Talk:Aristotelian physics/Archive 1

Archive 1

Archive 2

Main ideas

Aristotle's ideas about physics need to be clearly stated, but his prose is hard to read, and it's hard to motivate yourself to do it, because it's all crap. So nobody reads it anymore. I only read a little bit.

Having said that, these idiotic ideas dominated academic discourse for two thousand years, and suppressed foundational scientific ideas for a long long time. It's impossible to convey this tragedy properly by being too charitable to this type of academic fraud.Likebox (talk) 18:42, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Likebox, you apparently subscribe to the Whig theory of scientific development. Late 20th-century scholarship in history and philosophy of science has shown that such a naive point of view is wrong. The article's statement that "All of Aristotle's principles are now known to be completely wrong" is itself completely wrong. If you haven't noticed, the ether theory has returned, for example. Also, the article doesn't seem to understand how the vacuum (or void) that Aristotle discusses is not the vacuum one creates with a vacuum pump (he makes this very clear in the Physics). Similarly the article betrays no understanding that the atoms of the ancients aren't the atoms of modern science. There's so much question-begging and ignorance on display in this article that the label "academic fraud" would be more appropriately applied to the article than to Aristotle and his disciples. JKeck (talk) 18:29, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

I just undid the Likebox's removal of the proper context for this article from the disambiguation. Among the many stupidities in this article, it is interesting that the article talks about Aristotle's invocation of "unspecified forces" to explain gravity as if that unspecificity were somehow rectified by the moderns (Newton, et al.)! As you may recall, Newton famously refrained from hypothesizing/speculating about the cause of gravity; "gravity" is only a name. It is only with Einstein that we get anything like any explanation for gravity. JKeck (talk) 18:40, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

"Unspecified" does not mean "mysterious". It means vague. Aristotle claimed that fire experiences levity, and water and earth experience gravity. Then the Earth goes to the center and makes the "Earth", the water goes around it, and the air above, and fire above that, then the celestial quintessence. This idea is just completely wrong, in any context.

I think that you are complaining that the notion of "all pervading ether" promoted by Aristotle is somehow similar to the modern notion of a dynamical vacuum. That's not true. The idea that Aristotle promotes is that as a medium becomes more tenuous, motion becomes faster, increasing without limit to infinite speed when a vacuum is achieved. This idea is central to his physics, and it's completely wrong. Motion does not increase without limit as a medium is made less dense.

Then a true vacuum is impossible, because things fill it up with infinite speed. This idea was shown to be false by vacuum pumps, since as a vacuum is achieved nothing like infinite speed occurs.

His renounciation of "atomism" is not a renounciation of the notion of philosophical atomism, it's a renounciation of the idea that matter is made of little hard balls that are always moving and bounce off each other. While this is not exactly the modern notion of atoms, it's close enough to explain most of the properties of matter at room temperature, and this is the idea pushed by Democritus. The reason he renounces this is because the little hard balls would have to be surrounded by vacuum, which he says would be impossible.

None of Aristotle's ideas are correct, as is well known, and none of them are correct in any approximation, unlike Archimedes laws of statics or Democritus' conception of atoms. This is well known, and the only arguments are whether the philosophical mumbo jumbo is any better than the physics.Likebox (talk) 23:57, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

About the rest of your comments: You claim that Aristotle's "void" is not a region without stuff in it, but a philosophical idea. You also claim that Aristotle's renounciation of atoms is not a renounciation of the little-hard bouncing-balls idea, but of something else more vague.

You may be on to something, because vagueness is Aristotle's middle name. But your interpretation that void is different than the one created by a vacuum pump is unsupportable. There weren't any vacuum pumps in Aristotle's time, and his followers did not accept that vacuum pumps were possible because of what he wrote.

