Talk:Scientific Revolution/Archive 2

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Talk archives for Scientific Revolution (current talk page)
<< 1 < Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3 > 2 >>

archived 14:59, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Contents

This article really needs focus and improvement

I just did a comparison and found that scarcely any significant changes have been made since this article was designated History of Science Collaboration of the Month. Let me make a few random comments:

I think this topic is very important; as Herbert Butterfield said:

Since [the Scientific R]evolution overturned the authority in science not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world — since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics — iit outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes — mere internal displacements within the system of medieval Christendom.

Can we tell why Butterfield thought it was so important and why Shapin doubts that it took place? This article scarcely tries.

[Butterfield thought there was a scientific revolution and that it was so important because he mistakenly thought Newton's physics wholly overthrew Aristotelian physics. See 'McCluskey and Butterfield on the Scientific Revolution' below. Logicus 13:00, 11 September 2006 (UTC)]

Looking through its sections I'd rate them:

  • Introduction — Fair
  1. Emergence of the revolution — Fair
  2. Early and medieval views of science — Long, but weak; only need to summarize the medieval world view
  3. Infusion of classical texts — Superfluous Delete
  4. New scientific developments — Just a catalogue Delete
  5. Theoretical developments — Needs organization
  6. Methodological developments — Needs organization and additions; its more than just mechanization and empiricism (see the range of approaches facing Newton that Westfall discusses in the first chapter of Never at Rest
    1. Mechanization — Fair
    2. Empiricism — Even Koyré wouldn't buy this stereotype
  7. Postmodern critiques — What critiques are meant, citations please (If it can't be justified, delete it)

As a medievalist I shouldn't say this, but I'm disturbed to see an article on the Scientific Revolution beginning with a section on ancient science, and then going on to the recovery of ancient learning in the Twelfth Century. When asked to fix a starting point, I've always had the Scientific Revolution begin in 1543 with the publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus and Vesalius's Fabrica. Looking for an ending point, I fudge and make it the death of Newton in 1727.

Maybe we should start improvements to the article within something like those limits. It is an important topic. --SteveMcCluskey 02:57, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Proposed Outline

Rather than just gripe about it, I thought I'd put up an outline for a new article.
I've also decided to copy the present article to User:SteveMcCluskey/Scientific Revolution where everyone is invited to engage in radical revisions. I'll be away the rest of today so I won't make many changes until tomorrow.
"The desire to edit is a basic human need."
--SteveMcCluskey 15:05, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Introduction
  1. Significance of the "Revolution"
  2. Ancient and medieval background
  3. Transformational developments and their reception
    1. Copernicus's De revolutionibus
    2. Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica
  4. New Approaches to Nature
    1. The Mechanical Philosophy
    2. The Chemical Philosophy
    3. Empiricism
    4. Mathematization
  5. Subsequent Developments
    1. The New Astronomy
      1. Kepler
      2. Brahe
      3. Galileo
    2. The New Physics
      1. Galileo
      2. Newton's Principia
  6. Institutional changes
    1. The changing role of patronage
    2. Networks of communication
      1. Printing
    3. Scientific societies

Partial changes made

I've just dumped the changes I've made incorporating the first two sections of this outline into the article. In real life my inbasket is overflowing so I'm taking a wikibreak and will remove the working draft from my userpages.

The rest of the article is still a bit of a shambles -- as a work in progress it's still redundant (and even self-contradictory). A bit from the section on Post-Modern critiques (perhaps stressing Shapin more than unnamed "postmodern"critics) could go in the section on Significance of the "revolution".

See you in a month or so; have fun with this. --SteveMcCluskey 15:07, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Logicus comments

Before you implement any of this, could we please have a testable definition of a scientific revolution from you that you propose for the article ? And in which sciences you claim there were revolutions ?

McCluskey says “Needs organization and additions; its more than just mechanization and empiricism (see the range of approaches facing Newton that Westfall discusses in the first chapter of Never at Rest”

Its not even mechanisation and empiricism theses so far as I am aware, mechanism vanquished by Newton. Both theses fail. Could you please kindly list the range of approaches Westfall discusses for those who have not read him or don’t have him to hand ?


McC says: “When asked to fix a starting point, I've always had the Scientific Revolution begin in 1543 with the publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus and Vesalius's Fabrica. Looking for an ending point, I fudge and make it the death of Newton in 1727. Maybe we should start improvements to the article within something like those limits.”

I suggest not. I suggest the article should be more historiographical rather than asserting there was a scientific revolution in some specific period. If it wants to get into specific periodisations it should not fudge but give the conceptual reason why a specific date is given. Presumably you give 1543 for starter because you think there was ‘a Copernican revolution’, but there wasn’t as distinct from a heliocentric ‘revolution’ because Copernican project of saving the physical reality of the celestial spheres (by means of heliocentrism) failed with Tycho/Kepler and transits of comets. Given your Butterfield viewpoint, ironically you should especially note that not being a historian of science himself but only a follower of Duhem, he dated the revolution 1300-1800 as in his book title The Origin of Modern Science : 1300-1800 . The dating you give is like the original traditional 19th century type dating before Duhem’s major intervention to put the beginning back to the 14th century in the alleged overthrow of Aristotelian dynamics by Parisian impetus dynamics.
I appreciate its very difficult constructing coherent Wikipedia articles given participation policy, and also that we apparently fundamentally disagree about many issues, but you might like to consider the following rough note ideas for the style of an article that might possibly make it much more interesting than the present one and the way you are heading ?
“The traditional thesis of the alleged 'scientific revolution' as portrayed in the 19th century by such as Mach was that Aristotelian philosophy and physics was totally overthrown and replaced in the 17th century by Galileo's and then Newton's physics that allegedly fundamentally contradicted it and its alleged 'law of inertia'. However, at the turn of the 20th century the French physicist, philosopher and historian of science Pierre Duhem backdated the alleged fundamental contradiction and overthrow of Aristotelian physics to the 14th century scholastic impetus dynamics developed at his alma mater, Paris University, by clerics such as Jean Buridan, and of which he regarded the dynamics of Galileo and Newton as a continuous development. Thus followers of Duhem such as the Cambridge historian Butterfield, although not himself a historian of science, dated the scientific revolution as a transition that occupied the period 1300-1800, and Kuhn also followed Duhem in dating the overthrow of Aristotelian physics to the 14th century. Duhem's research led to the founding of the new 20th century academic subject 'history of medieval science' that was promoted by an unlikely alliance of Stalin and the Vatican, both of whom had an ideological interest in there being medieval science as Duhem had uncovered that was 'pre-bourgeois feudal' science corresponding to the feudal mode of production and was also 'clerical', whereby the Church had promoted rather than obstructed 'the scientific revolution'.

But in the 20th century reaction against Duhem led by such as Koyre, Maier and Drake, efforts were made to restore the alleged inertial-dynamics revolution to the 17th century by finding allegedly important conceptual discontinuties between scholastic impetus dynamics and Newton's law of inertia that was said to have eventually replaced Aristotle's, and that Duhem had supposedly overlooked. But in turn Duhem's supporters subjected the efforts of Koyre and Maier to robust criticism.

However, with respect to the project of pushing the alleged scientific revolution ever further back, for the last 20 years the historian of the philosophies of Aristotle's commentators, Richard Sorabji and his assistants, has argued that the alleged anti-Aristotelian physics revolution must be backdated even further than Duhem (and Kuhn) did to the physics of Philoponus in the 6th century. Thus on this basis the scientific revolution conceived as the overthrow of Aristotelian physics and replacement by Newton's would roughly be the period 600-1800.

But most significantly, against the common fundamental premise of all these theories of a scientific revolution, Newton and other scholars have claimed Aristotelian physics essentially observed the Principia's law of inertia, whereby if so it would follow there was no scientific revolution on this basis on which it was originally posited. Assessing these claims requires careful logical and conceptual analysis of both Aristotle's Physics and other Aristotelian works and also of Newton's Principia and other works that has yet to be undertaken by academic historians of science.

Beyond this original and core claim of a scientific revolution as an anti-Aristotelian inertial-dynamics revolution in physics, with lower and upper dates according to when its different proponents claim Aristotelian physics was overthrown and Newton's physics fully replaced it, claims of revolutions in other sciences have also been made, but mostly if not wholly with insufficient conceptual definition both of what constitutes a revolution in a science and of the theoretical system the overthrown science consisted of to determine whether there were or not. Claims have also been made of a methodological scientific revolution such as in the mechanisation, or the mathematisation or the empiricism of scientific research, but they have never been verified and are often easily refuted.

It is arguably evident from the leading historiography of the idea of 'the scientific revolution' by Floris Cohen that it is a radically degenerating and increasingly ill-defined concept, and for that reason, as Cohen fears, in imminent danger of dissolution as a fiction like that of the Renaissance, but to whose prevention Cohen's own forthcoming efforts at its regeneration are devoted. However, the question arises of whether it may be doomed for the deeper historiographical reason that Vico's project of constructing block periodisations by absolute discontinuities in history - of which Renaissance and the scientific revolution thesis are prime examples, as Butterfield's view demonstrated - is itself untenable like all alleged absolutes ? Or is it doomed for the more superficial reason that ..." Logicus 18:12, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Newton on the Scientific Revolution

The recent changes by Logicus rely heavily on the interpretation of a direct quotation from Newton, in which Newton claims that his first law of motion was already known to the ancient atomists and to Aristotle. Most Newton scholars recognize Newton's claims for the antiquity of his ideas as a recurring theme in his writings.'

An important and revealing study of Newton's attitude to the supposeed ancient lineage of his ideas is J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, "Newton and the 'Pipes of Pan'," Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 21, No. 2. (Dec., 1966), pp. 108-143. McGuire and Rattansi note that in the 1690s, Newton was preparing a series of classical scholia for the second edition of the Principia, in which he planned (according to various sources) to attribute his ideas to Pythagoras, Plato, Thales, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Democritus. He attributed the Copernican system to the Egyptians, and the atomic system to Epicurus, Democritus, Ecphantus, Empedocles, Zenocrates, Heraclides, Asclepiades, Diodorus, Metrodorus of Chios, Pythagoras, and Moschus the Phoenician.

The fact that Newton claimed that his ideas were in Aristotle or in other ancient sources, does not necessarily mean that they actually were. Primary sources like this require careful analysis by historians familiar with Newton, his life, his achievements, and in this case, with the content of Aristotle's Physics and its later influence. That is one of the reasons why Wikipedia cautions against the use of Primary sources and has a strict policy against Original Research. --SteveMcCluskey 01:33, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

McCluskey and Butterfield on the Scientific Revolution

The above changes proposed by Steve McCluskey on 26 August and subsequently apparently rely heavily on the interpretation of his quoted claim made by Butterfield being unquestionably true, namely that there was a scientific revolution that overthrew Aristotelian physics, But the fact that Butterfield and some others make this claim does not necessarily mean it is true. And Steve's proposal apparently violates the NPOV principle because the question of whether there was a scientific revolution is a matter of debate, which he seems to ignore. And the fact that Newton claimed his ideas were in Aristotle does not necessarily mean they were not. (So far as I am aware the McGuire and Rattansi article Steve quotes notably never discuss the truth-value of Newton's claim I quote, which has only ever been touched on by B.Cohen.) However, in citing Wikipedia's No Original Research principle, maybe Steve is trying to suggest my changes breach it, whereby his would not be breaching the NPOV principle. But as the following Wikipedia definition attests, mine do not:

“Original research is a term used in Wikipedia to refer to material placed in articles by Wikipedia users that has not been previously published by a reliable source. It includes unpublished material, for example, arguments, concepts, data, ideas, statements, or theories, or any new analysis or synthesis of published material that appears to advance a position - or, in the words of Wikipedia's co-founder Jimbo Wales, that would amount to a "novel narrative or historical interpretation".”

But (i) the Newton material I quoted was previously published by what Steve would surely regard as 'a reliable source', (ii) the view that there was no scientific revolution is not novel, (iii) the view that Aristotle essentially stated Newton's first law of motion in Physics 4.8 was also stated by Sir Thomas Heath in his 1949 Mathematics In Aristotle, for example, and is endorsed by most commentators, and in his 1908 Identity and Reality Meyerson reported it was the unanimous view of classics scholars at that time that the principle of inertia was presupposed by ancient Greek physics including both the atomists and Aristotle, but then sought to show they were wrong, the view accepted by his disciple Koyre. As for the claim that primary sources require careful analysis by historians familiar with the subject, agreed, but the problem is the quoted Newton claim never has had but has been largely ignored by academic historians of science, possibly because it challenges the conventional academic wisdom straight from the horse's mouth.. There is also the question of whether historians of science have the requisite training in logic and philosophy of science to be capable of the logically valid careful conceptual analysis required in such matters. In particular apparently the only academic historian of science to have discussed the status of Newton's claim in a publication, namely Bernard Cohen, apparently dismissed it on the logically invalid ground that Aristotle denied the void, as though this entails he also thereby denied the law of inertia, thus overlooking the fact that Descartes, who Cohen claimed first asserted the law of inertia, also denied the void, as did Newton because he denied the possibility of gravitational action at a distance without any intervening medium. The law of inertia is not a logically existential assertion of the void, as Cohen and his mentor Koyre imagined, but rather a logically counterfactual conditional principle of the behaviour of a body subject to zero net impressed forces, and its truth-value is logically independent of the question of whether there is a void or not, as the logically more astute Descartes and Newton realised.

Butterfield's Blunder

Steve apparently proposes the article should be devoted to elaborating the doctrine that there definitely was a scientific revolution that overthrew scholastic philosophy and Aristotelian physics - as maintained by Butterfield and others - rather than be a more historiographical article on the debate about this controversial issue, which is surely required by the NPOV principle. But Butterfield did no original research in the history of science, and his exposition of the traditional thesis that there was a scientific revolution because there was an anti-Aristotelian inertial-dynamics revolution in which Newton's first law of motion contradicted and replaced Aristotle's doctrine of inertia and so wholly overthrew Aristotelian physics is one of the clearest most overt examples of the fallacy of confusing Aristotle's doctrine of gravitational resistance to motion with a doctrine of inertia. Butterfield's blunder here was as follows.

A traditional logical error made by Aristotle commentators is to presume that in addition to his theory of sublunar natural/gravitational motion and resistance to virtually all except straight downward motion by the inherent nature/gravity of bodies, Aristotle also posited a second internal inherent property of bodies that resists all motion whatever, namely by its tendency towards rest, and which they call 'inertia'. Thus on this analysis Aristotle posited TWO inherent properties of matter that resist motion, namely the almost omni-directional resistance of gravity and the wholly omni-directional resistance of inertia. But this is apparently a blunder of illogical analysis that fails to see that the inherent tendency to rest in Aristotle's dynamics is solely due to a component of gravitational resistance to motion rather than to some additional non-gravitational property of 'inertia', and that Aristotle's dynamics does not posit any inherent tendency to resist all motion whatever. For if it did, it would not have predicted that natural/gravitational fall in a vacuum (i.e. 'free-fall') would be infinitely fast as in Physics 4.8.215a.25f, because then this would be prevented by the internal resistance of any such omni-directional 'inertia', just as it is in Kepler's and Newton's dynamics. Those who believe Aristotle believed in both gravity and also in some additional inherent nature of bodies to be at rest fail to see the latter is just part of the former whereby it must be discounted when comparing the predictions of Aristotle's dynamics with Newton's first law of the non-gravitational/non-natural behaviour of bodies. For a logically valid comparison of Aristotle's and Newton's dynamics re the law of inertia one must compare what gravity-free bodies do in Aristotelian dynamics with Newton's first law, and this is exactly what Newton himself did in comparing his first law with Aristotle's analysis of the behaviour or gravity free-bodies in Physics 4.8.215a19-22.

One of the most striking examples of this illogical blunder in accounts of Aristotle's dynamics of mistakenly attributing a second inherent resistance to motion in bodies called 'inertia' in addition to that of gravity is to be found in the following account of Aristotle's theory of motion given by the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield in his by now well outdated 1949 The Origins of Modern Science, cited in the Wikipedia list of book references on inertia:

"On the Aristotelian theory [of motion] all heavy terrestrial bodies have a natural tendency towards the centre of the universe, which...was at or near the centre of the earth; but motion IN ANY OTHER DIRECTION was violent motion, because it contradicted the ordinary tendency of a body to move to what was regarded as its natural place [and to be at rest there]. Such motion depended upon the operation of a mover, and the Aristotelian DOCTRINE OF INERTIA was a doctrine of rest - it was motion, not rest that always required to be explained." [p.3 Butterfield 1957 edition. My insertions in square brackets and my caps for emphasis.]

Here Butterfield first gives an account of Aristotle's theory of nature/gravity according to which nature/gravity opposes 'violent' motion, which Butterfield commendably correctly describes as 'motion in ANY other direction than straight to the centre of the earth', and which must logically therefore include resisting horizontal motion, for example, such as the hauling of a ship along the horizontal in Physics 7.5. He then also correctly tells us that such violent motion requires a mover, but crucially fails to note this could logically be because such violent motion is resisted by the nature/gravity of the body which it contradicts, as he himself has just indicated.

But then suddenly out of the blue Butterfield illogically conjures up "the Aristotelian doctrine of inertia" as a "doctrine of rest" that supposedly explains why violent motion needs a mover, namely to overcome resistance from some non-gravitational "inertial" tendency to rest, but which resistance is in fact entirely Butterfield's illogical concoction. For this resistance is just the gravitational tendency to rest and resist motion contrary to gravity that Butterfield has already depicted, albeit omitting mention of its tendency to rest aspect, rather than some additional second force of inertia inherent in bodies. What Butterfield calls Aristotle's 'doctrine of inertia' is in fact his doctrine of gravity or gravitational resistance to any motion not straight downward. This traditional error was further promoted by Annaliese Maier's 1950s attempts to prove that the 'tendency to rest' in scholastic physics was due to inertia rather than to gravity, but whose documentation in the Oresme extract she quoted, proved the very opposite to the logically astute reader. As Oresme expressed this Aristotelian theory of gravity in his 14th century De Caelo et Mundo:

"For the reason why such things as men or animals experience work or effort in moving themselves or other heavy things is that their WEIGHT inclines them towards rest or to be moved with some other contrary motion"

But without their inherent gravity, bodies would have no internal resistance to motion in Aristotle's dynamics, neither the horizontal tendency to rest nor the vertical tendency to a contrary motion.

Thus Butterfield failed to see that the main reason why sublunar violent motion required a mover in Aristotle's dynamics was to overcome gravitational resistance to motion, just as it does in modern physics, thus promoting the anti-Aristotelian and anti-Newtonian myth of a fundamental discontinuity and post-medieval modernity in physics. Certainly Butterfield never proved Newton's law of inertia contradicted Aristotle's nor that it overthrew Aristotelian physics. Thus the Wikipedia article on the alleged scientific revolution and its alleged importance should not be based on Butterfield's views as gospel as McCluskey seems to propose. Logicus 12:34, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Three Two points on this discussion.
First, Logicus misunderstands what I'm doing in this work in progress. [[But do I understand correctly you are biasing it in favour of the thesis that there was a scientific revolution ?Logicus 15:30, 11 September 2006 (UTC)] As I said in an earlier discussion (02:57, 26 August 2006 (UTC)):,
"Can we tell why Butterfield thought it was so important and why Shapin doubts that it took place? This article scarcely tries."
So far I've gotten to the point on Butterfield. I don't have Shapin at hand and hope someone will take a hard look at his work.
Secondly, Logicus proposes a radical reinterpretation of Aristotle's Physics, which I have not encountered in almost forty years of research and teaching in the history of science. [I would be most grateful if you could provide the reference for where you encountered this interpretation almost 40 years ago (-: Did you not also encounter it 44 years ago in the Hall's 1962 publication of Newton's interpretation of Physics ?Logicus 15:30, 11 September 2006 (UTC)] If Butterfield misinterpreted Aristotle, his "misinterpretation" is shared by Galileo Galilei, Alexander Koyré, E. A. Burtt, I. B. Cohen, Richard S. Westfall, David C. Lindberg, G. E. R. Lloyd, and (as Logicus points out), Anneliese Maier. I would like to see a similar array of secondary sources cited to support the claim of continuity from Aristotle to Galileo to Newton. [I don't accept this claim at least for Galileo. Do you have any evidence that Galileo thought Aristotle held a doctrine of inertia as described by Butterfield ? I say not. What say you ? Logicus 15:30, 11 September 2006 (UTC)] --SteveMcCluskey 13:26, 11 September 2006 (UTC) [[But I am not claiming absolute continuity from Aristotle to Newton, but rather only denying revolutionary discontinuity in core principles of Aristotelian dynamics as it had come to be developed by the 17th century. And I have already pointed out, if you care to re-read what I said, Newton and Sir Thomas Heath held that Aristotle stated the law of inertia and Meyerson [1908] reported readers of ancient Greek physics at that time unanimously held it presupposed the law of inertia. Logicus 15:30, 11 September 2006 (UTC)]
Third, we disagree on the nature of Original Research. As Logicus points out, “Original research is a term used in Wikipedia to refer to ... any new analysis or synthesis of published material that appears to advance a position - or, in the words of Wikipedia's co-founder Jimbo Wales, that would amount to a "novel narrative or historical interpretation".” Lacking secondary sources, it is clear that Logicus is preparing such a novel historical interpretation. --SteveMcCluskey 13:36, 11 September 2006 (UTC) [Need I point out yet again this is not so, as McCluskey himself may be confirming in possibly telling us above that I am advocating an interpretation of Aristotle's Physics he himself encountered almost 40 years ago. For the hard of logical understanding, rather I am certainly defending an old and now minority view, proponents of which I have mentioned, and not currently championed by academic historians of science who have studiously ignored Newton's important claim that first came to light in 1962, rather than advancing a novel interpretation. The simple question they have to answer is whether Newton was essentially right or wrong.Logicus 15:30, 11 September 2006 (UTC)]
Clarifying my point, as I said above: "Logicus proposes a radical reinterpretation of Aristotle's Physics, which I have not encountered in almost forty years of research and teaching in the history of science." Logicus then transforms this to claim that he is "advocating an interpretation of Aristotle's Physics he himself [McCluskey] encountered almost 40 years ago." As I said before, I have not encountered it in almost forty years; to restate; the first time I ever encountered it was in Logicus's discussion. I do not believe it is supported by the primary source quoted from Hall and Hall, since I believe Logicus is misinterpreting Newton's text.
On another related point, it is somewhat ironic that Logicus considers Butterfield's 1948 work to be outdated, but prefers to cite as authoritative Meyerson's 1908 Identity and Reality and Thomas Heath's (1861-1940) posthumously published Mathematics in Aristotle. To move outside historians of the scientific revolution, the conventional view of Aristotle's Physics that every violent motion requires the continuous action of a moving cause (contrary to Newton) is presented in G. E. R. Lloyd, Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of his Thought (1968), pp. 175-180 and Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, (1946), vol. 1, pp. 314-5.
Finally, let me raise a matter of style. Logicus's habit of intermeshing his comments with previous comments, makes it extremely difficult to follow the chronological and logical sequence of the discussion. Most readers find it preferable to read comments in chronological sequence. --SteveMcCluskey 17:11, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS COMMENTS:

[Re your first point, I indicated the transformation I made that you refer to was a joke by means of a smiley emoticon. Never mind. But behind the joke there was the serious point that whilst as an academic historian of science arguably you should have read that interpretation of Aristotle's Physics stated by Newton in the Halls' book either 44 years ago in 1962 when it was first published or at least in the 1960s, nevertheless I anticipated that like most historians of science and of the scientific revolution you have never seen it. And indeed you now confirm this in admitting the first time you have encountered this 'Newtonian' interpretation of Aristotle's Physics was in my discussion. But I was giving you the benefit of the doubt as claiming you first read Newton's interpretation almost 40 years ago. Is it also your experience that few historians of science, if any, have ever read it or even know of it ? ]

Re "I do not believe it is supported by the primary source quoted from Hall and Hall, since I believe Logicus is misinterpreting Newton's text."

