting under the apple tree. I'd like to see more discussion of the contribution of Huygens, Hooke, Wren and Halley preceding Principia. Sometimes we tend to give all the credit to a single person when it is a group effort.
A similar thing happens with Einstein and relativity. The way it was taught to me in high school you'd think that everybody was convinced in the accuracy of newtonian physics until Einstein had an epyphany and changed everything.
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" - Newton in a 1675 letter to Hooke.
I think Kepler was also the first to consider a principle much like our modern understanding of work and energy.
Newton made use of impulse and momentum in his F=ma, but energy as a physical quantity wasn't mainstream until much later.
No, not sometimes. All the time we give credit to a single person when virtually everything is discovered by groups of people sharing ideas over time.
Now I'm madly curious as to how non European cultures viewed gravity.
It probably never occurred to alot of people, down is down up is up
@@ryanw1511Mayans are widely regarded as some of the best astronomers of the pre scientific societies, Inca developed very robust mathematic systems, the Indus Valley had sewer systems more advanced than the European.
I highly doubt gravity was not given advanced interpretations as the ones seen in the video.
@santiagofernandezdelcastil1166
For sure there we plenty of advanced civilizations that accomplished alot, I'm just saying the concept of gravity is a bit esoteric, like once you learn about it, it makes sense but could easily be one of those things you've never thought of. im also referring to the average person l, I'm sure there were plenty of great minds that pondered the phenomenon
@@ryanw1511 ah yeah, the average person, even in our time, doesn’t sit down to learn and ponder certain questions. But I’d assume some smart people at the time wondered by the hell things fell to the ground hahaha
@santiagofernandezdelcastil1166
Yeah exactly, and with the whole flat earth movement I'm constantly reminded of that lol
What a tremendous channel. Your content has always been good - but as it has improved over time, your presentational style has gone up massively. Well done!
Thanks! I'm always trying to improve my content, so I'm glad to see people notice it!
I find it interesting that often we assume people in the past did not question or did not have diverse ideas about the nature of things, that they just believed what they were told. Sure, maybe that was true for most people, but academically there was a diversity of views and arguments. S lot of this reasoning was proven faulty, but it made sense in the context of the era and their intuition.
We believe what we are told, lol. How many of us actually checked Einsteins equations ourselves?
@@AverageAlien Totally. If we are put 500 years ago, would we be able to discover electricity or prove it to them?
@@josepheridu3322 no 99% of people don't even know how a battery works
So basically Just Like today? Who knew? /s
But seriously, it's Just Natural given that we are essentially still the Same species we were 5000 years ago... Just slightly more advanced by stumbling 3 steps Forward and 2 steps back
@@yorckyorck.scholtz7805 True, but it is quite sad that people are so arrogant today as "we know better know" when in fact they don't know much. They know someone else knows and build stuff, but they are pretty ignorant. At least people in the past had basic skills even to survive on the wild, we don't. Not saying living in the past was better, it wasn't, but feeling arrogant or superior to them is such an immature attitude.
Newton and Einstein have a drink in a bar.
Einstein states : Maybe it's not the train that's moving but the Earth beneath it.
Newton replies : What's a "train"?
To be fair, you could probably explain what a train was to Newton quite easily, since he lived right at the dawn of industrialization.
@@tbotalpha8133yeah, he'd probably get the jist of "a series of connected carts pulled along a fixed road by a powered machine." His follow up would probably be about how the machine is powered, but he'd probably understand steam power too. Newton was a pretty smart guy, I hear.
@@thompkins6796 To improve that. Steam Machine powered Minecart.
@@thompkins6796Newton would have thought in terms of momentum and force, because the concept of "energy" wasn't invented until after the invention of the steam engine.
@@juliavixen176 he would need the concepts translated to terms and examples he was familiar with, for sure, but with an afternoon of discussion of "energy" and "work", he'd have a good understanding of the function and physics behind a train. But we've beaten this silly joke to death twice over by actually thinking about it 🤷🏼♂️
Just stumbled across this gem of a channel and have been binging its contents. Please keep this up if it's something you like doing, your presentation and speaking skills make these videos very easy to watch and learn from. Super interesting material you've obviously worked hard to curate.