Your reading of "void", and I am not sure exactly what it is, isn't how contemporaries read it, nor mideval scholars, nor the "Whig" people, nor me. Actually, I don't know anyone who interprets Aristotle's notion of void to mean anything other than "a region without matter".Likebox (talk) 00:37, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Dear Likebox, the community members working on this article have already come to a consensus that the article evaluates Aristotle's physical theories not on their own terms, but on the basis of modern science, which is why the disambiguation text was updated. Since this is the case, I'm going to restore the disambiguation text based on this consensus. We can argue about the merit of the article itself separately. JKeck (talk) 18:41, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

The "community" in this case seems to consist of two people, myself and you. I want to understand your position: do you think this article is not evaluating Aristotle's ideas on their own terms? What's the missing subtlety? His ideas about physics are not that hard to understand.Likebox (talk) 19:48, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

You and I are the only people in this present window of time engaged in this discussion, but there have been others (e.g., ArepoEn, as well as the fellow who downgraded the article's quality scale rating). The reason that you think Aristotle's Physics is simple because the mathematical formulae in it are simple and you think physics is only about mathematical formulae. As a witness against this view, I call Newton himself: as you will recall, the full title of his Principia is Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. In other words, it is only the mathematical part of the study known in its entirety as natural philosophy, otherwise known as physics (look up the etymology of the word, please). Physics in the modern sense is a hybrid science, something like opera is a hybrid art combining drama and music. Physics combines mathematics and physical speculation, e.g., to understand Newton's arguments regarding gravity, you have to have a notion of weight in things around you and in yourself.

Aristotle's thought is rather subtle. For example, can you explain how Aristotle's natural philosophy is applicable to any sort of motion, whereas Newton's and Descartes's presume non-living motion? (Hint: the key is in Physics I.1.) How is Aristotle's notion of nature radically different from that of the moderns? Can you explain the difference between Aristotle's notion of place and that of space? Can you explain why the conclusions of Zeno's paradoxes are false without resorting to the calculus notion of the limit (which would make the argument circular)? I'll post here soon about the difference between vacuum and void. What's important is not what "contemporaries ..., mideval [sic] scholars, ... 'Whig' people" say about Aristotle, but what Aristotle himself clearly says. JKeck (talk) 01:10, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Here is a talk given at MIT that explains more about the need for "physical speculation" (i.e., natural philosophical concepts or ideas) in thinking about the natural world. JKeck (talk) 10:29, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

You are wrong about my position: not only mathematics, but also non-mathematical idea and speculations are OK. Aristotle's physics is crap on their own terms. His ideas are logically incoherent ramblings which are phrased so stupidly and pretentiously that it's not only hard to read, but when you finally do figure out what he's talking about, it's all rubbish.

I can't "explain" any of these things, because they are nonsense questions. They are pretentious series of words designed to make the person who utters them look smart and the person who challenges them look stupid. But I'll give you my best guess:

1. I'll guess that Aristotle's notion of "nature" is probably different from the moderns because he has notions of teleology everywhere. Everything "wants" to be somewhere.
2. I'll guess that Aristotle's notion of "place" is more like the notion of "class" in the 19th century social science. It's where things are "supposed" to be. His idiotic idea that every social heirarchy is due to natural law is really godawful and offensive. It's different from "space" in that space is about geometry, and he was completely ignorant about geometry.
3. Zeno's paradox is so not a problem, that I can't even understand why anyone was bothered about it in the first place. Since I don't see the paradox, I can't see how to resolve it.

I am not an expert.Likebox (talk) 19:25, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

What I find amazing, Likebox, is that you can, on the one hand, so insouciantly proclaim your ignorance of Aristotle's thought and even your incomprehension of the problems he was dealing with, and on the other "authoritatively" declare the entire subject to be complete rubbish ("crap"). Forgive me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that this attitude is completely foreign to any sort of serious scholarly endeavor, of which I would include Wikipedia (at least in aspiration), not to mention its foreignness to any attempt at honest human dealings. How can you say something is worthless before giving it a fair hearing? This attitude is the very picture of close-mindedness and—dare I say it?—bigotry. Rather reminiscent of the non-hearings of Guantanamo-Bay detainees, I might add.

If you ever see your way clear of such narrow-mindedness and want to open up to considering some "dangerous forin'" ideas, I recommend the talk linked above. JKeck (talk) 13:17, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

You really don't get it. I read Aristotle. I made up my mind. It's garbage. Total complete garbage. Nothing salvagable. The guy is a douchebag. I'm not going to waste my time with it anymore.

I did not read physics, but I did read Galileo's Two New Sciences and Dialogue, which pretty much lets you know what the main ideas are without having to slog through all the pretentious pompous drivel.