But can you prove your beliefs are correct ? First, the Newton document is surely not a primary source but rather a secondary source with respect to the point at issue, namely the nature of Aristotle's physics, being a secondary commentary on the primary source that is Aristotle's 'Physics' by the classics scholar and historian of science Sir Isaac Newton. According to Wikipedia "A secondary source summarizes one or more primary or secondary sources." It can only be considered a primary source as evidence on the issue of what Newton himself believed about Aristotle's 'Physics', whether rightly or wrongly. That document surely shows that at least Newton held the view that Aristotle's dynamics did not contradict the Principia's first law of motion as the original scientific revolution (in physics) thesis maintains. Do you claim otherwise ? How do you interpret Newton's text ?]

"On another related point, it is somewhat ironic that Logicus considers Butterfield's 1948 work to be outdated, but prefers to cite as authoritative Meyerson's 1908 Identity and Reality and Thomas Heath's (1861-1940) posthumously published Mathematics in Aristotle. "

[Indeed, but what I partly had in mind was that such works as Butterfield's that maintain Aristotle's dynamics contradicted Newton's first law are now outdated post-1962 simply by virtue of not discussing the surely important fact that Newton himself is now published as holding the contrary view. But Heath is not outdated in this respect because he concurred with Newton's opinion, whereas Meyerson is because he rejected it in spite of reporting it to be the prevailing opinion amongst readers of ancient Greek philosophy in 1908.]
[As for your point about the conventional view, I have pointed out why this 'conventional view' is mistaken below, because violent motion also requires a mover in Newton's dynamics, although NASA may well be initially interested in the expert advice on O-level Newtonian Physics of Messrs Lloyd and Copleston that anti-gravitational violent motion does not require a motor, with a view to eliminating their enormous rocket-fuel bills (-: However, may I also point out that even the more general principle that all motion requires a mover is not contrary to Newton, for as even Bernard Cohen himself eventually admitted in his 1999 Guide to Newton's Principia (p98), and contrary to the main thesis of his 1960 Birth of a New Physics, by virtue of his concept of the force of inertia, Newton had not fully abandoned this basic principle of 'the old physics'. But Cohen mistakenly imagined Newton had even partly abandoned it only because he wrongly imagined Newton's first law did contradict that principle, whereas of course it does not since that law says nothing whatever about whether there is a mover in uniform motion or not. (Without elementary logic, history of science is blind !) Newton fully endorsed the principle that all motion requires a causal force as follows: "Force is the causal principle of motion and rest. And it is either an external one [i.e. vis impressa] that generates or destroys or otherwise changes impressed motion in some body; or it is an internal principle [vis insita = vis inertiae] by which existing motion or rest is conserved in a body, and by which any being endeavours to continue in its state and opposes resistance." [De Gravitatione, p148, Hall & Hall, 1962 CUP] The main point to be made here is that even 'the conventional view' that Newton rejected the principle that 'all motion requires a causal force' was eventually challenged by Cohen, its erstwhile ardent advocate, and indeed correctly so to his credit, although he notably overlooked mentioning it again in his 2002 Cambridge Companion.] Logicus 17:29, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

What did Newton say ?

Here I just present the two paragraphs I put into the article, that Steve has now deleted, so that people can see what Newton actually wrote alongside what Butterfield wrote and how it challenges it.

"The 20th century historian, Herbert Butterfield, was less disconcerted but saw the change as equally fundamental.

"Since that revolution overturned the authority in science not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world - since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics - it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements within the system of medieval Christendom.... [I]t looms so large as the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodization of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance.[2]"


However, the view of Butterfield, Koyre, Kuhn and others that there was a scientific revolution was based on their opinion that Newton's physics overthrew Aristotelian physics because Newton's first law of motion was contradicted by Aristotle's law of inertia. But the logically more astute Newton himself was of the contrary view that Aristotle had essentially espoused his first law of motion, from which it follows there was no scientific revolution as Butterfield and others claim, namely an anti-Aristotelian inertial-dynamics revolution. For Newton wrote as follows:

"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, since he expresses his opinion thus … in Book IV of the Physics, text 69, [i.e. Physics 4.8.215a19] speaking of motion in the void where there is no impediment he writes: 'Why a body once moved should come to rest anywhere no one can say. For why should it rest here rather than there ? Hence EITHER it will not be moved, OR it must be moved indefinitely, UNLESS something stronger impedes it [My caps].' " [From one of Newton's Scientific Papers in The Portsmouth Collection, first published in Hall & Hall's 1962 'Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton'.] Logicus 14:37, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Re: why Shapin says "There is no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this book is about it."

Logicus seems to imply that Shapin (and other recent scholars) doubts the existence of the Sci Rev because of a continuity between Aristotle's physics and Newton's. This is definitely not the case. For the most part, in The Scientific Revolution (1996), Shapin describes the theotretical and empirical developments of the scientific revolution in the same terms as most modern historians of science. His discussion of Aristotelian physics embodies the standard take: natural motion vs. violent motion, with natural motion in circles (celestial) or tending toward "natural place" (terrestial) and violent motion irrelevant to natural philosophy.

Shapin's and other modern historians' doubts about the scientific revolution generally do not call into question the intellectual changes describes in tradition Sci-Rev historiography. As Shapin puts it in the bibliographical essay at the end:

Traditional views of the Scientific Revolution have been hotly disputed, and even rejected, by some recent historians. Grounds of dissent have varied, but in one way or another this newer work tends to be skeptical of the coherence and integrity of what had previously been understood as the Scientific Revolution. Revisionist historiography is suspicious of talk about its "essence," its coherency and effectively methodological character, and its unambiguous "modernity."

He goes on to discuss the different ways historians have a) shown that different sciences changed in different ways, and some were little affected by the traditional central aspects of the Sci-Rev, b) found striking discontinuties between early modern (post-Newton) physic and how we now understand modern physics, c) shown how the broad intellectual changes had numerous other causes besides the traditional "Great Men" of Sci Rev historiography, d) challenged the importance/coherence of the (single) scientific method that was traditionally supposed to have emerged in the Sci Rev, etc. There is no mention of Newton's physics not actually being radically different than Aristotle's as part of historians' criticism of the scientific revolution.

Peter Dear's 2001 Revolutionizing the Sciences: Eurpean Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700 has a similar take, adding complexity and variance to the transitions traditionally called the Scientific Revolution (but with much less emphasis on historiography than Shapin). Like Shapin's book, it seeks to show that the changes traditionally called the Scientific Revolution were less universal and more fragmented and varied in context and consequence than in traditional accounts (and were not the only important cultural and scientific changes happening). But again, they do not repudiate the standard Sci Rev story, they just reinterpret it.

Based on the sources I'm familiar with, I can see no justification for the changes Logicus is suggesting, which seems to interpret a primary source in direct contradiction of the consensus of historians.--ragesoss 01:29, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS COMMENTS:

Thanks for the comments and information.
  • Nowhere have I implied "Shapin (and other recent scholars) doubts the existence of the Sci Rev because of a continuity between Aristotle's physics and Newton's." I have never discussed Shapin's views, but am well aware he does not challenge the hitherto unproven thesis of a fundamental contradiction between Aristotle's and Newton's physics that allegedly constituted a scientific revolution.


Ragesoss says: "[Shapin's] discussion of Aristotelian physics embodies the standard take: natural motion vs. violent motion, with natural motion in circles (celestial) or tending toward "natural place" (terrestial) and violent motion irrelevant to natural philosophy."

As a matter of interest, this is most certainly not 'the standard take' on Aristotelian physics, in which violent motion is most certainly not irrelevant to natural philosophy because the analysis of detached violent motion (i.e. projectile motion) was crucial to the overthrow of Aristotelian physics on the Duhem-Kuhn analysis of the matter or on a 'non-standard take' vital to the development of the Aristotelian programme into the 17th century with its auxiliary theories of impetus in such as scholastic Parisian physics. And also the perpetual rotational violent motion of the sublunar fire belt was of course central to Aristotle's 'Metereology' and its theory of comets etc..

Ragesoss concludes:"Based on the sources I'm familiar with, I can see no justification for the changes Logicus is suggesting, which seems to interpret a primary source in direct contradiction of the consensus of historians."

Can we please be clear about what I am proposing ? I am objecting to the radical changes McCluskey has proposed, that the article be rewritten according to the Butterfield viewpoint stated, that there was a scientific revolution because Newton's physics overthrew scholastic philosophy and Aristotelian physics, and allegedly because the latter contradicted Newton's first law of motion. My objection is that this crucial issue of whether Aristotle's physics denied the 'law of inertia', and upon which the thesis of a scientific revolution was founded and developed by such as Koyre and others, is a matter of debate whereby an article on 'the scientific revolution' should adopt a NPOV approach. To show it is a matter of debate because some scholars maintain Aristotle affirmed the law of inertia, I have cited the testimony of the Cambridge Trinity classics scholar Newton himself, of the Cambridge Trinity classics scholar Heath, and also pointed out that on Meyerson's 1908 account at that time classics readers of ancient Greek philosophy all believed, like Newton, that the atomists, Aristotle and others all postulated the law of inertia. I have not made any claims about current scholars. I am simply appealing to the following Wikipedia NPOV policy to prevent an important minority viewpoint from being excluded and to prevent the article being written as though there definitely was a scientific revolution:

"The policy requires that, where there are OR HAVE BEEN conflicting views, these should be presented fairly, but not asserted. All significant published points of view are presented, not just the most popular one. It should not be asserted that the most popular view or some sort of intermediate view among the different views is the correct one. Readers are left to form their own opinions. As the name suggests, the neutral point of view is a point of view, not the absence or elimination of viewpoints."

As a matter of fact there is no 'consensus of historians' on Newton's claim in the Newton document as Ragesoss implies if only one historian of science has ever made substantive published comment on its truth-value. This surely scandalous situation surely speaks volumes in itself.

Moreover, the Newton document in question is surely not a primary source as Ragesoss and McCluskey claim, but rather a secondary source on the Wikipedia definition "A secondary source summarizes one or more primary or secondary sources.", since it is the classics scholar and historian of science Newton summarising a point about the ancient Greek primary source here that is Aristotle's Physics, giving a Latin translation and interpretation of it. It could surely only be considered a primary source as primary evidence of what Newton himself believed, but that is not what is apparently at issue here, which is not about what Newton himself believed, but rather whether Newton's secondary commentary about Aristotle's Physics is true or not. But maybe it could possibly be argued that the Wikipedia definitions are so logically incoherent they exclude nothing. In which case nor do they exclude it being classed as a secondary source.

[My caps]

Logicus,

It would help if you refrained from personal voice in your contributions. Perhaps you might wish to revoice the recent edits in the article, including those referring to 'logical astuteness'. One way to indicate good faith might be to rephrase things.

[(i) I don’t understand what you mean by ‘personal voice’, by which I understand the first person singular, but which I have never used in any of my contributions to articles, as distinct from discussions. However, if you refer to inserts such as [My caps]in a Newton quote, then this is a standard scholarly device for indicating one has used capitals or whatever to emphasise something rather than these being in the original. What alternative device do you suggest ?(ii) The recent edits I made in the article that also referred to Newton’s ‘logical astuteness’ were removed by McCluskey without consultation. Why should I revoice them ? Can you guarantee they can be put back without McCluskey or others removing them again ? Please let me know. But certainly if evaluation of somebody’s analysis is to be banned from articles, you have a lot of editing to do before you get to me (-: (iii) Who or what would it help if I did things as you want, and would you be kind enough to rewrite what I said as you think it should be written so that I can understand and evaluate you kind attempts to help me somehow. (iv) Are you suggesting I have somehow indicated ‘bad faith’ (is that Sartre’s concept)? Logicus 18:11, 12 September 2006 (UTC)]

Might there be a date for Newton's unpublished writings in Hall & Hall? The reference to "first law" suggests that they are post Principia.

[Yes, as I recall they were evaluated post Principia E1 by the Halls precisely because of the reason you state. Then as I also recall Bernard Cohen in his 1964 Notes & Proceedings of the Royal Society article Quantum in Se Est… , the only article by any academic historian of science to have ever discussed Newton’s paper that I am aware of, dates them in the 1690s [as McCluskey said] as part of a series of memoranda on the historical sources of his philosophy to his accolyte David Gregory either for his forthcoming book on the Moon to which Newton wrote the anonymous Preface on historical antecedents or for the Principia E2, or maybe both, I cannot recall. Do check that article for yourself. I never finished my debates with Bernard about these matters before he died, but if you do bother to read his article, you should note(i) Bernard’s logical error in apparently agreeing with a German commentator’s dismissal of Newton’s claim on the ground that Aristotle denied the void, but as did Descartes to whom Koyre and Cohen attributed the law of inertia. (ii) Bernard’s claim that nobody else in Newton’s time attributed the first law to Aristotle, whereas if you read the Newtonian Andrew Motte’s ‘Treatise on the Mechanical Powers’ (Motte who first translated Principia E3 into English), you will find he justifies the first law in exactly the same terms as Aristotle does in Physics 4.8.215a19-22 as quoted by Newton, and as also did D’Alembert, namely that ‘there is no reason for the body to stop here rather than there and thus nor anywhere’. The possibility Bernard overlooked was that it was tacitly accepted that Aristotle had first stated the first law whereby nobody would bother to state the obvious. (iii) Bernard’s claim that no contemporary historian would attribute any contributory role whatever in the law of inertia to Aristotle, whereas Eddie Grant did exactly that the very same year (as I recall) in his 1964 ‘Motion in the Void’ article.Logicus 18:11, 12 September 2006 (UTC)]

When one interpolates replies, it is possible to indicate who is saying what with the : markup, which indents replies to statements. Or the * markup puts a bullet point before the statement.

[Thanks a lot for that. Don’t have time to study all the Wikipedia formating tricks, so that’s helpful.Logicus 18:11, 12 September 2006 (UTC)]
This is an example. --Ancheta Wis 04:00, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Is the Aristotelian principle 'violent motion requires a mover' anti-Newton ?

Above Stever McCluskey tells us: "the conventional view of Aristotle's Physics that every violent motion requires the continuous action of a moving cause (contrary to Newton) is presented in G. E. R. Lloyd, Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of his Thought (1968), pp. 175-180 and Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, (1946), vol. 1, pp. 314-5."

This view may well be presented by Lloyd and Copleston. But is it true ? For in Aristotelian dynamics the violent motion of a sublunar body, as opposed to its natural motion, is a motion against its own nature/gravity, and therefore requires a motive force to sustain it against the countervailing force of gravity, just as it does in Newton's dynamics, as in the case of the directly upward projectile motion (i.e. violent motion) of a body with gravity, for example. That is why all space rockets require a continuously acting motor to overcome gravity and reach space, for example. Have Lloyd and Copleston misunderstood either Aristotelian or Newtonian physics, or possibly both ?

Perhaps people would like to think about this most crucial issue of whether Newton's dynamics did in fact completely overthrow the ancient and medieval authority of Aristotelian physics and scholastic philosophy and hence constitute scientific revolution as Butterfield and others claim, or whether they were in agreement that sustained motion against gravity requires a sustained motive force ?

Thanks for the other comments from various contributors, to which I shall reply asap. LOGICUS 81.132.185.177 10:02, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Are we getting boring?

Recent vandalism included the following:

"your about to read the most borest thing ever in the entire world."

Setting aside his grammar, he reminded me that in our recent debate about inertia and the concept of the SR, we've added a lot of detail that doesn't really belong in an encyclopedia article. My additions read like a laundry list of ancient philosophers and don't really belong here; interested readers can follow up using our footnotes.

I've prepared two abridgements on a userpage. You might want to look and comment here. Thanks, --SteveMcCluskey 15:14, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

I've copied Logicus's comments here, so we can keep the discussion in one place. --SteveMcCluskey 18:34, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
I have already edited out the reference to Galileo's concept of inertia in the article because as even your 'authority' Westfall points out, he didn't have one. Rather he had a theory of impetus (an auxiliary theory of Aristotelian dynamics). It was Kepler and then Newton who developed the theory of inertia (originating from Averroes), another auxiliary theory of Aristotleian dynamics according to which bodies have a non-gravitational inherent resistance to motion, all motion in Kepler's case and all motion except uniform motion in Newton's case. It was Newton who synthesised the Aristotelian auxiliary theories of impetus and of inertia into his bizarre hybrid concept of the force of inertia.Logicus 18:11, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
Three short responses.
  • "my authority" was not Westfall, but Clagett who discusses Galileo's concept of inertia on pp. 158-9, 667-9 in his Science of Mechanics.... Galileo's concept changed through time, in his Two Great World Systems he was struggling with the concept of impetus, but by the Two New Sciences he was clear on the concept of inertia -- at least as it applied to horizontal motion.
  • You marked your removal of the reference to inertia as a "minor edit"; minor edits are for small spelling and grammatical changes, not for changes relating to the meaning of the discussion. Since you consider this a minor edit, should I assume that you won't mind if I change it back :)
  • Once again, please indent your remarks to set them apart from other editors'. You should know the routine by now since this point has been raised a year ago about your discussions on Inertia.

--SteveMcCluskey 18:52, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Steve asks: Are we getting boring ?: Logicus Comments

Arguably 'we' are not, but you are (-: What happened here was that I edited your new section 'Significance of the "revolution" ' in an attempt to both observe NPOV policy and also make it much more interesting. As copied above in 'What did Newton say ?', I quoted Newton's claim that Aristotle espoused his first law of motion that effectively contradicts your quotation of Butterfield's view of the scientific revolution as the overthrow of Aristotelian physics, thus setting up an interesting antinomy of 'authorities' at the outset - Butterfield and others versus Newton (no contest in my view(-:) - that could be expounded and explored by the article. Arguably issues are much more interesting to people if expounded dialectically as debates between opposing views that give their reasons and conceptual logic: anyway, such was the view of Socrates, Plato, Galileo, Berkeley and others, for example. However, you removed my edits on the mistaken grounds that they violated Wikipedia NOR and NPS policies, which they did not, presenting neither a historically novel viewpoint nor a primary source. But you saw fit to at least accept the fact that those you regard as chief scientific revolutionaries cited ancient pedigrees for their views, and you elected to write a very boring paragraph listing these, and which is anyway logically pointless to developing a narrative of a scientific revolution because the next boring paragraph tells us few historians of science have found any such influences as claimed (so why bother mentioning them in the first place ?), and then tells us Copernicus and Galileo were both influenced by some older theories. But this is all trying to observe the conceptually mindless authoritarian rituals of the academic discipline form, quoting 'authorities' and displaying supposed learning, rather than conceptually explaining things to people, especially younger and poorer people who have Internet access who I presume are the main users of Wikipedia and have most likely never heard of any of the people you cite or what their ideas were ? What the reader really might well want to know by now is such as what a scientific revolution consists of, in what sciences there were revolutions, if any, and the conceptual details of what they consisted of. (By the way, I don't understand the Donne quote and why he thought fire was put out and the Sun and earth were lost.)
I don’t know what to suggest to prevent your producing a boring article by virtue of an ‘academic’ approach (as opposed to a more ‘journalistic’ approach). I have already suggested a historiographical/dialectical approach above. Previously, as and when I found the time I was gradually trying to reform this article piecemeal into a more NPOV and dialectically interesting article as well as more historically accurate (e.g. the dialectic between the historians' mechanisation thesis on the one hand and Newton's rejection of mechanism in the Principia), but your intervention has probably scuppered that. 80.6.94.131 15:43, 15 September 2006 (UTC)


Steve says: "my authority" was not Westfall, but Clagett who discusses Galileo's concept of inertia on pp. 158-9, 667-9 in his Science of Mechanics.... Galileo's concept changed through time, in his Two Great World Systems he was struggling with the concept of impetus, but by the Two New Sciences he was clear on the concept of inertia -- at least as it applied to horizontal motion.

Logicus comments: In the first instance rather than correct your apparently mistaken exposition of Galileo's dynamics, since you apparently prefer 'authority' rather than reason in determining the truth (-:, I quote Westfall who you seem to regard as an authority in matters of the scientific revolution: "Galileo did not employ the word inertia. For that matter, whatever his phraseology, he did not employ the concept of inertia in precisely the form we hold it today." p18 The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanism and Mechanics. 1977 CUP. (I should have said Westfall said Galileo did not use the TERM inertia.) As it happens, like Feyerabend and others, Westfall was of the mistaken opinion that, unlike Newton, Galileo held a theory of circular inertia just because he maintained that a canonball on the upper surface of a perfectly smooth sphere gravitationally concentric with the centre of the Earth's gravity would roll around a great circle forever once moving (i.e. Cusa's thought-expt), but of course Newton's dynamics predicts the same in such gravitational circumstances, whereby Westfall should logically also have concluded Newton held a theory of circular inertia, but did not, thus perpetuating a traditional historian of science red-herring. Cusa's thought-experiment was a 'refutation' of the Aristotelian theory of horizontal gravity, that is, the gravitational tendency to rest on the horizontal that the self-refuting Maier strikingly failed to prove was due to inertia according to Buridan and Oresme, rather than to gravity/weight. As for Clagett, he does not discuss Galileo's concept of inertia in that work, but rather Galileo's concept of impetus and also his principle of indifference to rest or motion on the 'horizontal' i.e. the surface of gravitationally concentric sphere, such as a perfectly calm lake. In what respect do you claim Galileo was 'clearer on the concept of inertia' in the Discorsi than in the Dialogo ? On what you possibly mean by 'inertia', 'Galileo' held a theory of the permanent conservation of rectilinear impetus in the absence of all resistance in the Dialogo and there is no reason to think he did not in the Discorsi so far as I am aware. Do you disagree ? 80.6.94.131 16:10, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Newton's Point Of View (NPOV) and Wikipedia policy contra McCluskey & Ragesoss

In edited inserts to McCluskey's recent editing of this article, I quoted Newton's attribution of the Principia's first law of motion to Aristotle as evidence that there is a point of view that there was no scientific revolution as traditionally conceived by Koyre, Duhem, Butterfield and Co, namely that Newton's physics totally overthrew Aristotle's because the latter denied Newton's law of inertia [See above 'What did Newton say ?'].

But it was claimed by McCluskey that this constituted doing ‘original research’ in preparing a novel viewpoint, banned by Wikipedia policy, and also using primary sources, which Wikipedia cautions against, but does not ban and in fact even encourages. McCluskey then removed my edited inserts and the Newton quotation. And McCluskey's objections to my defending Newton's point of view - interpreting primary sources against the consensus of historians - were then echoed by Ragesoss. But it is important that people should be aware of Isaac Newton's interpretation of Aristotle's physics, at least because it is provably correct, and especially because historians of science have almost exclusively maintained a notably deafening silence about it since it was first published in 1962, whereby it is very little known.

Here I present more detailed Wikipedia policy evidence than before that these claims of McCluskey and Ragesoss are mistaken because (i) the Newton document is not a primary source but rather a secondary source and (ii) the research I present is 'source-based research' that Wikipedia recognises as fundamental to writing an encyclopedia', and not 'original research'.

I quote from Wikipedia's No Original Research Policy as follows:

Wikipedia NOR Policy

"Primary and secondary sources

  • Primary sources present information or data, such as archeological artifacts; film, video or photographs (but see below); historical documents such as a diary, census, transcript of a public hearing, trial, or interview; tabulated results of surveys or questionnaires, records of laboratory assays or observations; records of field observations.
  • Secondary sources present a generalization, analysis, synthesis, interpretation, or evaluation of information or data from other sources. Original research that creates primary sources is not allowed. However, research that consists of collecting and organizing information from existing primary and/or secondary sources is, of course, strongly encouraged. All articles on Wikipedia should be based on information collected from published primary and secondary sources. This is not "original research"; it is "source-based research", and it is fundamental to writing an encyclopedia."