Thanks! This means a lot to me. And don't worry, I love doing this and plan on continuing for a long time still
I am thankful that the algorithm suggested this video. You are a delight. Keep up the good work!
Regarding what you said about how "love" and "hate" shouldn't be taken literally as emotions, I think it's important to note that we _still_ do this in the sciences. We describe things that are attracted to water as "hydrophilic" and things that repel water as "hydrophobic". These directly translate to "water loving" and "water fearing". It's not _quite_ love and hate, but it's very close. We even use "-phobic" to describe people who hate certain groups.
Very glad to have been recommended this channel. Cheers from Brazil.
Thank you for the calm but sharp presentation!
The placement of the elements into spheres really makes how one can perceive how people in the past thought and how they believe how things work. They compartmentalize certain things into layers and other concepts; an easier way for them to understand and explain.
The samething that makes it move downward is the samething that makes it feel heavy.
It stands to reason!
Not true. Even in zero gravity objects have mass. They do not weigh anything, but they have mass and it is harder to move a massive object than a less massive object even in space.
@@MantasVEVOThats not entirely true either, theres no friction in most places with no gravity (technically theres gravity everywhere). Pushing a large "massive" object is actually just gravity disguising itself yet again, even in space, it's simply you trying to exert yourself against the gravity of the object itself and your own relative gravity. Its way, way easier for example to launch a rocket off the moon than it is to launch one from earth, you barely need a fraction of the fuel to get into orbit. Because indeed, OP is correct in an ooga booga caveman kinda way. obviously there's the issue of you going flying in fhe other direction when you push something however, thus in space, with nothing around, it would feel as if you had been the one pushed away, and the object remained static in a relativity standpoint. In a special relaticistic standpoint however.... Well its complicated 🤣 not enough hours in the day
Just found your channel, it is great! They actually weren’t just making up crazy theories back then, there was some logic to it. More logic than I expected really. Anyways, you just gained a subscriber!
turns out the average person before you were born was (gasp) not a lunatic! and they were doing the best they could with the information they had, just like you are, presumably.
@@xXx_Regulus_xXxi genuinely really hope in the far future we're remembered like ancient philosophers. it would be so cool if we're wrong!
Now this is a type of channel I have been looking for! Great work, looking forward to more!
A thousand years from now someone is going to make a UA-cam video explaining how primitive Einstein's theory of gravity was compared to the modern theory of exotic quantum gravity.
Probably although I doubt youtube will still be used in a thousand years
This was very enlightening! It's easy to assume that people of the past were dumb because they didn't know things we all know, but they almost always came to reasonable conclusions with the information they had access to, and seeing that evolve as more information is obtained ( like the greater precision of telescopes showing the earth isn't the center of the universe) is fascinating
I've been reading Robert Grosseteste's work on the topic. Quite interesting. He drew diagrams like where would things fall if you cut the world in half. He maintained that if you cut off a third of the place, water would first have to fall towards the center and fill a smaller sphere until it grew larger than the removed part. Only then would it begin to flood the remainder. Very smart understanding of gravity for the 13th century.
History *and* science! My kind of click-bait! I'd really enjoy hearing you explore the thoughts of Francis Bacon, if the idea pleases you. Thanks again.
I've got a looooong list of topics I want to cover, and there are definitely a couple related to Francis Bacon on there
Thanks! Honestly, you helped me see how the things that they thought were often quite logical, given the knowledge that they had.
It also explains why heliocentrism would be so controversial even without the theological issues.
Very well explained. Usually im a lil confused on science topics but i feel more informed now.
You almost ignore Descartes, and your short description of his theory is almost totally wrong. His gravitational theory was mathematically sound and in fact the big contender to Newton's back in the day (the geodesic missions to Lapland and Ecuador, 1736-37: measuring the shape of the earth to determine if Descartes or Newton was right). Look up the details -- it is fascinating!