Since you think the characterization is "oversimplified", I would appreciate it if you could tell me where my preconceptions about it are wrong, and what subtleties I am missing. Or perhaps they are just too subtle for a simple mind like mine. In that case, I would have to lump you in with the frauds too. I ain't found no forin' ideas so subtile that they can't be picked up by jus' bout anybody with a hankerin.Likebox (talk) 15:30, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Galileo doesn't understand Aristotle. Your reliance on him is like trusting a klansman's word about minorities. JKeck (talk) 18:41, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

I understand that I may have picked up unfortunate biases--- please help me set my mind straight. What am I misunderstanding? It would help get this article NPOV, because I am coming from a straight up Galilean viewpoint.Likebox (talk) 20:43, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Modern Aristotelianism

The last section was getting long and repetative, so I wanted to discuss something related in a separate section. That's the MIT lecture mentioned above, which has some Aristotelian concepts souped up and modernized.

A lot of that article is devoted to discussion of a notion of emergence of epiphenomenon in biology, but phrased in a different less mathematical way than usual. Emergent properties are those which are not really reducible to the primary atomic properties, but are sort of superposed on top of them like the meanings of words are superposed on top of the letters that compose the words.

This is not a great example of Aristotelianism, because the philosophy of emergent properties certainly did not begin with Aristotle. A good example of Aristotelianism is found in this sentence from the appendix:

What would it mean for distance not to be infinitely divisible, but to be made up of a finite number of discrete indivisibles? Can a finite number of points make up a distance? Either they are separated by distances or they are not. If so, there are distances between them along which we may take more points, and so on to infinity—and hence distance is infinitely divisible after all. And if the points are not separated by any distances between them, then they coincide in a single point, which has no length or distance.

Hence distance is infinitely divisible, whether it be physical or mathematical.

This sentence, which I think is a near direct lift from Aristotle, attempts to come to a conclusion, that distance is infinitely divisible, by a typical Aristotelian argument from lack of imagination.

"I can't see how it could be otherwise, so it must be this way”

Unfortunately, as the Greeks were well aware, the list of the ways that things can be is very infinite, and searching through this space requires a ton of imagination. Without mathematical precision, the search is hopeless.

This Aristotelian argument assumes, without thinking, that the notion of "distance" is somehow fundamental, measured by real numbers, by numbers with decimals, and that the notion of "distance between two points" is always meaningful. In geometry, there is a way of defining what it means for points to be linked to other points in such a way that distance is never mentioned, giving rise to a topological space. It is also possible to define approximate notions of distance on finite-looking spaces which look like the ordinary notions at normal separations, but break down when the separations would be very small. After your imagination is expanded by these examples, then you just don't make this argument.Likebox (talk) 21:26, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

I agree with your starting a new section. I'm glad you read the talk, and it's good to hear your thoughts on a couple of points in the paper. With whom do you say the idea of emergent properties began? I don't claim to have an answer myself. (I don't think Aristotle would claim to have originated such a notion, but simply to have expanded the conception of what people spontaneously believe.) Perhaps an answer depends on your definition of emergence. But what I do know is that while emergent properties are certainly not reducible to atomic properties, they are not in any Aristotelian sense of emergence "superposed on top of them like the meanings of words are superposed on top of the letters that compose the words." This why Augros says:

This means that in the case of a human being, who is composed entirely out of parts with irrational natures, and yet behaves rationally and puts his parts to rational purposes, we must admit the presence of a new nature, a rational nature. This nature is not something alongside the particles themselves, like another particle, or a vitalistic force floating about in between the particles and telling them what to do—it is simply the single, new, shared nature of the particles themselves, while they exist in that human form. This general understanding explains both why human beings have motives for action which their components in isolation do not, and also why we do nothing without using our atoms.

Of course, you've jumped over most of the points of the talk. But what particular jumps out at me about your last paragraph is that it doesn't actually answer the arguments Augros and Aristotle make and the situation (reality) they outline. One reason for this may a disregarded for a major point of the talk: that general concepts and common experience come before the specific concepts and specialized experience we get from the sciences. There is an order of knowing: if you cannot know what's right around you, then you cannot know a scientific instrument or a high-level theory. Neglecting this important fact, you immediately jump to your specialized arguments and concepts that seem to me to qualify as a "pretentious series of words designed to make the person who utters them look smart and the person who challenges them look stupid." What's missing in the ideas you sketch so vaguely is any description of how they might actually be conceptually prior to our common-sense notions of space. —Preceding unsigned comment added by JKeck (talk • contribs) 20:33, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

I would guess that a proper notion of "emergence" is contained in the writing of any any materialistic philosopher, since a materialist philosophy needs emergent properties in order to reproduce obvious parts of our experiences, like thoughts and feelings, from atoms bouncing around.