The Newton paper I have presented gives an analysis and interpretation of information from another source, namely Aristotle's Physics. The latter is presumably the primary source here, being a primary source about the nature of Aristotle's physics along with his On The Heavens, providing direct evidence of whether it affirmed or denied Newton's law of inertia, and thus whether there was a scientific revolution or not. Moreover, the Newton secondary source claim that I am defending - that Aristotle's physics affirmed the law of inertia - was also held by other classics scholars and historians of science, such as the Cambridge Trinity historian of ancient Greek science Sir Thomas Heath, whereby it is obviously not a "novel historical interpretation" even in the 20th century and thus not the forbidden 'original research' McCluskey claims it is.

Rather, in the words of Wikipedia policy, I am providing "information collected from published primary and secondary sources. This is not "original research"; it is "source-based research", and it is fundamental to writing an encyclopedia." This research is defending an old viewpoint - the viewpoint of Sir Isaac Newton himself - that is now a minority viewpoint by providing and analysing primary, secondary and tertiary sources to demonstrate how the currently prevailing contrary view is both unproven to date and mistaken, whereby Newton's view merits mention at least as an alternative view that has not been refuted.

Here I provide some sources supporting Newton's viewpoint. First here is a secondary source commenting on the primary source Aristotle's Physics by the Cambridge Trinity classics scholar and historian of ancient Greek science and maths Sir Thomas Heath. He is commenting on his own translation of Aristotle's Physics 4.8.215a19-22, the same passage cited by Newton as evidence that Aristotle endorsed his first law of motion.

ARISTOTLE'S PHYSICS 4.8.215A19-22: " "Further, no one could give any reason why, having been set in motion, [a body in a void] should stop anywhere: for why here, rather then there ? Hence, EITHER it will remain at rest, OR it must continue to move ad infinitum UNLESS something stronger impedes it." [My caps for emphasis]

But attention should be drawn to the last sentence in the above passage, because the statement in it constitutes a fair anticipation of Newton's First Law of Motion. There is a similar passage in Plutarch, De facie in orbe lunae, c.6, which has been noted as containing a similar anticipation of Newton's First Law: 'For everything is borne along in its own natural direction unless this is changed by some other force.' But Aristotle's statement seems to me more complete." [p115-6 Mathematics in Aristotle, Oxford Clarendon, 1949]

Now here is a tertiary source reporting that readers of ancient Greek physics at the turn of the century almost unanimously believed it postulated the law of inertia, including Aristotle's physics, the secondary source here being the opinions of those classics readers:

EMILE MEYERSON: "It is sometimes asserted that this principle [of inertia] was known to antiquity. It is certain that in following the exposition of a Greek atomic system, such as that of Democritus, through the refutations of Aristotle, or that of Epicurus in De Rerum Natura, a modern reader is almost without fail led to believe that these philosophers implicitly postulated [the law of] inertia." [p113, Identity and Reality, 1908]

Note how similar the reported view of the modern classics reader was to that of the older classics reader Newton. Meyerson then went on to claim these readers were wrong because, he mistakenly claimed, the law of inertia is the assertion of an unforced interminable straight motion, which of course it is not, and because Aristotle denied there is any such motion he therefore denied the law of inertia. Thus it seems he initiated the elementary logical fallacy that was then repeated and exported from France to America by his equally logically challenged disciple Koyre in his 1939 Galilean Studies dedicated to Meyerson. Koyre further invalidly concluded the discovery of the law of inertia presupposed positing an infinite universe and void to make room for that interminable straight motion he mistakenly thought the law of inertia asserted. But Newton's first law only states that any body neither at rest nor in uniform straight motion is subject to perturbing impressed forces. It does not state there are any bodies not subject to such forces amd thereby assert there is some interminable uniform motion in the real world.

To be continued...

Logicus 14:36, 17 September 2006 (UTC)


Truth, authority, and the NOR Policy

At 16:10, 15 September 2006, Logicus (User:80.6.94.131) said " you apparently prefer 'authority' rather than reason in determining the truth." This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the encyclopedic nature of Wikipedia and its No Original Research policy.
Let's try to get at the heart of the No Original Research policy by tracing its origins. It began with an e-mail on the wikien-l where Jimbo Wales expressed his reaction to an editor who was advocating an unorthodox criticism of special relativity on the article by that name. That view was generalized to cover topics other than physics and became the original version of the No Original Research policy and is still included in the much larger current version.
Here's Jimbo's view, transposed from physics to history:
The specific factual content of the article is, in a sense, none of my business. My sole interest here is that the wiki process be followed and respected. Talking to me about [history] is pointless, because it misses the point.
What do mainstream [history] texts say on the matter? What do the majority of prominent [historians] say on the matter? Is there significant debate one way or the other within the mainstream [historical] community on this point?
If your viewpoint is in the majority, then it should be easy to substantiate it with reference to commonly accepted reference texts.
If your viewpoint is held by a significant [minority of historians], then it should be easy to name prominent adherents, and the article should certainly address the controversy without taking sides.
If your viewpoint is held by an extremely small minority, then whether it's true or not, whether you can prove it or not, it doesn't belong in Wikipedia, except perhaps in some ancilliary article. Wikipedia is not the place for original research.
Remember, I'm not much interested in "is it true or not" in this context. We could talk about that forever and get nowhere. I'm only interested in the much more tractable question "is it encyclopedic and NPOV or not"? And this question can be answered in the fashion I outlined above.
--Jimbo
Since this is the official Wikipedia framework, we have to live with it and work within it. We cannot determine whether a view belongs in Wikipedia by debating whether it's true that Aristotle maintained a theory of inertia (or that seventeenth-century natural philosophers believed that Aristotle held a theory of inertia). Instead, our goal is to determine whether these views are held by a majority, a significant minority, or an extremely small minority of historians. To do that, we need to identify specific passages in which historians state these views and similar passages where historians state alternative views (such as that Aristotle believed that bodies are moved by some motive cause or that Galileo, Descartes, or Newton believed that their concepts of inertia or impetus contradicted the views of Aristotle).
If this means we must engage in what Logicus called "mindless authoritarian rituals of the academic discipline form, quoting 'authorities' and displaying supposed learning," so be it. --SteveMcCluskey 16:25, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS COMMENTS: Thanks for this information about Wikipedia policy and your strictures. But what is their logical relevance ? What currently relevant proposition do you think they establish ? That in Wikipedia verifying or refuting whether scientist X held the theory Y must not be established by direct reference to X's writings, but only by reference to whether third parties say they did? That some particular view is held by too small a minority to be included in the article ? Perhaps this will be clarified in response to my Proposed Edits below ?

  • Your comments are apparently directed to my saying you apparently prefer 'authority' to reason in determining the truth. But you omit the context of my remark, which was contesting your claim that 'Galileo's KEY concept was inertia', whereas I claimed he had no concept of inertia and his key concept was 'impetus'. So I just cited your Newton authority Westfall's correct opinion that Galileo never used the word 'inertia' to help persuade you of this more easily, instead of asking you for verification, which would have involved reasoning about Galileo's texts, including the production of evidence. Or would you have just claimed some majority view that Galileo's key concept was inertia, even if refuted by Galileo's texts ? Anyway, fortunately you have now withdrawn this mistaken claim. But you still claim he had a concept of inertia. But I claim he did not have a concept of inertia, neither in Kepler's nor in Newton's meaning of the term 'inertia' as an inherent resistance to forms of motion (it was Kepler who invented the general concept of inertia and introduced that term into physics). On the contrary, like Buridan who thought "prime matter does not resist motion", as Moody pointed out when refuting Maier's thesis that scholastic physics (Buridan and Oresme) presumed inertia, it seems Galileo held the same opinion and had no concept of inertia. I suspect what you probably have in mind here is the 'principle of the continuation of unresisted and externally unforced motion' as embodied in Galileo's concept of impetus. So unless you can verify Galileo had a concept of inertia, please accept the change of 'inertia' to 'impetus' and stop repeatedly restoring 'inertia' every time I change it to 'impetus'.
  • You conclude Wikipedia policy may mean we must engage in what I called 'mindless authoritarian academic rituals', but again overlook the context of my remarks. I was objecting to your just listing lots of names of alleged ancient influences on Copernicus, Kepler and Newton in the 'Significance' section without explaining their theories to readers and as though everybody knows who those people were. Do you claim Wikipedia policy excludes explaining who people were, what theories they held and the relevant nature of their theories?
  • As your weblink reference to the current NOR policy reveals, it is not in fact that policy you are quoting, but rather the NPOV policy and its doctrine of what constitutes a sufficiently large minority viewpoint to require mention in Wikipedia articles. Comparing this with NOR policy, there would appear to be some logical confusion here about whether some source-based research must be excluded because it is original research because it advances a novel viewpoint, or rather because, although not novel, the viewpoint is that of too small a minority to be included.
  • The aspect of the NPOV policy you cite raises the simple question on which official Wikipedia policy apparently gives no operable guidance, namely what proportion of the relevant community constitutes "an extremely small minority" ? More or less than 10% ? Some effective criterion must surely be given before the conclusions you draw, which reduce Wikipedia to statistical surveys of opinions as opposed to establishing truth by reason and evidence, can be validated. And the following question surely also arises. Even if the minority were a minority of just one person, what if that person happened to be Albert Einstein, say, or even that even greater scientist Sir Isaac Newton ? Would their viewpoint still have to be excluded under the 'extremely small minority rule ?

But thanks again for the education about Wikipedia ! Logicus 17:22, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Dating the alleged 'scientific revolution' requires NPOV

The current first paragraph of the article is concerned with dating the alleged scientific revolution as follows:

"Many historians of science who maintain there was a scientific revolution date it roughly as having begun in 1543, the year in which Nicolaus Copernicus published his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) and Andreas Vesalius published his De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human body). But they agree less about its closing date, although many would agree that the Scientific Revolution had come to a close by the death of Sir Isaac Newton in 1727. As with many historical demarcations, historians of science disagree about these boundaries, ..."

Thus without even telling us what a scientific revolution is and in which sciences there were revolutions and why, this current first paragraph of the article immediately launches into the complex issue of dating 'the scientific revolution', which it dates as 1543 to 1727 but without telling us why. (Why should the publication of Copernicus's De Revolutionibus and Vesalius's book be the beginning and why should the death of Newton be the end ?) But the previous pre-McCluskey Wikipedia first paragraph dated the scientific revolution 1600-1687 (i.e. from 'revolutionary' works of Galileo & Kepler to Newton's Principia E1). And McCluskey's mentor Butterfield dated it 1300-1800 in his book listed in the References, around the same time Rupert Hall's dated it 1500-1800. And Peter Dear's 2001 book as kindly reported by Ragesoss dates it 1500-1700.

Clearly there are some significant differences here whereby an explanatory NPOV approach is required rather than just one dating point of view being favoured - the astronomy/mechanics view - with others being implicitly marginally covered just by an admission of disagreements about boundaries apparently about the same thing, when in fact the disagreement is a deeper conceptual differences about what the alleged revolution consisted of and which sciences had revolutions. The current Wikipedia article (Section 5, last para) seems to claim there were revolutions in astronomy, mechanics, optics, chemistry, biology and some other unspecified sciences, and whatever science Vesalius practiced (human physiology ?). That's at least 6 revolutions. But in the current 'conceptually mindless' approach of the article, nowhere are we told what they consisted of (except Vesalius?), what old principles were replaced by what new principles, and why that constituted a revolution rather than a reform or revision of existing theory.

The truth of the matter seems to be that McCluskey's 1543-1727 admitted 'fudge dating' is based on the by now well-outdated original narrower conception of the scientifc revolution as just a revolution in astronomy and mechanics that excluded revolutions in any other sciences, and moreover in its pre-Duhem conception before its backdating to 1300 that the Duhemian Butterfield adheres to. But Butterfield dates the end of the scientific revolution as 1800 because he widens the original astronomy/mechanics conception of the scientific revolution to include an alleged revolution in another science, namely Chemistry. Thus we get the dating 1300-1800 (i.e. Duhem + Chemistry). But because Hall rejected 14th century impetus dynamics as the origin of the revolution because it was part of Aristotelian physics and he saw the essence of the revolution as a break with ancient Greek science, he chose 1500 as the beginning.

Now the overall lesson here is that historians' datings of the scientific revolution mainly depend upon how they conceive what a scientific revolution in science is and in what sciences they claim there were such revolutions, and it is these things we really need to know in an educational article on the scientific revolution rather than be told some specific dating without the reason why. The apparent reason for the current 1543-1727 dating is basically that McCluskey conceives the scientific revolution as the alleged astronomy/mechanics revolution, and apparently regards Copernicus's astronomy as revolutionary rather than the failed last stand of the ancient celestial spheres astronomy, thus rejecting the previous 1600-1687 Wikipedia dating. But by virtue of excluding such as the Butterfield dating from mention and even from implicit consideration, the first paragraph's claim that 'historians agree more about the starting date and less about the closing date' is in fact nonsense. In the particular case of Butterfield versus McCluskey datings, the difference of starting dates is about 250 years, whereas that between closing dates is only about 70 years. And in general as in this case, the literature on the scientific revolution shows much greater disagreement about its alleged starting point than about its finishing point, contrary to what McCluskey claims in the first paragraph.

In conclusion, clearly the current first paragraph must be radically revised or entirely removed, and if it is to be concerned with dating the boundaries of the alleged scientific revolution, then given the wide disagreement between historians of science due to their widely different conceptions of it, it must adopt an NPOV approach and somehow explain the different datings of different historians, perhaps with summary categories of the main different approaches if possible. A leading difference is differences about what sciences had revolutions that are to be included within 'the scientific revolution'. The current article's initial 1543-1727 dating conflicts with the dating that would follow from its later claim in the last paragraph of its Section 5 'Theoretical developments' that there were revolutions in astronomy, mechanics, optics, chemistry biology and other sciences by dating the first and last of these. However, in none of these sciences are we told what the alleged revolution was. And in the only science in which we are told something of that ilk, human physiology, we are told the ancient 'Galen maintained the heart is the centre of the arterial system which disseminates arterial blood', but the revolutionary Vesalius found that "the circulation of blood resolved[sic!] from pumping of the heart". Some revolution ! Logicus 16:44, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

I somewhat agree with you regarding the dates in the introduction, but I also think that because the idea of the Scientific Revolution (as opposed to a generic scientific revolution a la Kuhn) is most often associated primarily with astronomy and mechanics, that that should be the focus of most of the body of the article (i.e., presenting the traditional idea of a Scientific Revolution per Koyre and his intellectual successors). We may soon need a separate article on Historiography of the Scientific Revolution.--ragesoss 00:50, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Ragesoss and Logicus -- I tweaked the discussion of dates in the opening paragraph to reflect the ambiguities brought by the question of Medieval influences / anticipations at the beginning and what, as I recall, Butterfield called "the delayed revolution in Chemistry" at the end. BTW, I prefer the early 18th century ending; when I used Butterfield as a text I skipped his latter chapters.
I hope Ragesoss isn't suggesting there's no place for biology and chemistry in this article. It's interesting that although Allen Debus wrote Man and Nature in the Renaissance, centered on those sciences, to complement Westfall's discussion of the revolution in astronomy and mechanics in his Construction of Modern Science, Debus began by commenting that "Few events in world history have been more momentous than the Scientific Revolution."
I like the Historiography of the Scientific Revolution idea, but perhaps it should be started as a section in the Historiography of science article and then carved off if necessary. A specific example like that might make the Historiography of Science article more robust. --SteveMcCluskey 03:20, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Of course, I didn't mean to imply there is no place for biology and chemistry. I like the outline you've created, which includes those area, but emphasizes mechanics and astronomy. And beginning with section of historiography of science is a sensible suggestion.--ragesoss 10:47, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Problems of Verification: Some Proposed Edits

These proposed edits hopefully both improve the article by removing some gross errors and also assist in clarifying the issues of Wikipedia policy raised by Steve McCluskey in 'Truth, Authority and the NOR Policy' above.

In the current first paragraph delete "A closing date is less easily established, although most historians would agree that the Scientific Revolution had come to a close by the death of Sir Isaac Newton in 1727" UNVERIFIED. The logic of the arithmetic evidence presented in this paragraph suggests the contrary, that it is easier for revolutionists to agree a closing date than an opening date, with an opening date disagreement of some 250 years.


In 3rd Para of 'Significance' delete "the replacement of the Aristotelian idea that heavy and light bodies moved naturally straight down or up toward their natural places and heavenly bodies moved naturally in unchanging circular motions by the idea that all bodies move according to the same physical laws including the law of gravity,..." because it is a multiple logical muddle and its claims unverifiable: UNVERIFIED. Just a few brief illustrative points: (i) In Aristotelian celestial dynamics not all heavenly bodies move naturally in unchanging circular motions. The nested celestial spheres each revolve uniformly in themselves but not absolutely, for only the fixed stars embedded in the stellar sphere move in unchanging circular motions. For the planets embedded in some of the spheres move in non-circular and non-uniform compounded resultant curvilinear motions, very similar to those in Kepler's and Newton's dynamics. But in Newton's simple astronomical model as in Galileo's the planets moved in circles, as in the simple (pre-)Aristotelina model. And in the Dialogo Galileo obviously conceived himself to be developing Aristotelian dynamics by demonstrating the universality of circular motion in nature and denying sublunar rectilinear motion (trajectory of projectiles from a tower is a semi-circle, refuted by Fermat). Overall the distinction attempted here fails. (ii) In Newton's physics bodies do not move according to the same physical laws as claimed because it posited different laws of repulsion and attraction for different bodies in different domains such as macro-dynamics, optics, chemistry and electricity. Also the inverse-square 'law of gravity' does not hold within celestial bodies.


In same para delete "and the replacement of the Aristotelian concept that all motions require the continued action of a cause by the inertial concept that motion is a state that, once started, continues indefinetely without the need for any further action of a cause." Verification required. This is a logical muddle. (i) Nobody, not even historians when in their right minds, denies all actual motions are accelerated and subject to gravitational forces and so require the continued actions of a cause/force, unless perhaps they try to get cute with GTR, but which also fails. So this claimed distinction between Aristotelian dynamics and some alleged replacement fails. In the 17th and 18th century neither Galileo's, Descartes', Newton's nor Leibniz's cosmologies denied this principle. (ii) Re the case of purely hypothetical 'inertial' motion - i.e. unresisted and externally unforced motion - in modern 'post-positivist' times at least since Westfall's 1970 Force in Newton's Physics and the discrediting of its Machian positivist interpretation, the claim that it is unforced and uncaused has been highly disputable because in Newton's dynamics 'inertial' motion is caused by the inherent force of inertia, whereby in 1999 in his Guide to Newton's Principia the world leading Newton 'expert' Bernard Cohen at long last finally admitted that by virtue of his concept of the force of inertia, Newton had not abandoned the principle of Aristotelian physics that 'all motion requires a mover'. (Thus at least Cohen must be removed from McCluskey's list of 8 secondary sources who are said to have claimed a fundamental discontinuity between Aristotelian and Newtonian dynamics like Butterfield.) (iii) it is simply false to say the inertial concept is that motion is a state that once started continues without need for further action of a cause, since this is false of orbital motions of planets (iv) the perpetual rotations of the celestial spheres are states in Aristotelian dynamics, contra Koyre's manifestly mistaken claim that motion is not a state but a process in Aristotle's dynamics, but which only applies to sublunar natural motion. Nor is the perpetual circular violent motion of the sublunar fire belt a process, but a permanent state.


In the 5th para of this section, delete "While few historians have found demonstrable infuence from these ancient sources, ..." unless and until it is VERIFIED that most historians have denied any such influences, because this claim misrepresents the burden of proof. If a scientist cites previous propounders of their theories and has adopted the same theory, what further proof of influence is required ? How on earth is 'no demonstrable influence' to be demonstrated in such circumstances ? By proof that they had no knowledge of the older theory or its proponent before propounding it ? But even that would fail because people may be unaware of the original source of their influences, just as modern scientists who believe in the Aristotelian philosophy that the world is composed of a plurality of different things (pluralism), that there are laws of nature (nomologicism) governing the behaviour of these many things, and that these laws can be derived from experience (empiricism), may be unaware they are therefore deeply influenced by Aristotelian philosophy, as are educators who maintain 'children should achieve their full potential'. For example, even if Newton himself had been unaware of the ancient origins of his theory of gravity in Plato's 'mutual attraction of cognates' theory that replaced Aristotle's in 14th century Parisian scholastic physics in order to accomodate a plurality of worlds contra Aristotle after the 1277 Condemnation, and subsequently adopted by such as Kepler and Galileo, nevertheless as Duhem pointed out in his 'Aim and Structure of Physical Theory', it was an evolutionary development of it.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS: It seems a key problem here is the logico-literacy problem of formulating factually true propositions about physics, which requires training, careful thought and systematic coherent logico-semantic analysis. When we have supposed 'authorities' such as Copleston and Lloyd reportedly positing 'Newtonian levitation' as Steve reported (i.e. that violent motion does not require the action of a force in Newton's dynamics) in their efforts to find fundamental discontinuitues between Aristotle's and Newton's physics, then clearly we have a very serious problem of understanding or exposition that should not be promulgated in an encyclopedia nor endorsed by its rules. Perhaps Steve McClusky can kindly explain what Wikipedia policy rules would exclude such blunders, or say exclude the blunder of a Wikipedia artice claiming that Newton's law of gravity says gravitational attraction is inversely proportional to the distance CUBED ? Logicus 18:08, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Disruptive Editing ?

I'm tired from trying to repair the latest changes to this article.

I think all involved could benefit from reading the Guideline on Disruptive editing.

I'm going to bed. --SteveMcCluskey 03:15, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS COMMENTS: Thank you for accepting 2 of my above 4 proposed edits of 21 September that I then executed two days later, and also the ‘inertia’ corrections. I shall explain later why I think you must also accept the other two edits because your subsequent redrafts do not solve the problem.
Meanwhile, re Koyre’s untenable distinction between motion being a process in Aristotelian dynamics versus a state in Newton’s, repeated by Westfall on page 19 of his unfortunate book you cite, you Koyre admirers (Ragesoss and yourself) might like to reflect on the fact that an intelligent critical attitude to Koyre surfaced in America in 1957 in Wisconsin in the Dutch Duhemian Dijksterhuis’s comments on this alleged antithesis as follows:

"...the antithesis in question between the two conceptions of motion exists only so long as uniform rectilinear motions are considered; all other motions are processes in classical mechanics as well, that is to say, they equally require the constant action of an external force,…” [p175 'The Origins of Classical Mechanics from Aristotle to Newton' M. Clagett ed 'Critical Problems in the History of Science' 1959 pp163-184 University of Wisconsin Proceedings 1957]

  • Re your advice for people to read about Disruptive Editing, from past experience of your failed efforts to identify breaches of Wikipedia policy, why don’t you save us the trouble of trying to work out what you have in mind and just state those sentences that you imagine are being breached ?