Apologies. I skipped over him quickly because the video was focused on Ancient and Medieval views. I just wanted to acknowledge that Newton and Kepler weren't the only ones thinking about gravity and motion in the early modern period but hadn't planned on going into it much further
What was Descartes theory of gravity actually like?
@@alvedonaren It is a slightly complex story. Firstly, Descartes threw away everything that the ancient philosophers had said (except Democrite and the Atomists, which he somewhat appreciated and was inspired by). Secondly, he thought that the whole universe originally was a solid, rock-like mass without characteristics, pure matter. The Supreme Being inplanted motion in this pure, solid matter, which cracked into particles of different sizes and shapes. The particles continue to grind against each other endlessly, which is why they continue to change size and shape, creating "whirlpools" that catch bigger chunks of matter. The smallest and finest matter is vacuum, and gravitation is simply "whirlpools" of vacuum particles. In theory and mathematically, this works, but the predictions it makes about gravitation's manifestations don't hold. Newton predicted that the Earth was flattened at the poles, which turned out to be correct, Descartes predicted that the Earth was pointy at the poles.
I love Descartes. He was wrong, but he was wonderfully wrong. And his cosmology is an early attempt at a scientific Theory Of Everything. For him, only matter and motion existed, and everything we experience in the universe is made of matter particles in different states of motion and shapes: light is made of very small, very fast-moving particles; fire is almost the same kind of particle, but slightly bigger and not that fast-moving; and the atmosphere is made of rather heavy particles that move slowly, but they are not as heavy and slow-moving as the particles in water or rocks.
I'd also talk about the equine theory of gravity. You seem to be putting Descartes before the horse.
Very informative.
But to be fair, gravity as an intrinsic quality of heavyness vs. gravity as an intrinsic quality of mass to bend spacetime isn't really that far off.
We are just as far away to understand the real cause and take it for granted.
The current best theory says all energy contorts spacetime and things naturally move according to the shape of this contortion.
Good stuff here!
Very interesting and well put together video. I like how you explain their models, and then talk about how they could have come to that conclusion and why they may have.
I feel the need to compliment you on the spot on pronounciation of foreign words, including Greek, Latin and French. Well done and very impressive!
Fascinating video. Didn't even know I wanted to know this. Earned a subscriber.
fantastic video. Didn't know about the connection between the four elements and tbe spheres. Stuff like this is why I love youtube
Great video, I'm glad you popped up in my recommended. Keep up the good work!
also this video helped me understand the song Pneuma by Tool better lol
Incredible work here, 10/10 elegance in your storytelling. Great stuff man
Years ago I read a now half-remembered article about the notion of 'impetus'. It was an imperfect model of ballistic movement. Ask someone to draw the path of a bullet fired horizontally, and you will often get a picture similar to the impetus idea: a completely horizontal movement for a long way, then a fast dropoff to the ground, rather than a wide parabolic section. The idea is that you impart 'impetus' to an object, and then it 'runs out' in time and drops. Road Runner cartoons work on this principle: the coyote dashes off a cliff. He goes horizontally, then thinks 'uh-oh' as he runs out of impetus, holds up a sign reading 'Bye...' and falls straight down. Somehow there is something intuitively appealing about this.
I imagine this is due to wind resistance. A parabolic arch path only really works when the object continues at a fixed speed rather than slowing due to resistance. Throw any object heavier than water through a swimming pool. It slows down and drops very quickly. So do objects which travel through the air.
That was a very helpful clarification of ancient views that have become strange and incomprehensible.
Wow! This video is great, i found it really interesting that even if their theory was kinda crazy, it still made sense. 🔥
it only sounds crazy because it conflicts with what you know about gravity. if you take that away the theory in the video becomes the most plausibly correct one you've heard of
I appreciate you disclosing that your area of expertise is western thought. So many historical science videos only talk about western ideas but treat it as though it’s world history.
great production value and great information. needs more views and subs
Wow i really enjoyed this. Great presentation.
A lot of people like to laugh at older scholars for getting things wrong but it’s really telling that these ancient scholars are likely still more intelligent then their modern day critics
The fact most people live knowing as much about the world as the people from pre newtons time is crazy
Ah, yes, studium historiae-a zeal for the story.