I read the talk, but the only part that I recognise as 100% Aristotle is the appendix. The reason I didn't answer the argument about "points inbetween points" is because the answer is so obvious to a modern person: The argument depends on at least these tacit assumptions:

1. points of space are irreducible entities, you can talk about them
2. Two points have a notion of "distance" between them, which can be smaller or larger
3. between any two points is another point which is necessarily distinct from both.

One can violate any of these assumptions, but it is easiest to violate the third. Here's a stupid model than I made up by thinking 1 minute: It keeps assumption 1, there are points, and assumption 2, the notion of distance. But it will violate assumption 3.

1. Imagine generating a list of points scattered around inside an interval, with distances to other points. For every pair of points, there is a real number distance to every other point, and the world is one dimensional. That just means that the distance obeys the equality d(x,y)+/- d(y,z) = +/- d(x,z) with the appropriate choice of signs, depending on whether y is to the "left" or to the "right" of z. The concept of "to the left" and "to the right" still make sense, I hope this is 100% clear.
2. whenever a generated point is within a distance 1 unit of another point, the two points are merged.

It is concievable that this idiotic model of space is correct. In this conception, Aristotle's assumptions fail, and his conclusions fail. The arguments he makes are always like this: he creates a false choice between a small number of options that are nowhere near exhaustive. Then he uses childish syllogisms to eliminate the obviously wrong options, leaving him with the one that he wants.

The one idea that he settles on is always the one that the powerful people in his society agree is correct. The fact that we now see how stupid these ideas are is a testimony to the progress of science.Likebox (talk) 17:15, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your explanation. It's clear from your argument that what you mean by point and coincidence (or "merged") is completely different from what the terms actually mean (and what an ordinary person means by them). In fact you've redefined them to the point that they no longer prove anything with respect to reality.

If you like, you can also prove that 1=2. All you have to do is redefine counting in some kind of non-obvious way. Here, let me prove that I am the President of the United States. All I have to do is redefine "President of the U.S." to mean "six feet tall." I am six feet tall, ergo, I am President of the U.S. Great fun, but how meaningful?

“ 'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. ”

If you actually take the meanings of the terms as Aristotle defines them, you will see that his conclusion is nearly self-evident (i.e., evident once the definitions of the terms are known). For example, points are dimensionless, i.e., not further divisible. Thus, what you call tacit assumption #3 is not an assumption at all, but a necessary conclusion of talking about indivisibles.

Again, you're completely ignoring the necessity of taking our basic conceptions of the world as true (axiomatic, if you will). In doing so, you have forfeited the right to talk about the truth of reality in any meaningful sense. To go against these basic conceptions with more sophisticated conceptions is the branches attacking the trunk of their tree: self-undermining. If our minds can't grasp reality in a basic sense, then your mind has no right to make the assertion about reality that we cannot grasp it. At best you can talk about "consistency," albeit the consistency of some self-defined never-never land without a clear relation to the world we actually live in. Aristotle is not talking about some possible world, but the world we humans actually inhabit. You're welcome to live in never-never land, but please leave us of the reality-based community alone. JKeck (talk) 20:16, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

What I was trying to say, perhaps not very well, is that the notion of "reality" is subtle, and the way things actually are is a subset of the possible ways things could be. The ways things could be is defined by mathematics, because that's the only way we have of making precise intuitive notions like "point", "distance", "between", etc.

The example I gave is pretty stupid, but it tries to make it clear that the intuitive notion of space time point is not in itself obvious or clear outside of a mathematical system. The properties which intuition ascribes to these things are not necessarily true, and to reason about them requires care to ensure that one is not introducing biases.

The hidden biases are deep, and they skew physical reasoning. Reasoning that goes "this is how it seems intuitively, therefore this is how it must be" is to be rejected. The only right way to reason is to say "This is how it seems intuitively, so this is the first assumption, accepted provisionally for lack of better evidence". This is exactly the opposite of how Aristotelianism works. It is how modern science works.