Meanwhile, do beware of breaching the following principle yourself:

"It introduces an analysis or synthesis of established facts, ideas, opinions, or arguments in a way that builds a particular case favored by the editor, without attributing that analysis or synthesis to a reputable source." Logicus 18:47, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

I have not accepted your edits; I just haven't gotten around to cleaning up all of your changes. I see no reason to continue cleaning up your editing until this matter is resolved.
For you to criticize anyone for failure to cite reliable sources is so ironic that it doesn't deserve comment.
I am asking for comment by other editors involved in this page in accordance with the Disruptive Edting guideline.
--SteveMcCluskey 19:24, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
I concur with SteveMcCluskey; the interpretations Logicus is trying to introduce are, with respect to modern scholarship related to the Scientific Revolution, original research by Wikipedia's standards, even if they rely to some extent on (quite old) secondary material.--ragesoss 22:36, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
But the issue here raised by Steve is not whether my 4 edits breach NOR policy (which they do not, and nor has Steve proven nor claimed they do), but rather whether they satisfy the criteria of Disruptive Editing. As it happens none of my four proposed edits were original research by current Wikipedia policy. And none rely on any old secondary material. For example, re my third edit, it was in 1999 that Bernard Cohen finally admitted Newton's notion of inertia did not break with the Aristotelian principle that all motion requires a cause, as I have already explained, but to which Steve has notably not responded. It seems as though he discounts 'expert' opinion that contradicts his point of view. And re my second edit, who else maintains the planets or all the celestial spheres move in unchanging uniform circular motion in Aristotelian celestial dynamics as Steve mistakenly claimed? The whole point of the complicated system of scores of nested eccentric celestial spheres introduced by Eudoxus and Aristotle was to provide a mechanical model that explained the non-uniform non-circular eccentric motions of the planets. And my first edit boiled down to an apparent logico-arithmetic error about the range of disagreements about when the SR started, and the fourth to no sources having been provided for Steve's obviously mistaken claim that the scientists mentioned were not influenced by any of the influences they cited. And since Steve has obviously made some effort to reduce the falsity levels of his claims, my proposals were surely productive rather than disruptive. Moreover, Steve was given 2 days to say whether he thought they were mistaken, but did not. I hope this information enables you to withdraw your support for Steve's Disruptive Editing claim. Re NOR policy by the way, there is currently no age restriction on the admissible secondary material, so if you want to try and hang me on that policy presumably you will need to first get it revised to exclude old secondary material ? Logicus 00:52, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
While the arguments Logicus was making earlier were original research, and he was being rather disruptive about it, his most recent edits need not be interpreted as such. He seems willing to work toward a consensus, and accept that mainstream historical interpretations will be the focus of the article; demanding citations for what he feels are unjustified claims is fair, and providing those citations will ultimately strengthen the article.
Logicus, keep in mind, however, that it is outside a Wikipedia article's scope to make explicit judgment's about what scholarship is right and what is wrong; the things I've read are consonant with SteveMclusky's interpretation of Aristotelian physics. You've not given much context for the Cohen reference you provided; it's hard to judge how relevant it is in the overall context of the article. In any case, the correct interpretation of Aristotle's physics, (or more appropriately, whatever passed for Aristotle's physics by Newton's time) is only a small part of the traditional view of the scientific revolution (the gist of which this article needs to convey to the reader, concisely). The system of Eudoxus and Aristotle is usually described as one in which uniform circular motion is the central feature; for example, from Olaf Pederson's Early Physics and Astronomy (1974, revised 1993), regarding the tradition of Eudoxus and Plato (which in this respect, he elsewhere extends to the Aristotelian tradition): "In modern phraseology, it could be said that the task of the astronomer is to formulate a mathematical theory which, from certain presuppositions (in this case a number of uniform circular motions) makes possible a deduction of the more irregular movements which the planets are seen to perform." (p. 25). As it is described in everything I've read (including Pederson, p. 81, well as in Michael Crowe's 1990 Theories of the World from Antiquity to the Copernican Revolution), Ptolemy's addition of the equant point (not deferents and epicycles) is the only thing, up until Kepler, that violates the requirement of uniform circular motion. Even so, Ptolemy claimed allegiance to the principle that all celestial motion was uniform circular motion; others up to (and perhaps including) Copernicus attempted to "save Ptolemy from himself," which was eventually done by replacing the equant with the Tusi couple.
(Aside: Perhaps we should step back and try to lay out the differences between the significant authors of Sci Rev historiography; maybe you two (Steve and Logicus) feel comfortable about assigning weight to these conflicting narratives without explicit discussion, but I do not. That said, I don't anticipate having significant time to devote to research for this article for a while; I'm going on wikibreak as I read for qualifiers.)--ragesoss 02:41, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
LOGICUS REPLIES TO RAGESOSS: I am most grateful for your reconsideration and withdrawal of your support for Steve McCluskey's charge of Disruptive Editing re my recent proposed edits. However, re your accusation that I have previously made original research arguments and also been rather disruptive in editing, I would be even more grateful if you would also kindly either produce some logically valid evidence for this charge or else kindly withdraw it, since I have never breached NOR policy nor DE policy so far as I am aware. As you may appreciate, I would prefer not to have previous convictions automatically presumed when these charges have never been verified. In my opinion on Wikipedia policy breaches, the situation is rather that others have radically breached Good Faith policy against myself.

I would also be grateful if you could let me know how the Wikipedia Disruptive Editing process McCluskey says he has initiated may be terminated.

Re the procedural matters you raise, I am indeed willing to work towards a consensus, and am amenable to your suggestion that we step back and maybe have that discussion about the McCluskey proposals that Steve apparently invited but never honoured. But the problem here would appear to be Steve, not me. The basic procedural problem is that Steve originally just marched in on 30 August as though he owned the article and Wikipedia and his opinions about the article and the SR were authoritative, proposed an outline for a complete rewrite supposedly for discussion, claimed he had copied the existing article to his User Talk page and invited its radical revision there, but didn't. Instead he then started making radical changes to the article before there was any discussion, and which he invited everybody to have fun with, but which disrupted revisions I was gradually making to make it more historically accurate and interesting re debate and more coherent. Then when I edited his changes to challenge Butterfield's view with Newton's and so create an interesting antinomy, he responded with untenable charges of original research and insultingly implied a primary source was being used in a particular manner by somebody untrained to do such, and he then removed the edit.

Perhaps further article edits can be put on hold whilst issues are discussed/resolved in Talk and you have time for the research you require ? I certainly have much evidence to bear against McCluskey's view that I have not yet had time to muster in Talk, especially against his alleged array of secondary sources in support of Butterfield's interpretation. And if you could possibly provide a list of all those books on your bookshelf of which a quick glance confirmed McCluskey's view for you it would be helpful, especially since as we have seen here, it seems at least two of them (Pederson and Crowe) do not, but rather confirm mine, yet again revealing a logico-literacy problem, probably stemming from insufficient time to read what has been said carefully.

Re the many substantive points you raise and have raised previously in Talk forums that I have not yet responded to, for which I apologise, in my view they are all mistaken and I shall explain why asap. Now I just respond to three points you make here that are pertinent to rebutting the Disruptive Editing charge:

  • Your astronomical information in the section 'The system…...Tusi couple' clearly supports my proposed edit rather than McCluskey's as you wrongly imply. This is because your sources clearly confirm my point that the planets “move irregularly” in Aristotelian celestial dynamics and hence that McCluskey's edit that “heavenly bodies move in unchanging circular motions in Aristotelian dynamics” was indeed thereby FALSE as attested by secondary sources. As I said, only the fixed stars do. The import is that one of the sillier traditional distinctions made, that Kepler replaced Aristotelian circular planetary orbits with ellipitical orbits, thereby fails. Thanks for these further secondary source justifications for my edit, which was therefore justified and productive. QED.
  • Your claim that “the correct interpretation of Aristotle's physics is only a small part of the traditional view of the scientific revolution” is surely mistaken and contradicts your own 21 September advocacy of Koyre's view as the traditional view, since that view was wholly based on the much older traditional 'total overthrow of Aristotelian physics' positivist thesis, to whose validity the interpretation of Aristotelian physics is therefore fundamental, and on which Newton's commentary is therefore a most valuable secondary source. (Koyre was involved in a particular debate within this whole positivist tradition dating from Mach's 1883 'Science of Mechanics' and then Duhem's massive critique of Mach's claim that Galileo invented dynamics, to which Koyre was responding.) QED.
  • Your claim “You've not given much context for the Cohen reference you provided; it's hard to judge how relevant it is in the overall context of the article.” is surely mistaken. The reference is given twice in the Talk with full context, and as I have explained it is centrally relevant to refuting the claim of McCluskey and Westfall that the Aristotelian principle that 'all motions require the action of a cause' was overthrown by Newton's dynamics, even in the case of purely ideal nonexistent externally unforced uniform rectilinear motion. But maybe the good news from Harvard of Cohen's recantation of his 'Birth of a New Physics' error has not yet reached West Virginia ? And as Dijksterhuis pointed out , as I have quoted above, that principle is anyway true for actual motions. Thus another alleged revolutionary distinction between Aristotle's and Newton's dynamics, this one first introduced by Duhem, fails. And as I have also pointed out in Talk on 13 September, the Halls' 1962 secondary source shows Newton maintained 'force is the causal principle of all motion', contra McCluskey and Westfall. Thus my proposed edit was justified, and McCluskey's edit needs to take this alternative viewpoint of Newton and Cohen into account. QED?

But thanks again for your considerate and relatively more humane intervention. Logicus 16:18, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Logicus, I think perhaps your position is closer to ours we've all been assuming. Let's go systematically, taking SteveMcCluskey's outline as our roadmap, and go one section at a time to produce content acceptable to everyone. I say we set aside the "Significance" section and work first on the ancient and medieval background section; I will create a section for it below.--ragesoss 19:14, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Ground Rules 11:25, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

When editing the Talk page, might we adhere to the following guidelines:

  1. Please do not alter another editor's contribution.
  2. Please add to the bottom of a thread, and not interpolate directly into the thread of another editor.
  3. Please demarcate your own contribution with markup such as quote, indentation, numbering, bold, bracket, etc.
  4. Please timestamp your contribution thus ~~~~
  5. This behavior is common knowledge in the community. It is a sign of trouble when this protocol is not followed.
  6. The talk page should be archived (i.e., it is 170K, and should be placed in storage). But might the contributors suggest just what be retained to give context for the discussion to be continued. Ancheta Wis 11:25, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
LOGICUS ASKS: Has anybody been breaching these important rules lately ? May we take non-response to this query to indicate they have not been ? I would much appreciate your reply to my reply to your previous comments as requested on your UserTalk page. Logicus 16:36, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Archiving discussion

A useful breakpoint for the archive for now would be the start of the recent discussion, initiated as I understand it by my comments that "This article really needs focus and improvement." To the extent that the earlier discussions may be relevant, they can be consulted in the archive as necessary.

I'll let this recommendation sit for comments for a while.

As I don't know how to set up an archive, if anyone does (Ancheta?), feel free to do so.

Like Ragesoss, I'm trying to get things done in my real life (see the Wikibreak note on my talk page). I proposed using the procedure outlined in the new Tendentious Editing guideline since it was developed as a fast and non-bureaucratic way to deal with problems like this. I don't have that much time to spend debating minutiae in the philosophy and history of science or acting as a prosecuting or defense attorney in a legal case. I'd like to get on with writing an article that reflects the best scholarship in the history of science. --SteveMcCluskey 14:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS COMMENTS: I agree with Steve's suggestion for an apposite Archiving breakpoint. As for his other many personal snotty remarks, I do not. Yet again he is in breach of Good Faith policy.Logicus 16:36, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Ancience and medieval background

working draft

In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Greek was the primary language of science. After the fragmentation of the Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek sharply decreased in western Europe, limiting direct access to all but the few scientific works that had been translated into Latin. Many ancient ideas were only known in the West through Latin encyclopedists; other fragments of ancient science were preserved or assumed in a range of practical and religious texts. By the 13th century, interest in scientific questions had become well established, as the writings of antiquity became increasingly available in Latin translations, made either from Arabic of directly from the Greek.[1] One of the more important translators was Gerard of Cremona (ca. 1114 - 1187) who travelled to Toledo, where "seeing the abundance of books in Arabic on every subject and regretting the poverty of the Latins in these things, he learned the Arabic language, in order to be able to translate." [2] These difficult new texts were first assimilated in Western Europe against the background provided by the traditions of early medieval science, with the assistance of late Greek and Arabic commentaries, most notably those of the Spanish Muslim, Averroes (1126-98). These texts and their commentaries were taught and studied, interpreted and criticized within the institutional structure of the Medieval universities.The Scientific revolution built upon the foundation of ancient Greek learning, as it had been elaborated in medieval Islam and the universitities of medieval Europe.[3] Though it had evolved considerably over the centuries, this "Aristotelian tradition" was still the dominant intellectual framework in 16th and 17th century Europe.

Key ideas from this period, which would be transformed fundamentally during the scientific revolution, include:

  • Aristotle's cosmology which placed the Earth at the center of a spherical cosmos, with a hierarchical order to the Universe. The terrestrial and celestial regions were made up of different elements which had different kinds of natural movement.
    • The terrestrial region, according to Aristotle, consisted of concentric spheres of the four elements—earth, water, air, and fire. All bodies naturally moved in straight lines until they reached the sphere appropriate to their elemental composition—their natural place. All other terrestrial motions were non-natural, or violent, and required the continued action of an external cause.[4]
    • The celestial region was made up of the fifth element, Aether, which was unchanging and moved naturally with uniform circular motion.[5] In the Aristotelian tradition, astronomical theories sought to explain the observed irregular motion of celestial objects through the combined effects of multiple uniform circular motions.[6]
  • The Ptolemaic model of planetary motion. Ptolemy's Almagest demonstrated that geometrical calculations could compute the exact positions of the Sun, Moon, stars, and planets in the future and in the past, and showed how these computational models were derived from astronomical observations. As such they formed the model for later astronomical developments. The physical basis for Ptolemaic models invoked layers of spherical shells, though the most complex models were inconsistent with this physical explanation.[7]
  • Galen's physiological system which located three vital functions in the brain, the center of the nervous system which disseminates a subtle psychical spirit responsible for sensation; in the heart, the center of the arterial system which disseminates arterial blood, bearing a vital spirit responsible for life; and in the liver, the center of the venous system which disseminates the thick venous blood, bearing a natural spirit responsible for growth and nourishment. He also adopted the traditional Greek view that illness was the result of imbalance among four bodily humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Health could be restored by diet, by bleeding or purging, or by medication to restore the proper balance.[8]
  1. ^ A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Pr., 1979), vol. 1, pp. 51-67.
  2. ^ E. Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Pr., 1974), p. 35.
  3. ^ E. Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1996), pp. 29-30, 42-7.
  4. ^ E. Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1996), pp. 55-63, 87-104; Olaf Pederson, Early Physics and Astronomy: A Historical Introduction, 2nd. ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1993), pp. 106-110.
  5. ^ E. Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1996), pp. 63-8, 104-16.
  6. ^ Olaf Pederson, Early Physics and Astronomy: A Historical Introduction, 2nd. ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1993), p. 25
  7. ^ Olaf Pedersen, Early Physics and Astronomy: A Historical Introduction, 2nd. ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1993), pp. 86-89.
  8. ^ A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Pr., 1979), vol. 1, pp. 171-6; G. E. R. Lloyd, Greek Science After Aristotle, (New York, W. W. Norton, 1973), pp. 140-1.

Above, I've added another sentence to the description of celestial motion; does that address your complaint about celestial dynamics, Logicus? Also, what othe problems do you have with this section?--ragesoss 19:30, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Ragesoss, thanks for taking the time to work up this draft. Reading this section over, all I found that glared at me was the strange phrase "at the center" in the description of Aristotle's terrestrial elements. It's my fault, I apparently didn't cut out the reference to the center when I was editing that section. Sorry about that.
I struck out the offending phrase and added a temporary <references/> tag so we can see the footnotes. --SteveMcCluskey 20:15, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
LOGICUS COMMENTS: Ragesoss I apprecate your efforts, but I submit this whole section is logically irrelevant to McCluskey's thesis of a revolution beginning in the 16th century. So scrap it ! Surely it is rather the state of immediately pre-revolutionary 16th century science that needs portraying to establish his specific thesis.

The main objection I have to this whole section concerns its logical irrrelevance and thereby its non-interest to the reader. This objection is that this section is wholly logically irrelevant to any narrative of a Scientific Revolution (SR) in the period 1543-1727 as claimed by McCluskey, which excludes the period of Ancient and Medieval Science. It should therefore be deleted as of no relevance to the article as McCluskey proposes to rewrite it. (It is of course a legacy from the pre-McCluskey article.) This may save extra work.

Rather the Prelude that must be portrayed to establish Steve's SR thesis is surely not the state of Ancient and Medieval science, but instead the immediately prior state of 16th century science against which Steve claims there was a revolution. And in particular it must portray the pre-revolutionary state and principles of those sciences in which he claims there was a revolution. Most particularly, in the first instance any such Prelude must surely state what principles of those sciences were changed and what principles replaced them. And then secondly, but more crucially, it must explain why these changes were revolutionary rather than just part of the normal regime of 'plus ca meme, plus ca change' and continual reformation in scientific development as everywhere else in life, at least on the Heraclitean view of the world and of thought as in perpetual flux. Why were these changes sufficiently extraordinary or exceptional to be classified as 'revolutionary' ? This must surely be explained. Or does perpetual change mean permanent revolution in McCluskey’s view ?

Thus the state of Ancient and Medieval science is logically and historically irrelevant to the article as currently constituted, with its 1543-1727 SR dating. Rather, in the core science of dynamics and the science of motion, for example, such as the states of Leonardo's Notebooks and the works of Domingo de Soto, of Bonamico, of Benedetti and of Vincenzo Galilei, for example, are far more historically and logically relevant to the question of whether there was a Scientific Revolution beginning in the 16th century, as McCluskey claims, than the state of ancient and medieval science. And a key question is, What was the alleged Scientific Revolution in mechanics a revolution against, if indeed there was a Scientific Revolution beginning in 1543 as McCluskey claims ? In my view there wasn't. But Steve may wish to put up his dukes and prove me wrong by demonstrating some fundamental revolutionary change in dynamics in this period or finding some secondary source that does (-:


On procedural matters:

Do you still allege I have breached NOR policy and also DE policy at some time in the past ? Would you please now kindly either explicitly withdraw these allegations or else demonstrate them.

Do you deny McCluskey has seriously breached Good Faith policy ?

I ask these questions because the impression created in Talk and User Talk is that McCluskey has inequitably been given privileged preferential treatment by Wikipedia 'officials' in being encouraged to proceed with his proposed complete re-write of the SR article from his viewpoint before critical discussion of his proposal by others had even begun, and then also for his allegations against my editing by 'officials' who have connived with him to try and find Wikipedia policy principles that would rule out my editing of the SR article and possibly of other articles, but on the other hand when I raise the issue of McCluskey's breach of Good Faith policy, I am told to drop it. Why this inequitable treatment ?

By the way Tendentious Editing is not a guideeline yet.

Accepting McCluskey's proposed rewrite doesn't seem very consensual.

More constructive stuff later from Logicus 16:12, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

This purpose of this section is to lay out the general state of knowledge at the beginning of the time period known as the "Scientific Revolution"; the purpose of the article as a whole is not necessarily to argue that there in fact was (or was not) a Scientific Revolution, but to describe the developments that people call the Scientific Revolution (and the criticisms of that argument that others have put forward). Obviously the contrast to the ancient and medieval Aristelian tradition that, roughly speaking, stretched up to the 16th century (and certainly for most learned Westerners, continued well beyond it) is crucial for understanding what is meant by "Scientific Revolution". So, considering the purpose of this section as a concise statement of the state of knowledge before the supposed revolution, how can we improve it? (Since your objections partly stem from the dating of the scientific revolution, I'm starting a new section for us to collate the various dates that people have used.)--ragesoss 17:07, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
LOGICUS REPLIES TO RAGESOSS: Whoops ! Re my proposal to scrap the 'ancient and medieval science' section, I thought Steve also disapproved of it, as in his 2 September statement "I'm disturbed to see an article on the Scientific Revolution beginning with a section on ancient science, and then going on to the recovery of ancient learning in the Twelfth Century." So I thought its removal was at least one thing we would be in agreement about and I was only possibly disagreeing with you. But when I re-checked Steve's proposed outline, I see that in fact he has included such a section in it near the beginning. So now I'm confused. So what exactly was he disturbed about ?

Re my proposal that any section on the immediately pre-revolutionary state of science for a revolution allegedely beginning in 1543 should not be about ancient and medieval science but rather about early 16th century science, again you and Steve seem to have a logico-literacy problem understanding it. In objecting to it you say "This purpose of this section is to lay out the general state of knowledge at the beginning of the time period known as the "Scientific Revolution";...the purpose of this section as a concise statement of the state of knowledge before the supposed revolution." Indeed ! And that is exactly why, and especially for greater concision, I propose the logic of the 1543 start position is that it should be scrapped and replaced by a section about the immediately ‘pre-revolutionary’ 16th century science. Of course, if any sciences still contained ancient or medieval elements, these will obviously be included in any such analysis, so nothing of logical relevance would be lost thereby. But all this waffly rambling around about the Roman Empire and Gerard of Cremona etc is irrelevant and boring and doesn't advance the scientific content of the narrative in any way. It belongs to an article about the translation of Arabic science into the Latin tradition. And by the way, re such an article, wasn’t the traditional language of medieval science Arabic rather than Greek ? I won’t comment on the contents of this section until we sort out the apparent confusion about this section, except to say the following.

Yes I liked the sentence you added about irregular planetary motion, but that whole bullet point is still problematic. For instance the Grant pp63-8 footnote 5 reference must go, because these pages are just too logically confused (one moment he has the planets in observable regular circular motion and then the next he has Saturn in retrograde motion !), although even he does not say the AETHER moved naturally with UNIFORM circular motion as McCluskey does, but only with circular motion, as I believe did Aristotle, although Grant gives no reference to Aristotle on this, which is bad. Not does the weblinked Wikipedia article on the Aether say the aether moved with UNIFORM circular motion. That seems to be pure McCluskey. In a rush, but following you, I propose the following replacement as a rough model.

‘The celestial region was made up of the fifth element, Aether, which was unchanging and whose natural motion was circular.[5] [Suggest footnote reference to, say, page 13 of the Loeb On The Heavens.] In Aristotelian astronomy its mechanical models sought to explain the observed irregular orbits of the planets as the resultant of the combined uniform rotations of nested interconnected aetherial spheres, originally 55 in all according to Aristotle, with each planet set in a sphere like a jewel in an orb.’

I like your idea of a section collating datings, but suggest that rather than follow what I call the 'conceptually mindless' approach, it should include the crucial information of how these different authors conceived and defined the Scientific Revolution, which will account for their different datings. Butterfield's(1300-1800) and Hall's datings need to go in, and many others. The biggest would probably be Sorabji, probably 600 – 1800 ? And what did Kuhn give it ?

My main procedural proposal re the article is that we rewind the tape to what Steve said on 30 August and 2 September and allow a month or so as he appeared to be suggesting for people concerned to have time to comment on and discuss his outline, rather than it just be accepted by 'officials' as it seems to have been.

Would you please kindly respond to my requests to prove or withdraw your allegations of breaches of NOR and DE policy ?