This is a question I have long pondered.
One of the better Elden Ring Lore videos in a while. =)
Great video, subscribed. I think this goes a long way toward showing that premodern people weren't just blithering idiots making stuff up, but drew logical inferences from what they observed, just like scientists do today!
As CS Lewis wrote in The Discarded Image (a book I highly recommend to anyone who found this video interesting!):
"We can no longer dismiss the change of [cosmological] Models as a simple progression from error to truth. No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomena known at any given period, and each succeeds at getting in a great many. But also, no less surely, each reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age's knowledge. Hardly any battery of new facts could have persuaded a Greek that the universe had an attribute as repugnant to him as infinity; hardly any such battery could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical."
Good job algo, good job.
Subbed.
Great video, kepler is very underrated apparently
Your answering questions I never knew I had
When you think about it, Anaximander basically described the heat death of the universe and entropic forces leading to self organization.
Très bonne vidéo, même en tant qu'étudiant qui vient de finir ma L3 d'Histoire j'ai appris beaucoup de choses 👍
Fascinating video! I do think it's interesting how you say that after newton, "gravity was no longer an intrinsic quality of heaviness or lightness, rather it was the property of mass" when mass is more or less, and especially at the time, mearly a measurement of how "heavy" a thing is.
Very interesting video. The main question it left me with was how pre-modern believers in heliocentrism (or anything other than geocentrism) like Copernicus understood gravity.
I love this topic choice! I wonder what about other knowledge that is obvious today?
Great Video!
Something that I found interesting in watching one of Veritasium’s videos, is that even Isaac Newton was uncomfortable with the idea that he supported, that gravity is some invisible force.
Bland set background. Great video voice. Your voice reminds me a lot of thubprint (metal scrapping youtuber).
Bartholomaeus Anglicus sounds interesting never knew him thanks!
I really enjoyed the video. Thanks for sharing!
Very good info!!!!
Thank you for asking. They imagined an impetus, which was kind of a quantity driving the thrown item forwards, until this impetus was consumed, and then the item fell down.
It is cool that the earth water wind fire idea is at least a recognition of different states of matter. Solid liquid gas and plasma. Where, generally speaking, they are right about the density of these attributes.
I wonder what they thought about liquid metal?
Once again, thank you for the video. You can see the reasoning of all the different views over time. And it's science that corrects.
This channel is great. Thank you for your hard work, making this video!
I am quite puzzled by one thing. The ancients were well aware of all five of the Platonic solids, and yet, they did not include the most beautiful of all (the dodecahedron) in their design. Is it because it does not have triangular faces? Perhaps, but neither does the cube, and _it_ was included. I guess one is left to conclude that the only platonic solid with five-sided faces was *the Fifth Element* , which was beyond the ken of the ancients.
Really nice video. Well done!
Thank you! This is very interesting! Now I finally do understand what "hot" and "cold" meant, while before I believed it to be literal temperature. I wonder what "wet" and "dry" meant, though - I guess it must be not real moisture, either?
Wow, great video!
You know, while watching I could now very easily see how ancient people would have believed this. If I was in their time, I would have probably believed them myself.
Its only then that we realized that we aren't the center of the universe is when we thought of gravity.
But it makes you think; If in a sense the four elements was scrapped for what we know as gravity because of new evidence, who isn't to say that because of new evidence, our concept of gravity could change?
I love when UA-cam videos ask a question and I'm like I don't know, tell me. 🤣
What an interesting subject, and so well presented.
I subscribed, to see more of this, and I will check out the videos already made.
Now, that was fascinating.
Thanx for sharing knowledge
The video didn't even mention Galileo disproving that heavier objects fall faster, but it mentioned much more
You can tell the ancient geocentrists put a lot more thought into their work than modern ones 😅 I guess that’s because they lacked the measurements to disprove many aspects of their theories, something modern geocentrists must contend with
*_Fascinating!_* Recently, while researching my own book on the Big Bang, I encountered the story of Aristarchus of Samos who apparently believed a heliocentric universe instead of geocentric, but that his ideas were shot down by his peers because of the lack of apparent stellar parallax. If the Sun was at the center, then the stars should shift as the Earth swung around the Sun, and the lack of such parallactic shift would mean, in a Heliocentric model that the stars were *_insanely far away_* -- too far for their imaginations to fathom. Sometimes, logic can lead to a wrong conclusion if that logic is itself based on a false premise ("impossibility of distance").