The issue of whether space is continuous is contested, and the current scientific thinking is that it isn't completely continuous. But that's not because Aristotle's assumption 3 fails, but because assumption 1 fails--- the notion of a space time point is probably ill defined.

The reason that people believe this is entirely philosophical, but the philosophy is not Aristotelian, but positivistic. In order to give meaning to the notion of "space time point", you should give a way of defining what it means to have a space time point. The way this is done in physics is to try to measure the position of an object at a certain location, and see if this can be done arbitrarily accurately, in principle.

In principle, to locate an object at position x, to accuracy a, in our real world, you need to use a photon (or some other particle) with wavelength less than a. This means that the energy of the photon is bigger than hc/a, by the uncertainty principle and special relativity. But if a is smaller than the Planck length, the mass of the energy hc/a, M=h/ac makes a black hole whose radius is bigger than a! So instead of measuring the position of the particle to accuracy a, you just made a black hole which destroyed the particle and the photon.

Modern physicists conclude from this, sensibly, that the notion of space and time are not reliable at the Planck length. The notion of space-time point is not fundamental. In fact, there are several proposals to replace this notion, which were only formulated in recent years. The most instructive, in my opinion, is the matrix theory proposal, that the objects are black holes, and their position should be described by N by N matrices which have the property that location only makes sense in regimes where the matrices all commute. This is an unbelievably sophisticated idea, in which all of Aristotle's assumptions about points break down. The intuitive notion of space and time are only reproduced when objects are far apart from each other.

To arrive at this idea, and to have a degree of confidence that it has some correctness when applied to objects in our universe, required many levels of reasoning, each of which showed that a previous common-sense prejudice breaks down. This process was slow and painstaking, and required a form of careful reasoning which questions biases as best as possible. The value of a result in science is measured by the degree to which it changes biases and introduces new processes and ways of thinking. In the Aristotelian way, the prejudices are codified into laws "It must be this way", which leaves no room for questioning, and reinforces authority. This is the road to darkness.Likebox (talk) 17:41, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Just to be clear--- although the MIT article has some overlaps with Aristotle, it's much more interesting and much better written than Aristotle, and makes some thoughtful points. I just was trying to point out that there is a fundamental danger of thought processes which reinforce common sense prejudices, with insufficient consideration of the range of possibilities. They tend to shut out scientific thought if they become dominant.Likebox (talk) 00:14, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Positivism is a bankrupt philosophy—at least it was honest enough to admit its failure. But its failure should have been obvious from the start: you can't disprove the need for philosophy without recourse to philosophy. Plus, measurement will never redefine geometrical propositions. The indivisibility of a geometrical point is no more empirically determined than the number of sides of a triangle. There's no such thing as a theory-free scientific investigation.

You're assuming that smaller means that more fundamental. In a sense it's true: obviously macroscopic things are made of microscopic parts. But in terms of our knowledge, it's false: we know about the microscopic world through the macroscopic world we live in. There's no way to get around it: your knowledge of everything is by means of the macroscopic world and the assumptions you cannot help but form in your encounter with it.

The basic point you're missing is that you cannot talk about your sophisticated notions without having first defined the more primitive notions. You can't say that something isn't a point (or an indivisible) without first having a well-defined notion of a point. You can't say something is discontinuous without first knowing what continuous is. A very rough analogy: you can't do quantum mechanics without first having a notion of classical mechanics, if only for the very mundane reason that your measuring apparatus is going to indicate things to you via classical mechanics. Non-Euclidean geometries are another rough analogue: you can claim that they redefine "straight", but first you have to have the Euclidean notion of "straight" as a basis for comparison.

Perhaps a more apropos example: our notions of position and velocity are emergent from the quantum realm in which these aren't well defined quantities. Yet, when we discuss the quantities in the quantum realm, we have to do so in terms of the well-defined macroscopic quantities, that is, in terms of an uncertainty in them (delta x, delta v). Notice also that our measurements of even these uncertainties depend on the quantities being reasonably precise for individual measurements. Our knowledge always proceeds from the more familiar to the less familiar. The more familiar concepts are the basis of our understanding the less familiar, even if we understand them by contrast. And the less familiar things cannot be any more certain (in the philosophical sense) than the more familiar, just as a house can be no more stable than the bedrock it rests on.