Logicus 17:13, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

What exactly was McCluskey disturbed about?
The problem I had when I critiqued the discussion of "the recovery of ancient learning in the Twelfth Century" was originally in the section called "Infusion of Classical Texts." My discussion of the original outline had described that section as "Superfluous Delete." When editing the new version, I kept portions of that section at the beginning of my discussion of the ancient and medieval background, until I decided what to do with it. I agree that it should go and I've suggested a strikeout, replacing the introductory paragraph with a new introductory sentence. (For clarity I've left the paragraph break, which is superfluous snd should go too). Perhaps we've got some agreement here. --SteveMcCluskey 19:19, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
Logicus suggests we go with the Loeb discussion of the 55 nested spheres which Aristotle proposes in his Metaphysics. I don't think that's really relevant to our period, because by the late Middle Ages the Aristotelian concentric sphere cosmology had been largely replaced by a cosmology based on Ptolemy's Planetary Hypotheses as presented by Alhazen, al-Fargani, and others. That idea was presented in the standard late medieval school texts circulating under the title Theorica planetarum. (Edward Grant, Planets Stars and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1996), pp. 277-8. As the title suggests, Grant traces medieval survivals up to the year of the publication of Newton's Principia.) I'd stay with what we currently have on medieval astronomy.
I agree that the word uniform goes a step too far in discussions of celestial motions; let's strike it. As Grant points out the medieval perceptions reflected a tension between uniformity and irregularity. The "irregular compound motions were perceived as somehow less real than the simple motions that produced them." (Grant, Planets Stars and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1996), pp. 488-496 (quotation at p. 494).) --SteveMcCluskey 19:59, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
I agree that the struck paragraph was largely extraneous, but a briefer explanation of the transmission/transformation of ancient and medieval knowledge might still be appropriate.
Should we also mention something about "crystalline spheres" in relation to Aether? Some recent work (e.g., Andersen, Barker and Chen) that still holds to a revolution model focuses on the shift from spheres (persisting through Copernicus) to orbits in free space (with Kepler) as the central event of the Copernican revolution (though this is partially distinct from the Scientific Revolution)?--ragesoss 20:13, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
There is a Firmament article. --Ancheta Wis 20:22, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
Thanks; I'd never seen that article. Actually, the perhaps poorly named Sphere (geocentric) is more what I meant (which I also hadn't seen before).--ragesoss 20:44, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
Ragesoss. Do you mean Anderson, Barker, and Chen's new book on The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions? I haven't seen it, but from the table of contents on the Cambridge University Press web page, it doesn't focus very closely on the medieval concept of crystalline spheres.
From what I've seen in the commentaries Thorndike edited in The Sphere of Sacrobosco and its Commentators, the notion of crystalline spheres did not play a major role in medieval cosmological thought. Grant argued in "Celestial Orbs in the Latin Middle Ages," Isis, 78(1987):153-73 that "For most medieval authors, a solid sphere signified a material sphere, without implying any obvious commitment to hardness or softness.... I believe that most would have opted for fluid orbs.... [I]t was not until the sixteenth centuries—not long before they would be forever banished from the heavens—that the celestial orbs were finally hardened."
Grant's later Planets, Stars, and Orbs (p. 339) discusses a minority of medieval philosophers who held that the spheres were solid. He also allows a place for crystalline spheres, which appear more in theological discussions (pp. 95, 103-4, 320-1, 332-4) of the Biblical "waters above the firmament" than in astronomical or cosmological discussions.
In my opinion, I could see a discussion of the medieval "solid" sphere model, just as long as we don't get carried away with hard or crystalline spheres. --SteveMcCluskey 22:03, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
The way I understood it was that "crystalline" denoted transparent rather than hard. But I'll defer to your judgment (the spheres part is what I was concerned about, not the crystalline part).--ragesoss 23:23, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
Ragesoss. I've been away much of the day but after a quick look, the additions about the Aristotelian tradition and the celestial spheres look good. I have a few nitpicks on the spheres, but lets let them pass.
Do you want the references to go after the additions; perhaps with a few new pages? I know Grant speaks to the Aristotelian tradition, but I don't recall at the moment how much Pedersen says about physical spheres. --SteveMcCluskey 03:16, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
I moved the appropriate Pedersen note and expanded the page range to encompass his discussion of spheres vis-a-vis Ptolemy. Maybe an illustration would be appropriate here, as well: either Image:Ptolemaic elements.svg or I could track down or scan the image Pedersen uses, which is from Georg Peurbach's 1460 Novae theoricae planatarum. The latter has the advantage of implicitly demonstrating the continued relevance of Ptolemaic astronomy nearly into the 16th century. As for the other sentence I added, if you can scrounge up a supporting reference, that would be great.--ragesoss 05:08, 2 October 2006 (UTC)


LOGICUS COMMENTS: Steve, there appears to be a consistency problem re the sentence you replaced the first paragraph with and your Butterfield position, as follows:

Was there a SR ? McCluskey versus McCluskey ?

"I think this topic is very important; as Herbert Butterfield said:Since [the Scientific R]evolution overturned the authority in science not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world - since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics - it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes - mere internal displacements within the system of medieval Christendom." McCluskey 26 August and currently quoted in the article.

VERSUS

"The Scientific revolution built upon the foundation of ancient Greek learning, as it had been elaborated in medieval Islam and the universities of medieval EDurope." McCluskey 30 September

With this last sentence the article would now be inconsistent, having first endorsed Butterfield's view and then contradicted it. Was the ancient and medieval authority in science overthrown by the SR as Butterfield claimed, or rather did it build upon the foundations of ancient Greek science and their medieval development as McCluskey claims ? Which is it ? Logicus 18:11, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

I don't see any contradiction here, but merely a typical example of historical change. Almost every historical process -- whether revolutionary or evolutionary -- builds on its predecessors. The fact that the scientific revolution started by building on the foundations of ancient Greek learning as it had been elaborated in the Middle Ages is not at all inconsistent with its concluding state ending in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy and the destruction of Aristotelian physics.
To give one example. Galileo's juvenalia are scholastic in content, yet in his Two Great World Systems he uses Simplicio as a foil to show the glaring flaws of scholastic Aristotelianism. In historical studies we have to remember that any one process, or any one person, goes through phases that may be logically inconsistent.
Incidentally, the agenda for the current discussion is to achieve consensus on the draft of Ancient and Medieval Background proposed by Ragesoss as part of the proposal to "go systematically, taking SteveMcCluskey's outline as our roadmap, and go one section at a time to produce content acceptable to everyone." You keep raising side issues (the latest is not one) that distract us from that agenda. This is the kind of thing that the writers of the Disruptive Editing Guideline had in mind. If you can't agree with the draft as written, you may chose to disagree, and then we will achieve consensus on the issues without achieving unanimity.
LOGICUS COMMENTS ON MCCLUSKEY: I reject all these claims and will rebutt them later.
LOGICUS COMMENTS ON THE UNSIGNED COMMENTS ABOVE: You claim "You keep raising side issues (the latest is not one) that distract us from that agenda." Since I am not aware of having done so and you admit this is not one, please provide some evidence of this so far unfounded allegation.

Re the historical point, your position appears to be 'The SR built upon the foundation of ancient and medieval learning and demolished it.' I shall maybe comment on this apparent gobbledegook later, which maybe touches on the heart of the matter of historians' failure to provide a tenable not easily refuted testable conception of the Scientific Revolution and their tendency to regress into an undefined concept and thus untestable pseudo-history. But perhaps what you meant to say was something like 'The SR started out from the foundation of ancient and medieval learning, but eventually overthrew it.' instead of what you actually wrote. Is this yet again a literacy problem ?

Are you now claiming the alleged SR was an evolutionary or a revolutionary process ?

Your historical comments on Galileo are mutiply mistaken. Dialogo and Discorsi were both the last fling of scholastic dynamics, with its radically mistaken theory that gravitational fall is uniformly accelerated because the scholastic theory of gravity mistakenly maintained the force of gravitational attraction was a universal constant, and which not even Galileos's main supporter and translator Mersenne accepted. Thus, for example, Galileo mistakenly calculated a canonball would take less than 4 hours to fall from the altitude of the lunar orbit compared with what Drake reported as Scheiner's correct prediction of about 5 days. More on this later if appropriate. Logicus 17:51, 4 October 2006 (UTC)


Does Violent Motion require an EXTERNAL cause ?

LOGICUS PROPOSES: The draft claims "All bodies naturally moved in straight lines until they reached the sphere appropriate to their elemental composition — their natural place. All other terrestrial motions were non-natural, or violent, and required the continued action of an external cause.[4]"

But is there any evidence of any such claim that violent motion requires an EXTERNAL cause in the Grant passages cited ? I could not see any in a quick skim read. Or even if there is, what justifying source does Grant give in Aristotle and is it born out by the source ? I suspect at least the word EXTERNAL must be removed, and propose the following provisional replacement of these two sentences: 'The natural motions of pure elemental bodies caused by their internal natures of what became known as gravity or levity were rectilinear directly towards the sphere appropriate to their element where they sought to be at rest in their natural place. All other sublunar motions were non-natural or violent, and were resisted by the nature (i.e. the gravity or levity) of the body.'Logicus 18:11, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

I've added another reference for the "external cause" section. From Pedersen:
  • After discussing natural motion: "The second category of motion is forced motion'. This is cuased by external forces and hinders the natural motion. Examples are projectile motion, lifting of loads, and so on." (p. 106). Also on that page: "The need for a moving force is common to all types of motion, and modern recognition of intertial motion as the uniform and straight motion of a boy without any action of force is alien to the physics of Antiquity."

--ragesoss 22:07, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS TO RAGESOSS: I take it you accept I am right about Grant. Nor do I think will you find any such evidence in Aristotle. What is Pederson's source/evidence for his apparently mistalen claim ? More later. Sorry about the trouble you are having with Raging Bull McCluskey Logicus 18:13, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Firstly, name-calling is inappropriate and counter-productive (though I suppose there are much worse things to be called than Raging Bull). I don't have Grant's book, so I provided another citation that supports the "external" claim. The burden is now on you to provide a credible source that disagrees with this interpretation. Directly challenging the validity of secondary sources (as opposed to using criticism or counter-arguments from other secondary sources) amounts to original research.--ragesoss 130.132.146.52 19:15, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
LOGICUS REQUESTS: Would you kindly tell me where NOR Policy says challenging a secondary source is OR ?
I don't understand your problem in this instance. You quote a secondary/tertiary source (Pederson) that you say claims A said X, and I quote a secondary source (any English interpretation of A's Physics) that shows A did not say X. Surely Wikipedia does not sanction using the claims of secondary sources that do not source or verify their claims?

Would also please kindly clarify what you think Wikipedia policy is on the following kind of example:

A secondary source claims A said X but the evidence they present shows A said not X. (e.g. "The witness testified the assailant was black as follows: "The assailant was white".") What should Wikipedia report based on such a source ? That A said X or that A said not X ? Or both ?

There are many such examples to be found in histories of science. Logicus 16:06, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Dating the scientific revolution

  • Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Science: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700 (2001)
Describing the traditional idea of the Sci Rev: "...Europe of the sixteenth and seveteenth centuries, a time and place that, in the history of science, is usually known as the Scientific Revolution." (p. 1) (Dear criticizes the traditional triumphalist account, but still identifies a drastic shift in the way knowledge was produced before and after this period; he also recognizes 'Copernicus to Newton' as the traditional bounds for the Scientific Revolution)
  • Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (1996)
Describing the traditional idea of the Sci Rev: "It was a moment at which the world was made modern, it was a Good Thing, and it happened sometime during the period from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century." (p. 1) --ragesoss 17:07, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Allen G. Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (1978)
"No period in scientific history has been studied in greater detail than the Scientific Revolution, and yet it remains an enigma even as to its chronological limits. Some speak of a three-hundred-year time span stretching from 1500 to 1800 whereas othyers consider only the dramatic developments of the seventeenth century." (p. ix)
  • Richard S. Westfall, The Construction of Modern Science (1971)
"Two major themes dominated the scientific revolution of the 17th century..."(p. 1) "When the 17th Century dawned, the Copernican revolution in astronomy was over fifty years old." (p. 3) --SteveMcCluskey 18:20, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
  • A. Rupert Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1500-1800: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude. (1954).
There is some inconsistency between the title's "1500-1800" and the text, in which he said:
"The same three elements [empirical practice, magic and rational thinking] continued to exist in science for many thousand years, until the scientific revolution took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." (p. xii)
  • Rupert Hall, "The Scholar and the Craftsman in the Scientific Revolution," in Marshall Claggett, Critical Problems in the History of Science (1959).
Immedieately following the title's "Scientific Revolution," the opening sentence states "Never has there been such a time as that during the later sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries for the great diversity of men in the forefront of scientific achievement." (p. 3) --SteveMcCluskey 20:19, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
  • A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo. (1952, 1961)
"How the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries came about is easier to understand than the reason why it should have taken place at all." (vol. 2, p. 131)
  • Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages. (1996)
The creation of a societal environment that enabled a scientific revolution to develop in the seventeenth century involved...." (p. 171) --SteveMcCluskey 20:35, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
LOGICUS ADDS: if 'the SR' is the one you originally commended that Butterfield conceived as the overthrow of Aristotelian natural philosophy and Aristotle's authority, which is in fact the major traditional Enlightenment-positivist conception of it, then for Grant that revolution began in 1492 with Columbus's discovery of America. [See Grant [1996] p167] Logicus 18:07, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution. (1957)
"The final historic integration of Copernican astronomy into the complete and coherent universe envisaged by the seventeenth is the subject of our final chapter...What follows is a partial sketch of the larger revolution in science and cosmology — a revolution which began with Copernicus and through which the Copernican Revolution was at last completed." (Note that here Kuhn uses "revolution" not in the sense of paradigm shift as he did 5 years later in Structure. In Structure, he does not discuss the scientific revolution—which does not conform to his model of a single paradigm shift—but instead writes of a Copernican Revolution and a Newtonian revolution, which he implies are the main components of the broader "revolution" we're concerned with.)--ragesoss 23:35, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Thomas Kuhn 1300-1900.
In his 1977 The Essential Tension, his main work on the Scientific Revolution, Kuhn conceived of it as a process of two currents of fundamental change, namely in what he conceived as 'the five classical mathematical sciences' of antiquity of astronomy, harmonics, maths, optics and statics, and also in 'the Baconian experimental craft traditions' such as chemistry, electricity, heat and magnetism etc. in which they eventually became classical sciences by the 20th century. But for Kuhn, following Duhem as he did in his 1957 'The Copenican Revolution' and 1962 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', the whole event began in the 14th century with the Parisian scholastics' creation of a new sixth classical science of locomotion, followed by fundamental changes in the five classical sciences of astronomy, maths, optics, statics and locomotion in the period 1500-1700, and the transformation of the 'Baconian experimental traditions' from crafts into becoming paradigmatic classical sciences roughly over the period 1600-1900. Kuhn also just handwaived revolutionary change in the life sciences that he did not deal with. But overall in this work Kuhn failed to give any satisfactory definition of revolutionary as distinct from evolutionary or 'normal' change or even of fundamental as distinct from superificial change, whereby his thesis of a scientific revolution remained unproven, arguably typical of the scholarship of historians of the alleged scientific revolution. In the terminology of his 1962 'The Structure of Scientific Recvolutions', the twin process he depicted as 'the Scientific Revolution' could arguably be summarised as that of 'paradigm-shifts' in 4 'classical sciences' accompanied by the paradigm-formation of the science of locomotion and of the various 'Baconian sciences'. In this connection it should generally be noted that the Kantian project of demarcating between pre-scientific and scientific states of a subject practiced by such Comte, Popper and Kuhn (pre-paradigmatic to paradigmatic) does not necessitate that transition was actually revolutionary, even if wrongly called such contrary to standard English parlance. Logicus 17:44, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm not sure where in Essential Tension you think that Kuhn claims those dates. He discusses the overlapping periods of change and revolution you point out, but the only thing he calls "the Scientific Revolution" (with caps) is the traditional 16th and 17th century changes (which he makes arguments about the significance of, but does not deny existence of). It's hard to take your arguments seriously when you don't provide the relevant quotes and citations. Again, the primary purpose of this article is to describe the (relatively well-defined) period and events historians have called the scientific revolution, not establish whether it is right to call these events a revolution. In as much as historians have debated the latter, it will enter into the article, but first the article must describe what it is they are arguing about. --ragesoss 130.132.146.52 19:04, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
LOGICUS REPLY TO RAGESOSS: p41 ET "The conceptual transformations of the classical sciences are the events through which the physical scienceS participated in a more general revolution of Western [scientific] thought." More later for the start and ends, but you yourself testfy 1300 start from 1957 TCR Logicus 16:09, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
LOGICUS TO RAGESOSS: I have not twisted Kuhn's dating of a revolution in science as a twin process starting in the 14th century in the 'classical sciences' and ending in the 19th century in the 'Baconian sciences'. What datings do you claim he gives for the beginning and end of this extensive revolution in science ? You notably give none for Kuhn. The problem here seems to be that you are unjustifiably presupposing some unitary conception of the scientific revolution. But note, for example, that if 'the SR' is the one that Butterfield conceived as the overthrow of Aristotelian natural philosophy and Aristotle's authority, which is in fact the major traditional Enlightenment-positivist conception of it, then for Grant that revolution began in 1492 with Columbus's discovery of America. [p167 Grant 1996] This again raises the question of what conceptions of a historical scientific revolution the article is concerned with and the NPOV problem. Moreover, for Kuhn in User Talk you even admit "Also, in Essential Tension, Kuhn clearly distinguishes "the Scientific Revolution" from the 1300-1900 revolution you've been referring to and you say Kuhn even uses scare quotes to emphasize that he doesn't agree with earlier historians about the significance or name of it, which clearly proves my point that Kuhn dates the scientific revolution as a much wider process dating 1300-1900 and doesn't agree with your conception of it. But you still do not say what dating Kuhn gives for the alleged process you dogmatically want to call 'the scientific revolution', which surely he regarded as beginning in the 14th century, not yours and McCluskey's 16th century. But overall, As Debus says above, "it remains an enigma even as to its chronological limits", yet the alleged enigma is demystified once one appreciates it is only a conceptual innovention of philosophers and historians of science and whereby the datings only differ in accordance with their different conceptions, but the rationale of which is opaque to the 'conceptually mindless' approach you and Steve are pursuing Logicus 18:07, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
LOGICUS PROPOSAL: I propose the various datings and concepts of 'the scientific revolution' of the following historians of science should also be researched and provided. (I have supplied 4 datings and one ‘scientific revolution’ concept indication.)

Bachelard

Bernal

Burtt

Butterfield 1300-1800

H.F.Cohen

I.B.Cohen

Comte

Crombie Done SteveMcCluskey 20:35, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Dijksterhuis

Duhem 1300-1750?

Dugas

Grant Done SteveMcCluskey 20:35, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Hall 1500-1800 Done SteveMcCluskey 20:19, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Kant

Koyre

Kuhn Concept of a sr: a ‘paradigm shift’ Done ragesoss 22:05, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Mach

Maier

McMullin

Sorabji 600-1730?

Tannery

Toulmin

Weber

Whewell

Logicus 14:25, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS COMMENTS: I have also added Bachelard, Bernal, Dugas, McMullin, Tannery, Toulmin and Weber to this list. I note people are not providing the datings at the outset for easy comparison, nor the conceptions of the alleged revolution. I also suggest we should list all the different sciences in which these people claim there were revolutions.
I take it this compilation is research a propos replacing the current first paragraph of the article, currently unjustifiably very narrowly focused on the traditionally alleged 'astro-mechanical' anti-Aristotelian revolution, with an NPOV approach that introduces the different conceptions of 'the Scientific Revolution' and of what a scientific revolution consists of, with their different datings of the alleged SR and their different lists of what sciences had revolutions. Logicus 17:50, 3 October 2006 (UTC)


Proposed consensus on the start of the SR?

One element underlying this discussion of dating seems to be the assumption that if there are earlier theories that differ from Aristotle, they represent an earlier Scientific Revolution. In this view, the beginning of the SR can be dated with the rise of the theory of impetus in the sixth century with John Philoponus (ca. 490 - ca. 570) or in the fourteenth century with Jean Buridan, et al., or perhaps it didn't happen at all.

The accepted historical view of impetus theory is that it developed within an Aristotelian framework. Symbolic of that is that both Philoponus and Buridan developed their ideas in their commentaries on Aristotle's works, in which they employed the basic Aristotelian concepts of motion and its causes. (see, for example, Maier or Clagett on Buridan and Sorabji on Philoponus) In contrast, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton developed their thoughts on motion in texts in which they consciously rejected Aristotelian principles.

In sum, this discussion of a limited aspect of mechanics, the dates given by the texts cited thus far in this section, and the influence of the De revolutionibus and the Fabrica on later developments, clearly put the start of the scientific revolution somewhere after the Middle Ages in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Given that uncertainty 1543 seems as historically significant a date as any other.

Can we have consensus on this? --SteveMcCluskey 22:05, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

None of the quotes we've collected specify 1543, although invocations of 'Copernicus to Newton' imply it. I would prefer "mid-sixteenth century" or the like, since clearly Copernicus had been working on (and discussing with a few other astronomers) his ideas before the death-bed publication of De rev; (and likewise Vesalius' impact is not due solely to Fabrica). Some sources only mention the 17th century and most seem intentially vague about the starting date; if we had to pick a specific date, that would of course be it, but I'd prefer to follow the convention our sources use.--ragesoss 23:34, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Nice compromise; I can live with that. --SteveMcCluskey 23:43, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
OOPS. As you pointed out, Vesalius's earlier work (e.g., his Tabulae anatomica, 1538 and his version of Galen's Institutiones Anatomicae, 1539) and Copernicus's early works, (e.g., his Commentariolus which was circulating in manuscript ca. 1512) were all influential. These contributions then put the start of the SR sometime in the "first half of the 16th century", which still agrees with our sources. --SteveMcCluskey 23:57, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Sounds good.--ragesoss 00:01, 3 October 2006 (UTC)


Ragesoss -- I fear your attempt to achieve consensus has failed. Logicus steadfastly refuses to concede even the smallest point (e.g., the date of the SR) and instead of citing evidence for a different date (or for the invalidity of the whole concept of the SR) issues assignment lists for others to investigate.
Consensus does not require unanimity. I think we should go ahead on this article without Logicus, and if he further disrupts the project by reverting our work, we should call for him to be banned from working on this article as a disruptive editor.
In addition to his Original Research and Point of View pushing, the kind of disruptive editing that best describes his actions is the low level, patience exhausting, disruption described below:
In addition, such editors may:
  • Campaign to drive away productive contributors: violate other policies and guidelines such as Wikipedia:Civility,Wikipedia:No personal attacks, Wikipedia:Ownership of articles, engage in sockpuppetry/meatpuppetry, etc. on a low level that might not exhaust the general community's patience, but that operates toward an end of exhausting the patience of productive rules-abiding editors on certain articles.
I think you should also be aware that Logicus has recently contacted Iantresman, who has "an interest in catastrophism, and the Electric Universe model, a protoscience based on plasma cosmology, in particular the work of Kristian Birkeland, Immanuel Velikovsky...", requesting his assistance with "The efforts of Ragesoss and McCluskey against Logicus apparently to exclude a minority viewpoint on the Scientific Revolution Talk pages."
Regretfully –SteveMcCluskey 20:41, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS COMMENTS ON MCCLUSKEY’S RANTING:

McCluskey claims: “ Logicus steadfastly refuses to concede even the smallest point (e.g., the date of the SR) and instead of citing evidence for a different date (or for the invalidity of the whole concept of the SR) issues assignment lists for others to investigate. “

This is patent nonsense. In the first instances I did not think we were supposed to be agreeing a single dating, which would be ridiculous given all the different conceptions and models of an SR with their different datings, but rather that Ragesoss had proposed a research section on different datings, for the purpose of adopting an NPOV approach to datings rather than the unbalanced POV on dating McCluskey is remorselessly pushing in breach of NPOV. I hoped Ragesoss’s proposed survey might enable a NPOV typological summary of the different models and datings.

I have contributed to this research as much as others, and contrary to McCluskey’s claim that I do not provide evidence for different dates, only yesterday provided evidence of Kuhn’s different 1300-1900 dating of the SR, for example, which incidentally corrected Ragesoss’s bias in only representing Kuhn’s astro-mechanical revolution dating, presumably because he was unaware of Kuhn’s 1977 work on the subject. And today I had intended to add the info Crombie 1100-1700, Comte 1600-1700, Koyre 1633-1727 ?, and Mach 1630s ? The SR has a huge and wide literature with many different conceptions and datings that McCluskey seems unaware of, possibly because as he revealed in his User Talk to Ragesoss, he has got rid of his books on the SR and he is anyway a medievalist. But his narrow bias in favour of a dating of the SR restricted to that of the very outdated conception of it as the alleged astro-mechanical revolution should surely not be allowed to dominate the article. To educate himself about the subject with just one book, McCluskey might find it useful to read Floris Cohen’s The Scientific Revolution: An Historiographical Enquiry that I added to References some time ago, in spite of its many and fatal flaws.

