Remember, a reason it took so long for natural philosophers to notice the laws of motion is because air complicates things. You don’t get to see regularity until you can focus on celestial bodies, dense/small objects, and vacuums—which are a difficult engineering problem to create in a lab with pre-Scientific Revolution technology.
Vacuums and telescopes are Renaissance tech, it’s true. Wikipedia tells me that the first laboratory vacuum was built in the year after Galileo’s death, so I think we can rule out the relevance of vacuums. (Galileo did say that things would be better in a vacuum.)
But dense objects are cheap! Maybe Galileo had better clocks than Archimedes, but given the Antikythera mechanism, we just don’t know. Timing objects rolling down an inclined plane is easy. Racing two objects of different weights doesn’t even require a clock.
The main question is whether the telescope affected Galileo’s earthbound work.
I’m also unclear on his contribution. It may have been to combine simple physical laws with mathematics to produce conclusions. In particular, he seems to have been the first to say that projectiles travel in parabolas, which he deduced from gravity being constant acceleration. Other people (Avicenna, Biruni) may have said that gravity was acceleration, but I think it’s hard to tell what they meant because they didn’t draw clear conclusions from it.
Vacuums and telescopes are Renaissance tech, it’s true. Wikipedia tells me that the first laboratory vacuum was built in the year after Galileo’s death, so I think we can rule out the relevance of vacuums. (Galileo did say that things would be better in a vacuum.)
Just to clarify, I only meant that vacuums were difficult to create in a lab with pre-Scientific Revolution tech, not that it was hard to create dense objects back then. Gold coins, anyone?
The broader point was that it takes a lot of cognitive labor simply to recognize that “hey, this would be much simpler to describe in a vacuum”. And so testing an inference program on a system unlikely to be observed on average, but set up lack regular complexities, is “cheating”, in a sense, because of how you save it the problem of recognizing these difficulties and abstracting away from them.
The broader point was that it takes a lot of cognitive labor simply to recognize that “hey, this would be much simpler to describe in a vacuum”.
It seems that it should be easy to produce physical laws or mathematical formulae describing dense bodies, without figuring out that they are universal laws whose domain of application is limited by the complication of air, but the historical progression was the opposite.
People talked about vacuum for thousands of years. Avicenna definitely said that things would be simpler in a vacuum. Wikipedia quotes Biruni saying that Aristotle said that the heavens are simpler because they are a vacuum.
Not that this has anything to do with superintelligences, but it suggests that we’ve forgotten what hard steps we’ve already done.
Why did no one before Galileo notice that the pendulum is cool?
I don’t understand how the Caliphate produced Snell’s law and good measurements (eg, the concern about whether measurement error is biased) without producing a contribution to precise earthbound dynamics that I’ve heard of.
Vacuums and telescopes are Renaissance tech, it’s true. Wikipedia tells me that the first laboratory vacuum was built in the year after Galileo’s death, so I think we can rule out the relevance of vacuums. (Galileo did say that things would be better in a vacuum.)
But dense objects are cheap! Maybe Galileo had better clocks than Archimedes, but given the Antikythera mechanism, we just don’t know. Timing objects rolling down an inclined plane is easy. Racing two objects of different weights doesn’t even require a clock.
The main question is whether the telescope affected Galileo’s earthbound work.
I’m also unclear on his contribution. It may have been to combine simple physical laws with mathematics to produce conclusions. In particular, he seems to have been the first to say that projectiles travel in parabolas, which he deduced from gravity being constant acceleration. Other people (Avicenna, Biruni) may have said that gravity was acceleration, but I think it’s hard to tell what they meant because they didn’t draw clear conclusions from it.
Just to clarify, I only meant that vacuums were difficult to create in a lab with pre-Scientific Revolution tech, not that it was hard to create dense objects back then. Gold coins, anyone?
The broader point was that it takes a lot of cognitive labor simply to recognize that “hey, this would be much simpler to describe in a vacuum”. And so testing an inference program on a system unlikely to be observed on average, but set up lack regular complexities, is “cheating”, in a sense, because of how you save it the problem of recognizing these difficulties and abstracting away from them.
It seems that it should be easy to produce physical laws or mathematical formulae describing dense bodies, without figuring out that they are universal laws whose domain of application is limited by the complication of air, but the historical progression was the opposite.
People talked about vacuum for thousands of years. Avicenna definitely said that things would be simpler in a vacuum. Wikipedia quotes Biruni saying that Aristotle said that the heavens are simpler because they are a vacuum.
Not that this has anything to do with superintelligences, but it suggests that we’ve forgotten what hard steps we’ve already done.
Why did no one before Galileo notice that the pendulum is cool?
I don’t understand how the Caliphate produced Snell’s law and good measurements (eg, the concern about whether measurement error is biased) without producing a contribution to precise earthbound dynamics that I’ve heard of.