I see you've added another paragraph while I've been writing. One thing you need to keep in mind is that all that survives of Aristotle are his lecture notes. They are incredibly sparse. The article, which I'm glad you got something out of, is part of a long tradition of explicating Aristotle. The problem we have in understanding Aristotle in our world is that our cultural milieu is so completely different from his. In many ways we live in a hall of mirrors (ala Boorstin): completely surrounded by our own creations in our our image, and little exposed to the natural world from which we were born. It's difficult to get away from ourselves (to the extent this is possible) and to experience the world as it is in itself.

I share your concern: certainly we need to avoid senselessly eliminating possibilities for theories. But on the other hand, we need to have a solid conception of what we already know before we can move beyond. The great thing about the Aristotelian tradition of natural philosophy is that it is demonstrative (like geometry), in contrast to the hypothetical-deductive model of modern science, which suffers from the problems of induction and theory-ladeness, among others. We need be confident in the reality of the world immediately around us before we can talk about the reality of things farther away. We need to have our feet firmly planted on the ground before we can reach to the stars, so to speak. JKeck (talk) 01:02, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes--- this is the main point of the MIT lecture, and it is a good and interesting point worth remembering. It reminds me of Bohr's writing about the primacy of classical experience, and Mach too (although you don't like positivism, they emphasized the primacy of immediate experience, and the need to define everything in relation to that, or starting from that). But when I read Aristotle, I don't see him making any of these interesting points.

The stuff I read in Aristotle is really just nonsense: he keeps repeating unimaginative (even for the time) common-sense notions, at the same time as others were challenging these notions with new scientific and non-scientific insights. I don't think that the modern "explication" (which really makes better points than Aristotle, in my view) should be substituted for what the guy actually said, which is a lot less informative.Likebox (talk) 02:18, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

I agree that we don't want to be putting words in Aristotle's mouth. (That's actually been the problem with so many commentaries throughout the centuries.) What you need to keep in mind is that there's a difference between what Aristotle said and what you understand him to say. Unless you're like the fundamentalist who, only knowing the King James Bible, said, "If English is good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for me," then at the very least, you need to acknowledge that he was writing in classical greek, an altogether different language and one that is much more economical in its use of words in many ways, and difficult to translate into a modern language like English. Michael Augros, the presenter of that talk, does his own translations of Aristotle and the last thing he would do is try to put something in Aristotle's mouth that the man didn't actually say.

Btw, I'd like to know what you mean by "at the same time." One thing you may not realize is the Museum at the Library of Alexandria was staffed largely by Aristotelian Platonists (for centuries after his death, Aristotle's philosophy wasn't recognized as fully distinct from Plato's). Aristotle's thought provided a grounding for much of the scientific development for many centuries. The empirical tradition owes a lot to Aristotle, whose conception of the world made investigation of it meaningful (in contrast to say, the conceptions of Plato, Parmenides and Herclitus, in which the sensible world is basically an illusion, or incapable of any lasting understanding). You'll note that William Harvey was an Aristotelian. Prominent analytic philosopher of physics Nancy Cartwright now calls herself a neo-Aristotelian. Those are just two examples off the top of my head. JKeck (talk) 14:54, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

By same time, I mean Democritus. Also Aristarchus, and Archimedes, the last two came a little later. The reason I am singling out Aristotle and not Plato is because Aristotle made false and unsupported claims about the natural world, which suppressed real, hard, scientific work that was done by others around him. He also is clearly writing for an elite audience, in a way the Euclid and Archimedes were not. That makes his prose turgid and full of the stench of snobbery.

You don't need to look hard to find admirers of Aristotle. I think that Newton was also an admirer of Aristotle, in some sense. I think it's almost always a class issue. "Low class" people, like Galileo, can't stomach aristotle. "High class" people, like Newton, like it. But this article I think discusses the content of his physics in a fair way.Likebox (talk) 15:29, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Btw, the point in Augros's talk about general knowledge being more certain is simply an elaboration of the principle Aristotle describes in Physics Book I, chapter 1. Unlike Plato, Aristotle had the virtue of actually taking the sensible world as a serious object of investigation. I'd like to know where you get the idea that Euclid and Archimedes weren't writing for an elite audience (elite because you can't understand him???). Literacy wasn't exactly common in those days, and books were even less common, so any sort of writing was for the elite. You're rather skilled to read through an English translation to know that the original Greek prose was "turgid and full of the stench of snobbery." Funny how the haters of snobs often tend to be the most snobbish. The article is entirely unfair because it mistakes the point of Aristotle's physics. In fact the article, at its more obvious points of ignorance, tends toward self-parody. JKeck (talk) 23:12, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

You can tell that Euclid was not writing for an elite from the famous quote: "There is no royal road to geometry". Mathematical literacy, then as now, was never confined to an elite.