Yet again McCluskey makes allegations of NOR and NPOV breaches by Logicus that as per usual he fails to demonstrate with evidence of what edits of any articles have ever breached them and what principle they have breached.

Re McCluskey’s perpetual harassing allegations of Disruptive Editing on my part that he makes but never demonstrates with any evidence, his allegation here seems to entirely overlook the fact that committing Disruptive Editing requires the conjoint satisfaction of three separate criteria covering the editing of ARTICLES, whereas I have not edited any ARTICLE recently but only contributed to Talk pages. And the 4th optional additional ‘Campaign’ condition McCluskey states above is obviously additional to the first 3 conditions having been satisfied, which they have not and which McCLuskey has not demonstrated, in spite of his being invited to do so to enable me to consider the justice of his case.

Contrary to what McCluskey claims in his squealing to Ragesoss, Logicus has certainly not requested the assistance of Iantresman in any respect. This claim would again seem to be another example of elementary reading illiteracy in the English language, akin to McCluskey’s previous misreportage that Logicus’s had expressed frustration with Bernard Cohen.

Logicus 17:20, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS COMMENTS: McCluskey's Dynamical Dilemma ?

McCluskey claimed on 2 October: "The accepted historical view of impetus theory is that it developed within an Aristotelian framework."

Steve, have you argued yourself into a logical dilemma from two different fronts ? You now maintain impetus dynamics was part of the Aristotelian framework, apparently to try and air-brush out the troublesome Duhemian 'impetus dynamics' start dates that clash with your 1543 view. But since impetus dynamics posits an INTERNAL cause of detached violent motion (i.e. projectile motion), then can you also still claim that violent motion required an EXTERNAL cause in the Aristotelian framework in this period ? Or do you claim the Aristotelian system was thereby inconsistent ? As you may be aware, impetus theory derived from Aristotle's attribution of the violent motion of the medium that he claimed propells projectiles as due to an impressed force impressed within the medium (e.g. air or water) by the original projector. It just cut out the middleman and said the impressed force was impressed directly in the projectile. (Don't be a wearisome fellow and try and make out this is Disruptive Editing. It is a crucial issue as to whether there was an inertial-dynamics revolution or not.)

By the way, I agree that impetus dynamics was part of the Aristotelian framework, which I have been arguing for years, but was unaware this was now generally accepted. Logicus 18:08, 4 October 2006 (UTC)


Logicus Comments: Correcting McCluskey history.

In an intriguing effort to eradicate the Duhemian inspired view accepted by Kuhn and many others - that the alleged revolution in dynamics and the science of motion as traditionally conceived as the total overthrow of Aristotelian dynamics was achieved by impetus dynamics well before the 17th century, whether it be in the 14th century (Buridan), 10th century (Avicenna), 6th century (Philoponus) or 2nd century BC (Hipparchus) - Steve wrote as follows:

"One element underlying this discussion of dating seems to be the assumption that if there are earlier theories that differ from Aristotle, they represent an earlier Scientific Revolution. In this view, the beginning of the SR can be dated with the rise of the theory of impetus in the sixth century with John Philoponus (ca. 490 - ca. 570) or in the fourteenth century with Jean Buridan, et al., or perhaps it didn't happen at all.
The accepted historical view of impetus theory is that it developed within an Aristotelian framework. Symbolic of that is that both Philoponus and Buridan developed their ideas in their commentaries on Aristotle's works, in which they employed the basic Aristotelian concepts of motion and its causes. (see, for example, Maier or Clagett on Buridan and Sorabji on Philoponus) In contrast, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton developed their thoughts on motion in texts in which they consciously rejected Aristotelian principles."


  • Is it now the unanimously accepted view that impetus dynamics was part of the Aristotelian framework rather than its overthrow as Duhem, Butterfield, Kuhn and others maintained ? Certainly Grant now holds this view, but who else does ?
  • Steve's strategy here is apparently to abolish all these earlier alleged overthrows of Aristotelian dynamics (AD) by now making impetus dynamics part of it. But in that case this implies AD did not maintain violent motion requires an external cause as alleged by the article, which in turn abolishes the distinction made between Aristotelian and Newtonian dynamics that is supposed to constitute a revolutionary break.
  • Sorabji on Philoponus: Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science: Developing ideas in commentaries on Aristotle does not entail some commentators did not break with the Aristotelian framework. Contrary to what Steve implies, Sorabji claims the overthrow of Aristotelian dynamics that Kuhn attributed to Buridan's 14th century impetus dynamics should be attributed to Philoponus's dynamics in the 6th century. But Sorabji claimed Philoponus rejected Aristotelian dynamics on at least 2 counts, the first being his rejection of the core law of motion of Aristotelian dynamics v α F/R that he regarded as empirically refuted by the finite speed of celestial motion, given the assumptions it has a mover (F > 0) but no resistance (R = 0), whereby v α F/0, which predicts infinite speed. Consequently Philoponus replaced the core law of Aristotelian dynamics with his alternative law v α F - R, which predicts finite speeds for a finite positive force but zero resistance. Thus arguably contrary to what Steve claims, on Sorabji's analysis Philoponus rejected "the basic Aristotelian concepts of motion and its causes" at least because he rejected its core principle that actual motion is caused by a balance between a moving force and resistance. This is the main reason for the title of Sorabji's main work on this topic Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science. Steve may wish to argue Sorabji is wrong, but it cannot be denied he claims Aristotelian dynamics was fundamentally rejected by Philoponus. For what its worth, I tend to agree with Sorabji that Philoponus rejected a fundamental core principle of Aristotelian dynamics, but I deny that Philoponan dynamics overthrew Aristotelian dynamics because Philoponan dynamics was itself 'overthrown' in the 12th century by Averroes's innovative 'inertial' Aristotelian dynamics that restored its core law of motion v α F/R and saved it from refutation by attributing a non-gravitational inherent resistance to motion to the stellar sphere, whereby R > 0. This was apparently the very first emergence of the concept of inertia in the history of physics, subsequently crucially generalised and developed by Kepler and Newton. (I leave it as an exercise for Steve the medievalist to find the secondary sources that support this view of medieval physics (-: )
  • Maier on Buridan: As Steve claims, Buridan's dynamics does indeed seem to have remained within the Aristotelian framework. In particular, as Moody pointed out in his 1966 Galileo and his Precursors to refute Maier's claim that Buridan maintained bodies have a non-gravitational inertial resistance to motion, he maintained (like Aristotle) that 'Prime matter does not resist motion', whereby in the absence of any external resistance there would be no resistance whatever to terminate the externally unforced motion of prime matter, that is, matter without any nature/form/gravity that resists motion. I thought it was now accepted Maier was wrong about Buridan's dynamics, or rather never accepted she was right. And as I have already pointed out, in her 1955 defence against her critics she bizarrely produced evidence from Oresme that the scholastic 'tendency to rest' was due to weight/gravity as evidence that it was not due to weight/gravity, but to inertia.
  • McCluskey: 'Galileo, Descartes and Newton consciously rejected Aristotelian principles of motion in their texts.'
What Aristotelian principles in what texts ? Logicus has already pointed out how Newton embraced the core principle of Aristotelian dynamics that motion and rest are caused by force. And in Le Monde at best Descartes equivocated on this issue. Logicus 14:38, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Ancient and Medieval Background is standard

It is a standard element for histories of the Scientific Revolution to begin with a discussion of the Ancient and Medieval background, for the reasons which Ragesoss pointed out. If we're discussing a historical change, it's important to define what the situation was before the change in order to understand the nature of the change.

Looking at a few texts I have at hand, Chapter one of Peter Dear's Revolutionizing the Sciences (pp. 1-24 especially) discusses "What was worth knowing in 1500," including a nice discussion of Aristotole's natural philosophy, late medieval medicine, and Ptolemaic astronomy.

The first three chapters of Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution (pp. 1-99) deal with ancient astronomy and Aristotelian cosmology and physics.

Westfall's biography of Newton, Never at Rest begins with a discussion (pp. 2-12) of the immediate predecessors of Newton: Copernicus and Kepler, Descartes and Galileo and how they represented a transformation of the ideas of Ptolemy and Aristotle.

Since this draft conforms to the standard presentation of the background to the scientific revolution, I propose we accept it as it stands.

Turning to a brief legalistic point, the Disruptive Editing Guideline is new, but was formally accepted on 21:25, 23 September 2006 after it was endorsedby Fred Bauder, one of the nine active members of the Arbitration Committee. After a momentary objection from 02:28 to 03:55 on 24 September 2006, it has remained as a Guideline for editing on Wikipedia. --SteveMcCluskey 18:05, 29 September 2006 (UTC)


LOGICUS REPLIES TO MCCLUSKEY: Thanks you for your information about Disruptive Editing, but not logically relevant to your appeal to the Essay on Tendentious Editing and its headline notice:

“This is an essay. It is not a policy or guideline. Please update the page as needed, or discuss it on the talk page.”

So on this basis I repeat my claim that Tendentious Editing is currently neither guideline nor policy. So it would seem you will have to try and find something else to hang me with.

Do you agree with me you have breached Good Faith policy ?

Re your points about my proposal to replace the ancient and modern section with a 16th century background section, your objections are obviously logically irrelevant, as I have explained to Ragesoss in the Preview section above today. Pity. I thought we would be in agreement about that. Logicus 17:29, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Sorry for the confusion about Tendentious Editing; I've been seeking guidance on the discussions on Tendentious Editing and Disruptive Editing (and mentioned Disruptive Editing in this discussion several times). The proposals interacted a lot and, until 23 September, the Disruptive Editing proposal was known as Tendentious Editing. When I wrote on the 27th I inadvertantly used the old name; I apologize for my misstatement, but I'm still concerned with a pattern of Disruptive editing. --SteveMcCluskey 18:40, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
LOGICUS REPLIES: Thanks for the apology and explanation. If you are alleging I have done some Disruptive Editing, would you please identify all those edits for me so that I can consider your case and if I can learn something, but so far as I am aware I have not. I suspect all your examples will turn out to be evidence of Bad Faith on your part.

Re you apparent disapproval of an ancient and medieval section, on 26 August you also wrote "2. Early and medieval views of science - Long, but weak; only need to summarize the medieval world view". But maybe we now agree it should go and be replaced by something like 'The early 16th century pre-revolutionary background.' or whenever you think the immediate background was. But the problem here is what dating of 'the SR' you go for. I cannot help here because I don't think there was one. Logicus 14:44, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Logicus, Since you don't think there was a Scientific Revolution, a positive contribution to the discussion would be to present quotations from historians giving their reasons for believing that a scientific revolution did not take place.
Such positive contributions would help ease my concerns about disruptive editing. --SteveMcCluskey 03:26, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Newton's role in the scientific revolution

There is a benefit in dating the end of the scientific revolution at 1727: B. J. T. Dobbs (1930-1994) and M. C. Jacob argue that Newton had a central role in the scientific revolution. Their book points out that Newton was instrumental in producing England's mechanical culture and the Industrial Revolution one generation before the rest of Europe, with attendant economic benefit.

  • "...[N]o single approach to knowledge ever proved to be effective in settling the knowledge crisis of the Renaissance and the early modern periods. Human senses are subject to error; so is human reason. So is the interpretation of revelation; so is the ... scientific method put forward by Descartes... Since every single approach to knowledge was subject to error, a more certain knowledge was to be obtained by utilizing each approach to correct the other; the senses to be rectified by reason, reason to be rectified by revelation, and so forth. ... The self-correcting character of Newton's procedure constitutes the superiority of Newton's method over that of earlier natural philosophers. ... "

--Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob (1995), Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism ISBN 1-57392-545-4 p.10

Those who have solved a differential equation using Newton's method might see a double meaning in these statements.--Ancheta Wis 03:24, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

So what ?
Logicus Asks: Just what is the alleged benefit here ? And what is the logical relevance of this note ? Is it trying to justify McCluskey's bizarrely arbitrary subjective whim of dating the end of the alleged 'scientific revolution' with the death of Newton ? If so, it fails so far as any 'revolution' in celestial dynamics is concerned. For as Newton's greatest advocate Voltaire himself wryly observed when he visited England in the 1720s, whereas on the continent the skies where full of vortices (Cartesian mechanist physics), in England they were empty. This reveals how Newton's celestial physics was not generally accepted on the continent until much later in the 18th century.
The Principia was primarily a polemic against Cartesian mechanism, and its concluding General Scholium cited the very eccentric motions of comets as a leading refutation of Cartesian vortices, whereby there is an argument that Newton's celestial dynamics was not generally accepted at least until after the return of Halley's comet in 1758 provided a theoretically anticipated dramatic novel fact of Newton's empirical superiority that knocked out Cartesian mechanism (and incidentally refuted the theory of Principia E1 that comet paths were parabolic). Or again arguably it was not until Laplace's Celestial Dynamics had apparently (pace Poincare's subsequent refutation) managed to predict stable enduring planetary orbits for the solar system and eliminated the need for Newton's appeal to God's occasional interventions to prevent its gravitational collapse into the Sun, which Leibniz had construed as blasphemy.
Overall the relevant alleged 'revolution' in cosmological modelling here is the transition from the mechanistic model of nested celestial spheres for the solar system, that began somewhere around 1600 with the beginning abolition of the SOLID celestial spheres apparently because of the newly estimated superlunary transpherical transits of comets, to their eventual replacement and also the replacement of the Kepler-Cartesian vortical plenary 'peas in a pea-soup' model by Newton's anti-mechanistic twin forces model. In the latter both mechanical spheres and vortices were replaced by a transverse force of inertia and a centripetal force of gravity and Newton's development of the ancient Aristotelian parallelogram of uniform velocities into a parallelogram of inherent forces to explain planetary orbits dynamically without spheres or vortical pea-soups.
This far more fundamental cosmological 'revolution' in celestial mechanics should not be conflated with the relatively separate and secondary 'heliocentric revolution' concerned with what was at the centre of the planetary system, That revolution seems to have started post-1600 when cosmological modelling was still geocentric as in Brahe's prevailing model. Arguably it was precipitated by Kepler's 1607 heliocentric inertial-dynamical celestial model that dramatically predicted the Sun (and also other planets with orbiting satellites) must rotate to drive its planetary satellites around, soon thereafter to be confirmed by telescopic observations of sun-spots by such as Fabricius's son, Kepler's research assistant. Thus the rise of heliocentrism was historically tied in with the progress of theories of the Sun as a motor of planetary motions, first introduced by Kepler and continued by such as Descartes, Borelli and Newton etc, but no part of the Copernican model that tried to save the celestial spheres and posited they rotated by their own nature and which failed. There was a dynamical revolution in cosmological modelling and also a heliocentric revolution, but no Copernican revolution as such. As Kuhn himself put it, "The Copernican Revolution is scarcely to be found in the De Revolutionibus..."[p155, 1957]. Or in plainspeak, there was no Copernican revolution. [Nor were these twin revolutions in cosmological models scientific revolutions, because cosmological modelling (or 'astronomy') has never been a separate science from 'mechanics' or the overall science of motion, but rather only a model-building part of that science concerned with building dynamical models of many different kinds of motions, such as gravitational fall, traction, projectile motion, oscillatory motions such pendulum motion, and including celestial or cosmological motion. And there was no revolution in the fundamental principles of dynamics or the science of motion: there was just an upheaval in one of its teacups.]
But is this note implicitly trying to suggest there was a Newtonian revolution in scientific method ? Its otherwise apparently pointless quotation of the infallibilist methodological assertions of the methodologically unqualified historian Betty Jo suggests this may be so. If so Logicus will deal with the problems of her analysis if and when such claims of a Newtonian methodological revolution are made. Logicus 17:50, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Transformational developments and their reception

working draft, beginning with imported material from De revolutionibus and De humani corporis fabrica - feel free to make radical changes--ragesoss 21:56, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

In 1543—a year sometimes given as the precise beginning of the scientific revolution—two seminal works marking a departure from the Aristotelian tradition were published: Nicolas Copernicus's astronomical treatise De revolutionibus and Andreas Vesalius's anatomy text De humani corporis fabrica.

Copernicus's De revolutionibus

De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) is the seminal work on heliocentric theory, Copernicus's final publication. The book offers an alternative model of the universe to the Ptolemaic system. Copernicus had earlier circulated a preliminary version of his system in a short manuscript called the Commentariolus. Over the next several decades, Copernicus rewrote Ptolemaic theory for a moving earth, incorporating over a thousand years of accounts of astronomical observations of varying accuracy.

In De revolutionibu Copernicus argued that the universe was made up of eight spheres. The outermost sphere consisted of motionless fixed stars; the sun was motionless at the center. The planets revolved around the Sun in the order of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The moon however, revolved around the earth. Moreover, In the Copernican system, what seemed to be the movement of the Sun and fixed stars around the earth was explained by the daily rotation of the earth around its own axis. Though he presented a number of mathematical innovations as a natural explanation for retrograde motion, Copernicus retained circular orbits and minor epicycles to account for the smaller variations of planetary motion and was understood as modifying, rather than overthrowing, the work of Ptolemy.<ref>Olaf Pedersen, ''Early Physics and Astronomy: A Historical Introduction'', (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1993), pp. 275-7.</ref> Nevertheless, if taken literally, the shift from an earth-centered to a sun-centered system raised serious questions about Aristotle's physics and cosmology. Copernicus himself suggested that the fall of bodies was caused by the natural inclination of the Sun, Moon, and planets "to combine their parts in the form of a sphere and thus contribute to their unity and integrity."<ref>Copernicus, ''De revolutionibus'', I.9; cited in Thomas S. Kuhn, ''The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought,'' (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Pr., 1957), p. 154.</ref>

The book initally caused only mild controversy among poets and theologians; many astronomers used the mathematical techniques of Copernicus, while the physical reality of a moving earth was largely rejected. Only by the early 17th century, when astronomers such as Kepler and Galileo argued for the literal truth of heliocentrism, did Copernicus's work become the target of serious theological and natural philosophical objections.<ref>Thomas S. Kuhn, ''The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought,'' (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Pr., 1957), pp. 193-7.</ref>

Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica

De humani corporis fabrica (On the fabric of the human body) is a textbook of human anatomy based on Vesalius's Paduan lectures. In his early studies at Paris, Vesalius had become familiar with Galen's newly translated anatomical works, which were to influence his work. Vesalius 's presentation follows the pattern set by Galen rather than that of the medieval anatomist, Mondino de' Luzzi. The Fabrica presents a careful examination of the organs and the complete structure of the human body, illustrated by detailed woodcuts attributed to the student of Titian, Jan Steven van Calcar. This would not have been possible without the many advances that had been made during the Renaissance, including both the artistic developments and the technical development of printing.<ref>Allen G. Debus, ''Man and Nature in the Renaissance,'' (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1978), pp. 59-60.</ref>

In the Fabrica Vesalius rejected some of Galen's ideas, including the idea that the venous system originated from the liver. Nonetheless, Vesalius clung to other Galenic concepts, such as the idea that there was a different type of blood flowing through the veins and the arteries. In the second edition of the Fabrica, published in 1555, Vesalius came to the conclusion that the septum (the wall separating the right and left ventricles of the heart) was not penetrated by the pores that Galen had required to allow venous blood to pass through the heart into the arterial system,<ref>Allen G. Debus, ''Man and Nature in the Renaissance,'' (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1978), p. 63.</ref> but it would not be until William Harvey's work on the circulation of the blood that Galen's separate venous and arterial systems would be united.

I've adjusted the Whiggish tone of the relation of Vesalius and Galenism. I also deleted the financial significance for Vesalius, but then I'm an internalist at heart. There's still need for citations and room to add something there on V's discussion of Galen. --SteveMcCluskey 22:30, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

I've finished my changes to the Copernicus section; how does it read now? Vesalius still needs references. --SteveMcCluskey 02:41, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS: I'm way behind you Steve, still in Ancient and Medieval and SR Survey. Catch you later.80.6.94.131 14:43, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

The medieval background in medicine: Avicenna or Galen ?

According to Grant (p29, [1996]), "[Avicenna's] great medical work, Canon of Medicine, may have been more important in the medical schools of the medieval universities than were the works of Galen." Has this been established in the last decade since Grant published ? And if anatomy was part of medicine, shouldn't the article discuss Avicenna's theories as the medieval background in medicine/anatomy, whereas currently it is only about Galen, and whether there was a revolution against any of Avicenna's theories ? Perhaps Steve could clarify this point ? Logicus 18:04, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Since you've recently deleted the discussion of Galen from the section on The Significance of the SR, I thought I should briefly address your quotation from Grant. The central point is that Avicenna's Canon is an essentially Galenic medical textbook. To say that medieval scholars had abandoned Galen because they taught Avicenna, is as illogical as saying modern physicists had abandoned Newton because they used any well-written physics textbook.
There are many sources on this, but convenient (if not authoritative) ones are the discussions of The Canon of Medicine and particularly of Avicenna in Wikipedia:
"His work is not essentially different from that of his predecessor Rhazes, because he presented the doctrine of Galen, and through Galen the doctrine of Hippocrates, modified by the system of Aristotle." --SteveMcCluskey 04:31, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
For an authoritative source on the same material, which is directed specifically to the Galenic nature of medicine before the Scientific Revolution, here is a passage from Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Pr.), 2001, p. 50:
"The medical faculties of the universities had, since their foundation in the thirteenth century, taught according to the teachings above all of Galen and the Arabic philosophers Avicenna and Rhazes. The two latter had written works on medicine that observed the main lines of Galen's theoretical doctrines, so that the overall approach in the western Middle Ages is appropriately called 'Galenic'."
I think that pretty well clarifies any ambiguity arising from Grant mentioning the importance of Avicenna's Canon of Medicine. --SteveMcCluskey 23:08, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Is there uncaused motion ?

LOGICUS TO RAGESOSS: (Re our discussions above on 3 and 4 October under subheading Does violent motion require an external cause ?)

With respect to the particular issue of whether there was a revolution in dynamics in the 17th century, the subject I understand you wish to make central to the article, on one particular element of such the article claims

"Key ideas ... which would be transformed fundamentally during the scientific revolution, include..."All other terrestrial motions were non-natural, or violent, and required the continued action of an EXTERNAL CAUSE."

But in the third bullet point on the alleged views on the revolutionary new ideas attributed to Donne and Butterfield in Section 2 it is rightly claimed that one of these new ideas was "all bodies are heavy", in which case all violent motion of bodies against their heaviness/gravity would require an 'external' force according to Newton's dynamics. Thus an apparent contradiction and bad physics to boot.

The incoherent misrepresentation of both Aristotelian and Newtonian dynamics in the article - i.e. that the former excluded internal causes of violent motion and that the latter held force was required neither for violent motion nor for inertial motion - needs correcting. It is wholly unacceptable that an Encyclopedia should give young people such a bad education in physics.

In general let me dispell a leading unscholarly misrepresentation of Newton's dynamics that is often deployed to concoct the illusion of a revolutionary fundamental break with Aristotelian dynamics and is used in the article, such as in the claim that there was a "replacement of the Aristotelian concept that all motions require the continued action of a cause by the inertial concept that motion is a state that, once started, continues indefinitely without the need for any further action of a cause."

Now in the first instance this is logically and scientifically nonsense, as such as Dijksterhuis pointed out and as I have already reported and repeated, for the simple logical reason that Newton's physics endorses neither the logical contrary nor the logical contradiction of the stated Aristotelian principle that "all motions require the continued action of a cause", but rather also endorses that very principle itself. That is, it supports neither the contrary principle that 'NO motions require the continued action of a cause', nor the contradictory principle that 'SOME motions require the continued action of cause'. For in Newton's physics "ALL bodies are heavy", as the article's preceding bullet point tells us, whereby they are accelerated by gravity.