😎♥✝🇺🇸💯
I once read that if Tycho Brahe’s extremely precise measurements had been just slightly more precise, like a factor 4 or 10, then he’d have seen stellar parallax..But he didn’t see any, so he concluded that geocentrism was correct.
@@peterknutsen3070 Thank you, Peter. I learn something new every day. After 74 years, this does *_not_* get old. I love it.
😎♥✝🇺🇸💯
I remember reading that people hypothesized that each celestial body had a radius with gravity pulling the objects inside of it and there were different rules outside those spheres, but Newton came up with the idea that gravity was universal and all bodies were pulling each other rather than just the planets pulling the nearby objects
This is well done. Subscribed.
5:22 It's settled, then. Water is wet.
It's amazing how we come up with theories like this and fully believe them, even the smartest of us throughout history.
It’s still happening today . Things we think we have an understanding of will be proven completely incorrect later
That drone footage at 2:33 looks so much Shetland 😌
Politics also affects what physics you chose to believe in. The Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1768 was written by Tories who wanted to combat the new ideas of the French Enlightenment and its Encylopédie of 1751, so they preferred Aristotle's concepts of earth and water having "gravity," whereas air and fire had "levity" to Newton's law of "universal gravitation." However, they said that experiments with vacuums created in glass jars had shown that light stuff also fell to the bottom, as did heavy stuff: there was no "levity"
Physics is experiment and theories based on those experiments.
Whoever keeps that in mind will never be confused by government initiatives
In his Principia, Newton actually first proves, then states exactly that 'The force which retains the moon in it's orbit is that force which we commonly call gravity'. Those are his words exactly.
In other words the word gravity had been in use for some time and was particularly relevant in ballistic calculations of cannon shot.
Gravity is the latin gravitas (heavyness, weight), so yes that word was not invented by Newton.
This is a wonderful video and you’ve definitely gained a subscriber in me
Thank you!
Well done!
Excellent video! Thank you!
You, my good sir, have gained a subscriber
Dès que t'as dit le mot "René Descartes" j'ai immédiatement su que t'es un de mes confrères québécois :)
Coupable 😉
Love how we cycled back to general relativity where gravity IS kind of an intrinsic property of matter... Actually the space itself
It perplexes me that the late civilizations might perceive our laws and theories as foolish or uneducated, akin to our perception of older and ancient theories.
I like the idea that earth, water, air and fire represent the phases solid, liquid, gas and plasma at STP
I always thought people were a bit dumb for believe some of the stuff Aristotle was putting out but what you said about bubbles, stones and earthquakes makes a lot of sense
Thank you for the video.
Great video! I'd love to see one about how pre-modern people thought about our body's need for oxygen. I think I heard there was a theory that breathing was a cooling system for the heart?
I talk a bit about that in my very first video on Ancient medicine. At least by the time of Galen (2nd century CE) the air we breathe was thought to be mixed with the blood to nourish the body, and some of it was refined by the brain to create a sort of ethereal fluid passing through the nerves which allowed for movement. But there were other views before that which could also be cool to talk about!
Nicely done. As someone who is slightly familiar with the content of your presentation, I'm not sure you emphasize enough the plausibility of the pre-Copernican theories. Given all the available evidence, these were the best that could be developed at the time, and, until Kepler and then Newton, all the alternatives had bigger problems than these did. (The oddity, of course, is that our understanding of gravity is still very imperfect, potentially subject to future revolutions in thought almost as great as those already undergone.)
I'm really curious how people thought of heredity before genetics. People surely had a concept of children resembling their parents, perhaps even before we had language, but I've never heard of ancient theories of inheritance.
*Drops blood into water
I’m sure Aristotle has his theories about it.