You can tell that Archimedes was not writing for an elite from several historical anecdotes: when Archimedes formulated the law of the lever, he demonstrated the principle by moving a ship single-handedly which was too heavy for several shipmen, using a system of pullees. This is very hands-on work. This is not an ivory-tower intellectual.

Likewise, when making bouyancy calculations in "On Floating Bodies", Archimedes analyzes a paraboloid of revolution in water, and calculates how far it can be tipped before it will turn over. This calculation was very laborious, and makes no sense as pure theoretical mathematics, because it is much less elegant than the other results in the same treatise. The only way it makes sense is as applied mathematics--- this calculation showed how far a model of a boat could tilt before capsizing. The answer would have been a terrific guide for shipbuilders, as an way to estimate tolerances. The fact that this practical problem survives in his mathematical works is telling.

There are other day-to-day practical inventions in Archimedes work which are very famous: the Archimedian screw, the war machines, etc. Some of the machines might be apochryphal, but on the whole, Archimedes life's work is full of them. On balance, it seems he got his ideas by interacting with engineers, not philosophers. His writing remains clear and lucid, like Galileo's, and grounded in sensible day to day concerns.

I believe that there is a tendency to underestimate the degree of literacy in the ancient world, assuming that it was as low as it was in the late middle ages. Before the church took over "the word", there was public access to books in libraries. It is not obvious to me that literacy was not very broadly shared. After the printing press, literacy is broadly distributed again. Perhaps the middle ages were the only time that writing was confined to an elite. A teacher of mine noted a passage in the bible: in Judges, or Kings, one of the characters runs across a young shephard boy and asks him to jot down a message. The boy does this, and is sent off. The important thing is that the boy's literacy is taken for granted. Historians know better than me, I'm sure.

The reason Aristotle's writing is snobby is not only because of the detailed word choice, it's because it is full of nit-picking pseudo-distinctions whose only purpose it to obscure obvious fallacies. When he talks about the motion of objects, it is clear that he has not sat down and done a single detailed observation of this motion. When he formulates the system of the world, it is not science that he is doing, but the codification of prejudice. It's not that I don't understand what he's saying. I do. I just think he's an idiot.

This article's only point is to tell you in straightforward language what the practical content of Aristotle's physics is: what were the predictions about observations. The philosophical content of Aristotle's work is harder to isolate in an objective way: different people will come to different conclusions. I think I understand that too. It will help for you to be more specific about what the article is misunderstanding.Likebox (talk) 22:29, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't understand how that Euclid quotation is "non-elitist." It sounds like he's saying there's no short-cut to geometrical knowledge. In fact the Wikipedia article on Royal Road supports this interpretation: "Euclid is said to have replied to King Ptolemy's request for an easier way of learning mathematics that 'there is no royal road to geometry'." But perhaps you know better?

As to Archimedes, it's well known that he did the practical work under duress: in his heart he desired to be a pure (i.e., impractical) mathematician. Such was the general attitude in ancient Greece; it was only the (Western) medieval monks who brought dignity to manual labor (ora et labora was the Benedictine motto, for example). Or perhaps you can find an ancient quotation praising work? Btw people always talk about Athens as a great democracy, but fail to acknowledge that the vast majority of the population was slaves, who didn't vote and had no part in government.

As far as the value of Aristotle's philosophy is concerned, it's like you never read the Augros talk. You're like a racial bigot who sees someone of a different race do something good and then immediately forgets about it because it doesn't fit into his worldview. JKeck (talk) 05:52, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

The Euclid quotation says that geometrical knowledge does not come any easier to the political elite than it does to anybody else. It's a very democratic statement.