Now arguably logically that is the end of the matter and the attempted revolutionary distinction fails, unless it is claimed with supporting evidence that the alleged Aristotelian principle was logically interpreted to include motions that don't exist anywhere, such as purely ideal motion like Newton's heuristic concept of purely inertial motion, that is, uniform straight motion without any external force. But this then raises the issue of whether Aristotle did not also have a conception of such a purely ideal motion in Physics 215a19-22, contrary to Koyre's claim that he was unable to abstract from gravity, but that Newton's citations refute. However, setting aside that issue, here let us just consider the logically crucial question of whether inertial motion was uncaused in Newton's dynamics.

Is there uncaused motion in Newton's dynamics ?

The claim that there was is implicitly deployed twice in the article. But the following quotation from a 1960s University of London GCE A-level Logic exam paper reveals the currency of the view that inertial motion is caused by a force in Newton's dynamics, both in the late 19th century and also in the 1960s in England when I first learnt Newton's dynamics. The author quoted with this view -George Gore - was a renowned physicist and President of the Birmingham Scientific Society who wrote it in a book on the art of scientific discovery, notably published at about the same time as Mach's positivist 1883 Science of Mechanics misrepresented inertial motion in Newton's Principia as being entirely force-free.

"Now it was by a grand effort of Newton's 'constructive' imagination, based on his wonderful mastery of geometrical reasoning, that, starting with the conception of two 'forces', one of them tending to produce continuous uniform motion in a straight line, the other tending to produce a uniformly accelerated motion towards a fixed point, he was able to show that if these dynamical assumptions were granted, Kepler's laws, being consequences of them, must be universally true." [My italics] Gore 'The Art of Scientific Discovery' Date 1878 . From a University of London GCE Exam Advanced Level exam paper, Summer 1966, Logic II: Induction and Scientific Method.

Moreover, this conception of Newton's notion of inertial uniform straight motion as caused by a force, and moreover an internal force, the force of inertia, was also clearly that of Newton himself, as the following English language translation secondary source I have already mentioned in 'Butterfield's Blunder' attests:

"Force is the causal principle of motion and rest. And it is either an external one [i.e. vis impressa] that generates or destroys or otherwise changes impressed motion in some body; or it is an internal principle [vis insita = vis inertiae] by which existing motion or rest is conserved in a body, and by which any being endeavours to continue in its state and opposes resistance." [Newton in De Gravitatione, p148, Hall & Hall, 1962 CUP]

Newton held the same view of vis insita and vis inertiae in the Principia, and his view that inertial uniform straight motion is caused by an inherent force is also born out by the Cohen & Whitman secondary source in their English translation of Newton's Principia, both in Newton's proof of the parallelogram of (inherent) forces in Corollary 1 of the Laws of Motion:

"Let a body in a given time by FORCE M alone impressed in A BE CARRIED with UNIFORM motion from A to B..."

and also in the crucial Theorem 1 of Section 2 of Book 1

"let a body BY ITS INHEREMT FORCE describe the straight line AB..."

This view that Newton's physics posits an inherent force or force of inertia as an internal force that causes uniform straight motion was also demonstrated in Sam Westfall's 1970 'Force in Newton's Physics', if any were needed. But as I recall from my systematic reading of that work in 1971, the lovable logically muddled Sam's eccentric claim that Newton's notion of force was therefore contradictory was logically invalid at least inasmuch there is no logical contradiction in positing two different kinds of forces (vis impressa and vis insita) with different effects, as Newton also did in other respects such as his repulsive and attractive forces.

I should also perhaps add that these claims about 18th century dynamics also apply to Leibniz's notion of vis viva and Duhem's claim that impetus dynamics was effectively continued by energeticist dynamics and the notion of kinetic energy as a concept-splitting in the notion of force.

I hope these secondary and tertiary(?) sources are sufficient to persuade you the two claims (p2 bullet point 4 and p3 bullet point 2) that both imply Newton's dynamics posited some uncaused motion unlike Aristotle's dynamics must be withdrawn as not born out by the evidence; or at least when these claims are made it should also immediately be pointed out that there is a contrary view expressed by such as Newton, Gore, Westfall and others.

I shall not offer linguistic reformulations here since my past efforts have been ignored.

Logicus 18:08, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Re:Aristotle - What sorts of 'internal' causes operate in Aristotelian physics, and what sources can we use as evidence? The sources I have on my bookshelf do not mention it and I have never heard this topic mentioned as significant for the Sci Rev, but I'm willing to take your views seriously if you provide a basis of credible, verifiable sources. Your twisting of Kuhn's Essential Tension regarding the dating of the scientific revolution makes me reticent to accept your interpretations of books I haven't read, without explicit quotations supporting your points. Quotations (the longer and more contextualized the better) would be helpful in deciding whether this is significant enough to include.
Re:Newton - We have not yet gotten to Newton, but the article need not hold that everything described in the Ancient and Medieval section is overthrown. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Keep in mind that we want to re-write basically everything in the article, so what it implies in the sections ahead need not hamper us.--ragesoss

LOGICUS REPLIES TO RAGESOSS:

Ragesoss: "What sorts of 'internal' causes operate in Aristotelian physics, and what sources can we use as evidence?"

Various sorts of internal causes operate in Aristotelian physics, such as the heavy and light natures of sublunar bodies and the internal intelligences of the celestial spheres. But if you are only referring to the case of violent motion here - that which is at issue re its alleged requirement of an EXTERNAL cause I have objected to - then the shortest possible answer to your twofold question may be (i) that one sort of internal cause that operated in 17th century Aristotelian physics was the internal force of impetus, and (ii) one source you could use may be the testimony of Steve McCluskey above that it is now generally accepted that impetus dynamics was part of the Aristotelian framework, or if not, maybe some of the sources he refers to without naming. Or maybe you could even use such as Grant, whose scholarship Steve seems to regard as reliable ?

"Indeed, impetus was envisioned as an internalisation of Aristotle's external motive force. It seemed a better way of adhering to Aristotle's own dictum that everything that is moved is moved by another." p96, Grant [1996]

Grant is at least correct in the two relevant respects here of claiming impetus was an internal motive force and also that it conformed to Aristotle's core heuristic principle rather than breaching it as Duhem and his followers mistakenly claimed, because this principle that 'all that is moved is moved by another' clearly does not state that the other must be external. (You can see Duhem's blunder on the web in Section 9 of his history of physics on the web @ [1]) ["If the School of Paris completely transformed the Peripatetic theory of gravity, it was equally responsible for the overthrow of Aristotelean dynamics. Convinced that, in all motion, the mover should be directly contiguous to the body moved, Aristotle had proposed a strange theory of the motion of projectiles." (My itals)]

Indeed, impetus theory was an auxiliary theory of the reviseable superstructure of the Aristotelian theoretical system that protected its core principles from empirical refutation. It was devised to solve the problem of the apparent empirical refutation of the system's foundational core principle that 'all motion has a mover' by the case of projectile motion against gravity and the empirical inadequacy of Aristotle's own auxiliary theory of the medium as mover. However, note that Grant himself did not include that principle in his own list of six foundational general principles of the hard core of the Aristotelian system at the top of p163 of his [1996]. So even if this principle were overthrown, Grant could not be cited as a source that such a change was fundamental or revolutionary.

But Grant is surely wrong in his foray into the logic of scientific discovery - a subject on which historians are typical unreliable - in claiming impetus was envisioned as an internalisation of Aristotle's external motive force. Rather it was most obviously just an extension of Aristotle's own notion of internally impressed force impressed just within the parts of the propelling medium by the projector in projectile motion. Aristotelian impressed force theory simply took the obvious simplifying step of the projector impressing an impressed force directly within the projectile itself to propell it, rather than only within the intermediary medium to propell the projectile indirectly via the medium in a complex Heath-Robinsonesque scaffolding of layers and layers of propelling media.

In his earlier 1977 Physical Science in the Middle Ages Grant had already acknowledged impetus theory was part of the Aristotelian system (rather than the overthrow of its science of motion as Duhem and his followers such as Kuhn and others maintained):

"New changes and additions [to the Aristotelian system] were often drawn to Aristotelian specifications...and were again made part of the system. Thus impetus theory replaced the external contact of air with the push of an incorporeal force." p83-4, Grant 1977

However, bear in mind once you are satisfied my objection is justified, you won't need any source for internal causation because there will be no point in mentioning whether a cause is external or internal because it will no longer have any relevance to the task of identifying what was revolutionary or fundamentally transformed. The issue of whether there was a fundamental revolution in dynamics in respect of some uncaused motion being accepted then becomes the question of whether and when that happened. This may get especially amusing in the 19th century with positivist 'force of inertia abolitionists' such as Mach who famously claimed inertia was CAUSED BY the the combined gravitational attraction of all the stars i.e. by external forces rather than a purely internal force, thus reducing the concept of inertia back to that of gravity from which Kepler had originally split it off.

So I conclude that at least by virtue of impetus dynamics the word 'external' must now be deleted because it is refuted by the very source Steve gave for its verification, namely Grant. So with respect to your interest in the twisting of sources perhaps you can bow see clearly how Steve has twisted a source to say the opposite of what it claims, just as he has done with Sorabji.

  • Ragesoss: "The sources I have on my bookshelf do not mention it [i.e. "What sorts of 'internal' causes operate in Aristotelian physics"] and I have never heard this topic mentioned as significant for the Sci Rev, but I'm willing to take your views seriously if you provide a basis of credible, verifiable sources...Quotations (the longer and more contextualized the better) would be helpful in deciding whether this is significant enough to include."

The books you happen to have on your bookshelf (only 1 shelf ?) and your state of knowledge about this topic both seem rather minimal, and you say you do not even have the Grant book McCluskey is using as a main source of his proposed rewrite. It seems because of your bookshelving problems discussed in User Talk, whereby McCluskey has had to pack away his books on the SR and you have only one bookshelf, and maybe because you have no access to libraries either, the rewrite of this article is being driven by two guys unfamiliar with the extensive literature of the subject they are writing about. Do you have a controlling editorial position of authority in the Wikipedia organisation? So do you think maybe they could see their way to buying you some books and bookshelves or maybe get you access to a good library ?

For your information given your lack of books and information about Aristotelian physics and the scientific revolution, internal causes such as claims of internal resistance to motion (e.g. Butterfield's Aristotelian 'inertia' I have already referenced) and of internal motive forces such as impetus (referenced above) and whether it breached a fundamental ban on internal causes of violent motion have been absolutely central and fundamental to the claim of a scientific revolution or not against Aristotelian dynamics in the science of motion. (In the Koyrean account you wanted the article to focus on, the alleged crucial revolutionary breakthrough was the step of abstracting from gravity, an internal cause of motion in Aristotelian and Galilean dynamics that Koyre mistakenly claimed neither Aristotle nor Galileo could abstract from, to conceive of gravity-free 'inertial' motion and 'the principle of inertia'.)

Moreover, contrary to your presumption, the article already does include this topic in discussing the heavy or light internal natures of sublunar bodies in Aristotle's physics and attempting to portray a revolutionary change in the 17th century between all bodies being heavy post-revolution, thus abolishing sublunar light bodies and superlunary bodies that are neither heavy nor light in the pre-revolutionary physics. But this is by the way ahistorical nonsense because it seems Aristotle's theory of gravity/levity was long largely replaced by the 17th century by the Platonic cognate theory of gravity adopted in Parisian physics in which all bodies universally are heavy towards their cognates, as held by Kepler and Galileo for example, as opposed to only some sublunar bodies being heavy towards a fixed point as in Aristotle's theory.

  • Ragesoss: "Re:Newton - We have not yet gotten to Newton, but the article need not hold that everything described in the Ancient and Medieval section is overthrown. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

But that bridge has already been crossed, because as I have already pointed out, the article already claims there was a "replacement of the Aristotelian concept that all motions require the continued action of a cause by the inertial concept that motion is a state that, once started, continues indefinitely without the need for any further action of a cause " So if the article does not suppose Newton's dynamics made this replacement, then when is it supposing it was made? The source for this is Westfall, but he is notably muddled on such issues.

  • "Your twisting of Kuhn's Essential Tension regarding the dating of the scientific revolution makes me reticent to accept your interpretations of books I haven't read, without explicit quotations supporting your points."

I have not twisted Kuhn's dating of a revolution in science as a twin process starting in the 14th century in the 'classical sciences' and ending in the 19th century in the 'Baconian sciences'. What datings do you claim he gives for the beginning and end of this extensive revolution in science ? You notably give none for Kuhn. The problem here seems to be that you are unjustifiably presupposing some unitary conception of the scientific revolution. But note, for example, that if 'the SR' is the one that Butterfield conceived as the overthrow of Aristotelian natural philosophy and Aristotle's authority, which is in fact the major traditional Enlightenment-positivist conception of it, then for Grant that revolution began in 1492 with Columbus's discovery of America. [p167 Grant 1996] This again raises the question of what conceptions of a historical scientific revolution the article is concerned with and the NPOV problem. Logicus 14:16, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Medieval Impetus vs Modern Inertia

I'm providing a historiographical discussion here that relates to a number of earlier discussions on this page dealing with the influence (or identity) of Buridan's idea of impetus with later ideas of inertia. (A search on Buridan or impetus will find the relevant discussons). The present discussion should show pretty well the state of research on the medieval concept of impetus.

One of the first historians of medieval science, the French physicist, Pierre Duhem, saw precursors of the modern idea of inertia in the impetus theory of Jean Buridan. Duhem (1861 – 1916) wrote in his posthumously published Le Système de Monde (I will quote the French rather than make you trust my translations):

La Mécanique de Galilée, c'est, peut-on dire, la forme adulte d'une science vivant dont la Mécanique de Buridan était la larve. (VIII, 200)

Duhem spelled out the nature of Buridan's embryonic form of the new physics in the following terms:

La loi de l'inertie n'a donc pas encore reçu de Jean Buridan son énoncé complet et définitif. Mais la part de vérité que de maître a reconnue est déja bien grande, assez grande pour bouleverser les fondements mêmes de la Philosophie péripatéticienne.
Tout la Dynamique d'Aristote repose sur cet axiome:
«Tout ce qui est en mouvement est nécessairement mû par quelque chose....»
A cette formule. voici que Buridan substitue cette autre:
Après qu'un corps a été mis en mouvement, il n'a plus pour se mouvoir, besoin d'aucun moteur extrinsèque: l'impetus qu'il a reçu une fois pour toute y suffit....
Voilà donc que s'écroule toute la Dynamique d'Aristote. (VIII, 338-9)

In Duhem's view Buridan had not yet definitively proclaimed the law of inertia, but his ideas had overthrown the foundations of peripatetic philosophy and brought about the collapse of Aristotle's dynamics.

Anneliese Maier, who approached the same texts as Duhem from the perspective of a student of medieval philosophy, saw a different picture. She agreed with Duhem that the late scholastics "prepared the way for the law of inertia" but she insisted that "from the outset, however, we must recognize that we are dealing with an analogue to the law of inertia, not an exact parallel to it. An exact parallel is out of the question, since late scholastic thinkers assumed that uniform motion is caused by a special kind of motive force called impetus, while modern mechanics postulates that uniform motion does not require any kind of force to make it continue..." (Maier, On the Threshold of Exact Science, (1982), pp. 77-8; translation of her 1955 Die naturphilosophische Bedeutung der scholastischen Impetustheorie.)

Subsequent historians of medieval science, such as Marshall Clagett, shared Maier's view that impetus was only "a kind of analogue to inertia." (Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages, (1959), p. xxviii). In his detailed discussion, Clagett notes that Buridan

spoke of [impetus] as a motive force and as the reason for the continued movement,... One cannot help but compare Buridan's impetus with Galileo's impeto and Newton's quantity of motion (momentum), even though on the face of it they are ontologically different from impetus considered as a kind of force. But while the affirmed ontology of impetus would seem to differentiate it from later concepts, yet the terms of its measure as presented by Buridan make an analogue with momentum,... (Clagett, p. 523).

A. C. Crombie was of the same opinion in his Augustine to Galileo (1958/1969).

Buridan concluded that the mover must impress on the body itself a certain impetus, a motive power by which it continued to move until affected by the action of independent forces.... The measure of the impetus was the quantity of matter multiplied by its velocity. (II, pp. 80-81).
It is interesting to look for analogies between terms appearing in systems of dynamics so widely separated in time, but these can also hide from us the gap that may separate their content.... Everything Buridan wrote about impetus indicates that he was proposing it as an Aristotelian cause of motion that should be commensurate with the effect.... But, considering it in its own period, and not as a precursor of something in the future, it is clear that Buridan saw his theory as a solution of the classical problems that arose within the context of Aristotelian dynamics, from which he never escaped. (II, pp. 84-85).

Edward Grant came to much the same conclusion, which he concisely summarized in his Physical Science in the Middle Ages (1971):

Buridan seized upon quantity of matter and speed as means of determining the measure of impetus, the same quantities which served to define momentum in Newtonian physics, although in the latter momentum is usually conceived as a quantity of motion or a measure of the effect of a body's motion, whereas impetus is a cause of motion. Indeed, impetus was viewed as an internalization of the cause of motion which Aristotle had made external. It seemed a better way of adhering to Aristotle's dictum that everything that is moved is moved by another." (p. 50).

Grant continued to hold this judgement 25 years later as he repeated it, in almost the same words, in his The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages, (1996), pp. 95-6.

In a nutshell, Duhem's 90-year old discovery of medieval anticipations of the principle of inertia has been greatly modified by subsequent research. The three four major historians of medieval science who have looked closely at the scholastic texts that attracted Duhem's attention all come to similar conclusions. Impetus and inertia are operationally similar, in that they are measured in the same terms, but ontologically distinct, in that impetus is a cause of continued motion within an Aristotelian dynamical framework while inertial motion needs no cause.

There are signs that impetus theory may have contributed to the later development of the theory of inertia. Galileo, for example, used impetus theory in his youthful De motu. (Clagett, pp. 666-7) but the crucial step was abandoning the Aristotelian notion that "everything that is moved is moved by another." This step took place during the course of the Scientific Revolution. --SteveMcCluskey 20:41, 8 October 2006 (UTC) (Edited and added Crombie ref SteveMcCluskey 18:23, 9 October 2006 (UTC))

Logicus Comments: As ever, what is the logical relevance of all this kindly provided information ? The crucial points at issue are the deletion of 'external' in the article, and you need to demondtrate the two crucial claims you make, inertial motion needs no cause and that 'all that moves is moved by another' was overthrown in the SR, given my proofs to the contrary. Logicus 18:12, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
The relevance is that I have just cited four historians of science who believe that there was a fundamental difference between the medieval concept of impetus, as requiring a cause, and inertial motion.
You keep referring to your "proofs to the contrary." The groundrules in Wikipedia are not to provide proofs, but to quote reliable experts who agree with you. I would really like to see citations of experts who defend your position (and I'm not being ironic).
Best wishes, SteveMcCluskey 18:37, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Logicus Comments:Does inertial motion have no cause ?
McCluskey still insists “inertial motion needs no cause and that [the Aristotelian principle] 'all that moves is moved by another' was overthrown in the SR”. But Logicus has already dealt with this issue in the section 'Is there uncaused motion ?' above. Here we repeat and extend that analysis.

Actual motion: But following Dijksterhuis’s [1957] already quoted above, Logicus has already pointed out that the principle ‘all that moves is moved by another’ is upheld by Newton’s physics in which all bodies are heavy effectively in all directions whereby motion in any one direction requires a mover against its heaviness in other directions, just like Aristotle’s projectile violent motion against gravity in Physics 215a14-19. But apparently the Big News from Wisconsin of Koyre’s refutation never reached West Virginia ? And since Aristotle’s principle obviously referred to actual motions, that is the end of the matter.


Hypothetical ‘inertial’ motion: McCluskey apparently thinks that the purely hypothetical nonexistent ‘inertial’ motion of Newtonian and classical dynamics has no cause and also contradicts the Aristotelian principle 'all that moves is moved by another' and also that this view is unanimously supported by all historians of science. Thus it would seem he has not seen or not read or possibly misread the copious evidence to the contrary that has been cited above in the section ‘Is there uncaused motion ?’ on 5 October, such as (i) the Hall’s 1962 secondary source English interpretation of Newton’s De Gravitatione and Newton’s view that inherent force is the cause of uniform (‘inertial’) motion and that all motion and rest is caused by force, the basic Aristotelian principle of the science of motion; (ii) Cohen & Whitman’s 1999 secondary source in their English interpretation of the Principia from which I quoted two separate extracts to show Newton held inertial motion is caused by inherent force; (iii)Westfall’s 1970 book that accepted Newton thought inertial motion was caused by inherent force; (iv) the evidence from George Gore that in the late 19th century scientists still regarded inertial motion in Newton’s dynamics as caused by an inherent force; (v) and I have previously also pointed out that in his 1999 Guide to Newton’s Principia (p98) Bernard Cohen finally admitted that by virtue of his concept of the force of inertia, Newton did not abandon the Aristotelian principle that all motion has a mover. Further to this, here I also point out (vi) that Kant did not regard Newton’s dynamics as having breached the principle of causality by positing uncaused phenomena.

But perhaps most significantly of all for McCluskey is (vii) the following refutation of his view from Wikipedia itself, from its current article on ‘inertia’:

“Newton actually attributed the term "inertia" to mean "the innate force possessed by an object which resists changes in motion"; thus Newton defined "inertia" to mean the cause of the phenomenon, rather than the phenomenon itself.”

Clearly Wikipedia accepts ‘inertial’ motion was not uncaused in Newton’s dynamics, contrary to what McCluskey claims.

So if the principle that all motion has a cause was not overthrown by Newton, then when was it overthrown in the Scientific Revolution that McC wants to date as ending in 1727 ? Certainly at the end of the 18th century the Newton worshipper Kant did not regard Newton's physics as having overthrown the principle of causality. And I have already provided textual evidence that the President of the Birmingham Scientific Society regarded inertia as an inherent force and cause of uniform motion in 1878. And of course in the late 19th century such as both Mach and Whitehead were concerned with the abolition of Newton's concept of the force of inertia, so it was obviously still around. So on this basis we must conclude the SR was still in process in the late 19th century, since the doctrine that all motion has a cause, including purely hypothetical externally unforced motion, was still not yet overthrown. And modern dictionaries tend to define inertia as a property of bodies that causes them to continue in uniform motion and resist acceleration.

So McCluskey’s attempted distinction between medieval impetus and modern inertia fails so far as the alleged SR is concerned. Both are internal causes of motion. Logicus 18:13, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

With your latest statement I'm beginning to see a crucial issue in your argument. Your earlier discussion's emphasis on the Hall and Hall passage from the Portsmouth collection had me thinking that you were arguing that inertial motion was found in Aristotle. Your more recent arguments seem to be working from the other end, i.e., that inertial (causeless) motion is not really found in Newton because of his use of the phrase vis inertiae.'
I took a quick look at Dijksterhuis's essay in Clagett (which I brought with me from Madison to West Virginia) and found the passage you referred to, but figuring where it fits in his argument will require more time than I have at the moment. I'm 100 pages through reviewing a 500 page book manuscript that must be done by next week.
I'm afraid I'll have to beg off further discussions until then; hope you have a pleasant weekend. A check of the Met Office web page shows rain easing off in the Midlands through Saturday; enjoy. --SteveMcCluskey 20:15, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
LOGICUS COMMENTS: First, let me try and save you some research work by short circuiting the refutation of your claim that in 'modern' physics 'inertial' motion is uncaused by means of a welter of secondary sources, namely contemporary dictionaries. Here I just quote the first three I looked at on the web, all of which refute your view, as follows [My caps], with their URLs:
1 Cambridge Dictionary http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=40480&dict=CALD

inertia (FORCE) noun [U] SPECIALIZED the physical FORCE that keeps something in the same position or moving in the same direction


2 Cambridge Dictionary of AMERICAN English

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=inertia*1+0&dict=A

Definition inertia noun (SPECIALIZED) In physics, inertia is the FORCE that CAUSES something moving to tend to continue moving, and that CAUSES something not moving to tend to continue not to move. (from Cambridge Dictionary of American English)

3 Oxford Concise

http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/inertia?view=uk

inertia

2 Physics a PROPERTY of matter BY WHICH it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless changed by an external force.


I leave it as an exercise for you to refute yourself by collecting other dictionary definitions of inertia that define it as a PROPERTY that CAUSES rest and motion and even as a FORCE that does.

Secondly, I shall try to sort out your apparent confusion about what I have been saying on this matter later, but here I just point out your first paragraph here confuses two logically separate issues, namely the question of whether Aristotle affirmed the principle of the continuation of unresisted and externally unforced motion, (which I say he did), and the separate question of whether he or Newton held such motion was caused by an internal force or not, and whereas it seems Aristotle did not, Newton clearly did, namely by the inherent force of inertia. Logicus 18:12, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS CLARIFIES ? May I suggest your apparent confusion about my denials that Newton's dynamics broke with or contradicted the fundaments of Aristotelian dynamics may be due to a failure to distinguish between my different denials of logically different claims that it did, namely (1) the claim that Aristotelian dynamics contradicted Newton's first law of motion (In addition to demonstrating the traditionally alleged contradicting principle - the impossibility of interminable locomotion - is not such, also quoting Newton's view published and translated by the Halls that Aristotle affirmed rather than denied his first law is logically relevent to this claim.); (2) the claim that Aristotelian dynamics held that all bodies have an inherent resistance to all motion, called 'inertia' as per Butterfield and Maier etc, and said to be denied by Newton's dynamics (here such as quoting Maier's own evidence from Oresme is logically relevent to refuting the claim); (3) the claim that the Aristotelian axiom 'all motion has a mover' is denied by Newton's dynamics, (4) the claim that 'all motion has a cause' is denied by Newton's dynamics. Quoting the Halls' publication and translation of Newton's view that 'FORCE is the CAUSE of all motion and rest' is logically relevant to refuting claims 3 & 4 when these principles are perversely extended to also cover nonexistent purely ideal motion, so called 'inertial' motions.

You may also find the following analysis helpful to clarification. In Aristotle's dynamics the continuation of unresisted and externally unforced motion in a void without natural places (as in Physics 215a19-22) would not require any internal force and nor did Aristotle posit any. However, as soon as one introduces a resistance to motion into this set up, such as by introducing natural places and hence such as an inherent gravitational resistance to the motion by virtue of it being in a contrary direction to the body's natural place, as in projectile violent motion, then without any countervailing force the motion must terminate or is impossible, as Aristotle says in Physics 215a14-19. So the post-Aristotle solution to this problem that came to be adopted was to impute the force required to continue the projectile motion against resistance post-projection to an implanted internal force of impetus. And then for the sake of consistency it seems this notion of projectile motion against gravitational resistance being caused by an internal force was then extended to the case of motion in a void where there is no resistance to motion, or simply to the ideal case of unresisted motion, whereby it eventually came about that Newton followed this tradition in holding that an externally unforced and unresisted motion would be caused by an internal force, the rationale of his theory being that in the real world of many resistances to motion, without such a force there would be nothing to make a body persevere against resistance, as in projectile motion against gravity, for example. So the historical truth of the matter, as so often, is the very reverse of what many historians of science claim, because whereas Aristotle did not posit that what you misleadingly call 'inertial' motion is caused by any force, Newton did, namely by the force of inertia. It seems for Aristotle it was entirely force-free whereas for Newton it was internally forced. I hope this helps. Logicus 18:06, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Repetition and confusion in the pre-revolutionary background ?

Logicus criticises the ‘disruptive editing’ of McCluskey and Ragesoss

However well intentioned they may be, nevertheless Steve McCluskey and Ragesoss have arguably unfortunately made an even bigger mess of the article than it was in already before Steve intervened in its editing and the previous and continuing gradual efforts of Logicus to improve it. One current leading problem of their editing is as follows.

The article is surely currently unacceptably repetitious and confusing about the pre-revolutionary background to the alleged scientific revolution because it has TWO separate but overlapping sections on that background. (1) In the section 'Significance of the "revolution" ' it lists 5 alleged changes at the time that Donne AND Butterfield (for logical clarity it should of course be OR, not AND) are alleged to have seen as revolutionary. (2) Then in the section 'Ancient and Medieval background' it gives a different listing of 5 sets of ideas "from this period" that were allegedly fundamentally transformed. But what period does "this period" refer to here ? The 16th and 17th centuries ? But if so this section is wrongly titled and it should be 'The 16th and 17th century background' in order not to confuse the reader that this is a different pre-revolutionary background from that depicted in the previous section.

Amongst the many other significant differences between the two different pre-revolutionary backgrounds provided, note that the alleged challenge to the Aristotelian theory of matter amongst those that Donne AND Butterfield are said to have noted (i.e. the second item in that list) is not mentioned amongst the five alleged fundamental changes listed in the 'Ancient and Medieval background' section. Is this because a mere challenge does not in itself make a revolution ?

Also note that in the items allegedly noted by Donne and Butterfield there is no mention that in Aristotelian physics violent motion requires an EXTERNAL cause as mistakenly claimed in the following section.

Surely one compelling objection to the current 'Significance' section is that it hardly deals with the issue of the cultural significance of the Enlightenment and its alleged scientific revolution at all. Where, for example, do we find any mention of such as Adorno's thesis that its significance is that its logical outcome was Auschwitz and the scientific micro-management of genocide, which has been taken seriously in some quarters ? The key issue here is surely that of whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, a sub-category of the debate over whether science is a good or bad thing in the moral balance pan? (Maybe much easier to say it was no thing at all (-:?)

Actionable conclusion: Logicus proposes the current repetitious and confusing mess identified here should be deleted and replaced by just one coherent set of claims about the immediately pre-revolutionary background in whatever century it is to be claimed the revolution in any specific science began. (Maybe forget about a ‘Significance’ section ?) And if it is intended to persist with the logically redundant eccentric claim that Donne and Butterfield also recognised the changes posited, please provide verification that each of them did so wherever they did so. I suspect it will turn out that it was only Butterfield, if anybody, who imagined most of these alleged changes. But of course he was not a historian of science and never held any academic position in that subject, however much he may have learnt from carousing with the ilk of Cohen in his many stays with Butterfield at the Peterhouse Masters' Lodge when visiting Cambridge to inspect Newton's papers. I do hope these recommendations are helpful in producing a more coherent and succinct, and indeed historically more accurate, article. Logicus 15:30, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Logicus, I think the "significance" section is the most complicated part of the article and that we will best be able to tackle it after we get through the re-write of the more straightforward, what-happened-when sections. I agree with you that the current version of that section is totally inadequate (though I disagree that the "good or bad thing" issue is the single key issue). We'll have to describe the argument that the events called the "Scientific Revolution" weren't actually seen as that important at the time, and the revolutionary character was essentially the invention of later historians and scientists. We'll have to give some space to the Death of Nature line of criticism, a la Carolyn Merchant. We'll have to give some space to the view of Kuhn and others that what we call the "Scientific Revolution" was just one part in a broader, more gradual set of developments that led to modern science. We'll talk about the criticism of the idea of a coherent "scientific method" emerging in the Sci Rev. There are many important criticisms of the Scientific Revolution idea. All in due time; we're trying to re-write the whole article, so hopefully we'll be able to clean up the repitition and confusion as we go through. So far, we've only on the second section (first the Background section, now the Copernicus and Vesalius section) in the revision schedule.--ragesoss 23:16, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
Logicus to Ragesoss: What revision schedule do you refer to ? Rather it seems you are now on the 3rd and 4th sections, the first and second being the Intro and the Significance section. What happens with these first two sections ? Logicus 18:12, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
They are the hardest parts, the most dependent on the rest, and so are being put aside until the end; at least, that was the plan I proposed to keep discussion focused on one thing at a time.--ragesoss 22:23, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

No dichotomous theory of gravity by the 16th century

Logicus Comments: The article currently claims heaviness was restricted to sublunar bodies in the 16th and 17th century pre-revolutionary background. But Duhem and subsequent have claimed Parisian physics adopted the Platonic theory of gravity against the Aristotelian dichotomy and maintained each of the planets have their own gravity, a non-dichotomous cosmology held by such as Oresme in the 14th century and then such as Cusa and Leonardo in the 15th and 16th centuries. Duhem writes as follows @ [2]

"VIII. PLURALITY OF WORLDS

Aristotle maintained the simultaneous existence of several worlds to be an absurdity, his principal argument being drawn from his theory of gravity, whence he concluded that two distinct worlds could not coexist and be each surrounded by its elements; therefore it would be ridiculous to compare each of the planets to an earth similar to ours. In 1277 the theologians of Paris condemned this doctrine as a denial of the creative omnipotence of God; Richard of Middletown and Henry of Ghent (who wrote about 1280), Guillaume Varon (who wrote a commentary on the "Sentences" about 1300), and, towards 1320, Jean de Bassols, William of Occam (d. after 1347), and Walter Burley (d. about 1348) did not hesitate to declare that God could create other worlds similar to ours. This doctrine, adopted by several Parisian masters, exacted that the theory of gravity and natural place developed by Aristotle be thoroughly changed; in fact, the following theory was substituted for it. If some part of the elements forming a world be detached from it and driven far away, its tendency will be to move towards the world to which it belongs and from which it was separated; the elements of each world are inclined so to arrange themselves that the heaviest will be in the centre and the lightest on the surface. This theory of gravity appeared in the writings of Jean Buridan of Béthune, who became rector of the University of Paris in 1327, teaching at that institution until about 1360; and in 1377 this same theory was formally proposed by Oresme. It was also destined to be adopted by Copernicus and his first followers, and to be maintained by Galileo, William Gilbert, and Otto von Guericke

IX. DYNAMICS THEORY OF IMPETUS INERTIA CELESTIAL AND SUBLUNARY MECHANICS IDENTICAL

If the School of Paris completely transformed the Peripatetic theory of gravity...."

Duhem goes on to explain that Parisian impetus physics explained celestial motion in terms of impetus, thus breaching the Aristotelian dichotomy of celestial and terrestrial mechanics.

If so it seems the article's following claims must be deleted as revolutionary changes in the 16th and 17th centuries:

"the replacement of the Aristotelian idea that by their nature, heavy bodies moved straight down toward their natural places; that by their nature, light bodies moved naturally straight up toward their natural place; and that by their nature, aethereal bodies moved in unchanging circular motions[6] by the idea that all bodies are heavy and move according to the same physical laws"

"The celestial region was made up of the fifth element, Aether, which was unchanging and moved naturally with circular motion.[20] In the Aristotelian tradition, astronomical theories sought to explain the observed irregular motion of celestial objects through the combined effects of multiple uniform circular motions.[21]"

Logicus 18:07, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

After looking at Duhem's Catholic Encyclopedia article, it is clear that the article does not address the commonly shared opinion of historians of medieval philosophy discussed in the passage cited above, which maintains that for medieval Aristotielians, heavy bodies (e.g., earth and water) have a natural downward tendency and that light bodies (e.g. fire and air) have a natural upward tendency. In fact, nowhere in this article does Duhem address the nature of the elements.
--SteveMcCluskey 17:39, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
Logicus replies to McCluskey: Yet again Steve McCluskey's comments suggest a very severe literacy problem. For contrary to his claim that “nowhere in this article does Duhem address the nature of the elements.”, Duhem does so in the passage already quoted by Logicus above, where he says “If some part of THE ELEMENTS [my caps] forming a world be detached from it and driven far away, its tendency will be to move towards the world to which it belongs and from which it was separated; the elements of each world are inclined so to arrange themselves that the heaviest will be in the centre and the lightest on the surface. This theory of gravity appeared in the writings of Jean Buridan of Béthune, who became rector of the University of Paris in 1327, teaching at that institution until about 1360; and in 1377 this same theory was formally proposed by Oresme. It was also destined to be adopted by Copernicus and his first followers, and to be maintained by Galileo, William Gilbert, and Otto von Guericke.”
Moreover note that contrary to the impression given by McCluskey, nobody is contesting “the commonly shared opinion of historians of medieval philosophy discussed in the passage cited above, which maintains that for medieval Aristotielians, heavy bodies (e.g., earth and water) have a natural downward tendency and that light bodies (e.g. fire and air) have a natural upward tendency.” . Rather what is contested is that this belief of some Aristotelians was the belief of all physicists. It is claimed some Neoplatonists denied this theory with their alternative cognate theory of universal gravity and their doctrine of the plurality of worlds.
And contrary to McCluskey's claim made that the idea that all bodies move according to the same physical laws was a new idea in the 16th century, in fact it can be dated at the very latest to Philoponus in the 6th century in his rejection of Aristotle's law v @ F/R because of its 'refutation' by the finite speed of celestial motion in favour of his alternative universal law v @ F - R.
Thus Logicus yet again deletes the following passage McCluskey has restored until its various apparently anti-historical claims are established:
"Among the new ideas which Butterfield saw as revolutionary were…the replacement of the Aristotelian idea that by their nature, heavy bodies (in which Earth or Water predominate) moved straight down toward their natural places; that by their nature, light bodies (in which Fire or Air predominate) moved naturally straight up toward their natural place; and that by their nature, aethereal bodies moved in unchanging circular motions[8] by the idea that all bodies are heavy and move according to the same physical laws."
Whatever Butterfield may have seen, neither the ideas that all bodies are heavy nor that they move according to the same physical laws were novel in the 16th century. Logicus 01:58, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Logicus complains: Under the following rubric, McCluskey has restored what Logicus has deleted as above, plus those concerning Galen : ("rv -- The process is to leave discussion of significance until the end".) But Logicus only agrees with this principle on the basis that it is interpreted in his favour and not in McCluskey's, whereby Logicus's well justified deletions should remain unless McCluskey can achieve historically acceptable corrections to his claims. So we again delete the claim that Galen's medical views were replaced by Harvey's, since McCluskey's much quoted and favoured authority Edward Grant says Avicenna rather than Galen was the medical authority at the time. If McCluskey wishes to discuss or challenge Grant with evidence that Galen was the authority or else that Avicenna held the same views as Galen that were replaced by Harvey, he may do so at the end. And we again delete McCluskey's unorthodox historical claims of ubiquitous unchallenged Aristotelian orthodoxy in the 16th century that ignore the widespread claims of the literature to the contrary (such as in Kuhn and others) that Platonic doctrines of the plurality of worlds and universal gravity and that claims of the unity of celestial and terrestrial physics in such as in Avicennan impetus dynamics or in Philoponan dynamics were thriving. If McCluskey wishes to challenge these prevailing accounts, he may do so at the end. Meanwhile Logicus would be most grateful for McCluskey's co-operation in refraining from the deletion of McCluskey's historically uninformed and illogical views on the history of science from this article in the Xmas period, especially in the interests of achieving a greater understanding of the logic of scientific development by English speaking paupers unable to afford an unfree encyclopedia, and even by American paupers not subject to whatever history of science nonsense is taught in American universities. (-: Or is McCluskey a privileged employee of Wikipedia ? Logicus 21:12, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Who made all these postmodern critiques?

The fact check has been on them for the last ~3months. They need to go unless they're valid and non-OR.

--209.128.81.201 21:33, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

I don't have a problem with removing that section; it's too vague to be useful for when we get through to revising that portion of the article. It probably was based on actual critiques that have been made, but we will be able to find plenty of sourced critiques (which will need to be vetted for significance, anyway, since so much has been written) once we get to the criticism part.--ragesoss 22:20, 18 October 2006 (UTC)


Who invented universal inertia, Aquinas or Kepler ?

Logicus asks: Was it Aquinas or Kepler who first posited universal inertia, that is, that all bodies universally have inertially resistant mass 'm' ?

The concept of 'inertia', a resistance to motion inherent in all bodies, was the central concept of Kepler's and Newton's dynamics that differentiated it from the original version of Aristotelian dynamics, whose only concept of an inherent resistance to motion was that of gravity/levity to sublunar violent motion. Thus in Aristotle's dynamics, whose basic law of motion that the average speed (v) of a whole motion is given by v α F/R, which became v α W/R for natural motion and v α F/W for violent motion (W = the body's weight), then (i) natural motion in a vacuum would be infinitely fast as in Physics 215a25f and (ii) violent motion of a weightless body (discounting medium resistance) would also be infinitely fast as in On The Heavens 301b1-18, because (i) v α W/0 and (ii) v α F/0 respectively in these two cases.

However, the predicted infinite speed of the forced motion of a weightless body was the major empirical problem of Aristotle's astro-physics which posited a mover of the celestial spheres (F > 0) but no resistance to it (R = 0), because it posited the spheres have no gravity. Thus the application of Aristotle's basic law of motion to the stellar sphere predicted it should rotate with infinite speed. But this prediction was empirically refuted by the observation that it takes 24 hours to revolve. So 'inertia', that is, the concept of a non-gravitational resistance to motion inherent in bodies, was in effect first posited in Aristotelian dynamics by Averroes, who attributed it to the stellar sphere in order to solve this problem, and whereby R > 0 for the sphere and hence v α F/R no longer predicted an infinite speed. Thus the invention of inertia was a classic case of an astro-physical hidden variable theory, like Zwicky's dark matter or Einstein's cosmological constant, for example, in which unobserved entities or properties are posited to fill a parameter of an equation required to avoid an empirical refutation of what it would otherwise predict.

However, it seems Averroes's positing of 'inertia' was restricted to the celestial spheres and not extended to sublunar bodies with gravity in the Aristotelian cosmos. But at least on Duhem's analysis in his 'Systeme du Monde' [See [3]], it seems Averroes' leading Latin disciple Aquinas extended it to all bodies including sublunar bodies with gravity. Thus he distinguished between the gravity or nature of a sublunar body that moves it in natural motion and the prime matter of the body that is moved by its nature and which resists motion. Thus on Duhem's analysis, whereas Averroes only attributed inertial resistant mass to the celestial spheres, Aquinas attributed it to all bodies universally, for sublunar bodies as well as for celestial bodies. And unlike Buridan, for whom prime matter did not resist motion, for Aquinas it did. As Duhem says of Aquinas's innovation:

"For the first time we have seen human reason distinguish two elements in a heavy body: the motive force, that is, in modern terms, the weight; and the moved thing, the corpus quantum, or as we say today, the mass. For the fist time we have seen the notion of mass being introduced in mechanics, and being introduced as equivalent to what remains in a body when one has suppressed all forms in order to leave only the prime matter quantified by its determined dimensions. St Thomas Aquinas’s analysis, completing Ibn Bajja’s, came to distinguish three notions in a falling body: the weight, the mass, and the resistance of the medium, about which physics will reason in the modern era."

Thus it seems Duhem attributed to Aquinas the innovation that Koyre attributed to Kepler, namely introducing the notion of inertia as a non-gravitational inherent resistance to motion in all bodies universally into physics. Newton's minor revision of the concept simply excluded the purely ideal case of uniform straight motion from being subject to inertial resistance, which only resists accelerated motion in Newton's theory of vis inertiae, but which happens to be all motion in Newton's cosmology in which all moving bodies are gravitationally accelerated.

But is Duhem's analysis correctas in the weblink above ? Did Aquinas invent universal inertia rather than Kepler and rather than Averroes who invented celestial inertia, and was he the first to do so ? Can the learned professors of medieval science help us here ?

The significance of this analysis for dissolving the historical telescoping myth of a 17th century scientific revolution in physics in which all prior innovations are attributed to figures such as Kepler, Galileo and Newton is that it seems this important development in physics typically attributed to the 17th century occurred in the 12th and 13th centuries. And along with such as the Platonic theory of universal gravity discussed above, Buridan's attribution of impetus to the celestial spheres and the obvious fact that at least from Philoponus Aristotle's basic law of motion v α F/R was applied to celestial motion, the Averroes-Aquinas theory of inertia in all bodies universally helps knock out the claim of a dichotomy between sublunar and superlunary physics with respect to attributes and laws in the 16th and 17th century background to the mythical 'scientific revolution' in physics in that period. Logicus 14:51, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Was the 'pre-revolutionary' medieval background wholly Aristotelian ?

Logicus comments: The article gives the impression of a wholly Aristotelian medieval background to an alleged scientific revolution. Indeed the Enlightenment ideological myth of a 17th century anti-Aristotelian scientific revolution itself supposes the further myth of a 12th century (or thereabouts) anti-Platonist Aristotelian 'Arabic' revolution in Latinate Christian philosophy in which the previously prevailing natural philosophy based on Plato's Timaeus was wholly overthrown and replaced by Aristotle's as developed in Arabic philosophy. In Platonist natural philosophy the world had a beginning and creation (albeit out of some pre-existing chaotic material) rather than being eternal as in Aristotelian physics, matter was atomic, gravity was a universal mutual attraction of like bodies, and the celestial bands/spheres rotated naturally without need of any mover (as in Copernicus's cosmology, for example), to give just four examples of its differences from Aristotelian physics. (Sir Desmond Lee’s prefatory commentary on his Penguin translation of the Timaeus claims the celestial bands are driven by force, but his own translation patently fails to support his claim, as so often with the crucial summary claims of historians of science.)

However, so far as I am aware nowhere is this thesis of a wholesale Aristotelian revolution and complete overthrow of Platonist physics evidentially substantiated in the literature. For example, neither in his [1977] nor his [1996] books on medieval science did Grant produce any arguments or evidence that Aristotelian physics completely dominated medieval physics without any competing Platonist residue, but simply presupposed it. What are we being invited to believe here and for what domain ? Is the domain that of what was researched or what was taught in medieval 'universities' (i.e. university science), and are we being asked to believe every one of these propounded or taught a uniform Aristotelian physics ? The rejection of various details of Aristotle's physics in favour of Platonist physics in the 13th century and subsequent in such as the Paris University Condemnation of Aristotle, Paris being the leading medieval christian theological college, and the Platonism of Chartres, for example, surely gainsay this mono-theoretical historical picture portrayed by Enlightenment ideology ? These examples suggest the real historical situation may well have been that Platonist physics was never completely overthrown by Aristotelian physics and the medieval scientific culture may well have been one of pluralist diversity rather than a mono-theoretical Aristotelian orthodoxy. Perhaps Wikipedia's learned professors of medieval science can illuminate this crucial issue for us ?

The significant point here may be that one reason there was no 17th century anti-Aristotelian revolution in some respects may be in respects in which Aristotelian theory was never all prevailing in the first place and, for example, never overthrew the Platonist theory of a universal gravity with its alternative theory of purely sublunar gravity.

It was Duhem who initiated the project of deconstructing the Enlightenment ideological construct of a 17th century scientific revolution and its telescoping and air-brushing historical practice, but he only relocated it in changes in Latinate science the 12th to 14th centuries in various alleged overthrows of Aristotelian physics. But it seems these were either not overthrows, such as the Avicennan impetus theory and the Averroes-Aquinas innovation of inertial resistant mass, or else they were such as elements of Platonist science that were never overthrown such as its theory of gravity. It remains to complete this task of deconstruction with a realistic historical analysis of the actual changes that occurred over these centuries from say the 10th to the 17th and to reveal the real logic of scientific discovery and development. Logicus 15:44, 29 October 2006 (UTC)


By:audelino chavez (AkA-A.J_

RfC on Logicus's editing

A Request for Comment (RfC) has been opened at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Logicus on Logicus's editing on this article and its associated talk page.

Anyone is welcome to add comments by certifying the dispute, by endorsing either the posted summary or responses to it, or by submitting their own perspective on the events described.

--SteveMcCluskey 02:03, 6 February 2007 (UTC)