The quote that says that Archimedes did practical work under duress is due to a Roman historian writing approximately two centuries later (I can't remember his name--- but the quote is something like "Archimedes viewed the practical inventions to be of lesser worth than the pure philosophical investigations"). This single quote by a non-technical commentator has been used many times to support the thesis that Archimedes viewed his practical work as less significant. While there might be a grain of truth to this, because practical inventions usually have a shorter shelf life than theoretical physics, I think that this quote is not supported by the balance of the historical evidence. Archimedes did too many practical things to seriously believe that they are of lesser worth. Also, "The method of mechanical theorems" shows us that he discovered the mathematical formulas that he considered most significant by practical methods derived from thinking about physics. So I don't buy this quote. It's not just because of my own personal worldview. There are others who have criticized this quote before, I am just parroting them.

I don't understand why bigotry always comes up. I am not bigoted against Aristotle, I just don't like it. But when I write text in the Encyclopedia, I try to keep my personal view out of it, only putting accurate neutral stuff. That doesn't mean that it ends up neutral, I am aware that unconscious biases can infect writing. Please tell me what particular bit of information in the article is not supported by the historical record, or the writing of Aristotle.Likebox (talk) 13:27, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Aristotle->Newton != Newton->Einstein

The transition from Aristotle to Newton involved replacing bullshit with science. The transition from Newton->Einstein involved replacing an approximate representation with a better representation. Newton's laws are a limit of Einstein's laws. Aristotle's laws are not a limit of Newton's laws.

Aristotle's laws are bunk. Newton's (and Einstein's) are science. Any attempt to deemphasize this difference should be resisted.Likebox (talk) 22:11, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

You can have the most accurate mathematical equations to describe the world that you want, but if you don't have the proper words to go with them, your understanding won't have advanced a step. Your fatal mistake is thinking that the point of Aristotle's Physics is some sort of mathematical description of motion. (One would think that simply the dearth of mathematics would be a tip-off, if not the fact that none of his main conclusions are mathematical, but rather philosophical.) No, Aristotle is not after anything so shallow. Rather, he is trying to discover how we can meaningfully talk about the natural, changing world. For example, in Book I, he is trying to navigate between Parmenides and Heraclitus: how can we have lasting, unchanging knowledge of an ever-changing world? (That you cannot even recognize the problem is a sign of a deeper problem. Forgetting the foundations of one's discipline is in the end self-defeating.) In Book II, he is trying to discover what nature is. This has to be done philosophically: the modern natural sciences investigate a subject (nature) that they can't by their own methods define. What is amazing is how insouciantly scientists then claim to have comprehensive knowledge of nature, when they cannot even write a definition of it that bears scrutiny. JKeck (talk) 23:42, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't think that Aristotle was trying to give a mathematical description, because, then as now, mathematical knowledge is looked upon by many elite thinkers as "shallow", compared to the pompous meaningless bullshit of philosophy. In the scientific tradition, true knowledge is characterized by detailed, precise, predictions about the behavior of a system. Bullshit is characterized by a sequence of words with no practical, effective, positivistic, way to tell if they are right or wrong.

The argument here is over what it means to really understand something. your contention is that, following Aristotle, this happens when you can string together a bunch of words that convince a great many people that you understand it. I believe, following the modern mathematical tradition, that you understand something when you can write a computer program that reproduces its behavior in a wide range of circumstances. This is, indeed, a difference between Aristotelian philosophy and Archimedes/Galileo etc. It is hard to write about this difference without acknowledging the nearly universally agreed upon fact that the Galilean tradition has been infinitely more effective at describing the natural world.

I agree that there is room left to think about what it is exactly that we are describing when we describe the natural world. Whether sensory experiences are irreducible or not, etc. But I think that that discussion in the twentieth century has been strongly influenced by logical positivism. The sad fact that you can make fun of logical positivism today without shame is a sad commentary on the state of philosophy.Likebox (talk) 22:44, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

But these bloviations of mine (sorry, I got carried away) are irrelevant. I don't know where this article goes astray. Perhaps a sentence saying "Aristotle's aims are not scientific, but philosophical, and his natural philosophy is not necessarily meant to be a precise description of natural phenomenon" would do the trick. I think you can source that to somebody like the MIT lecturer.Likebox (talk) 17:26, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

I would much appreciate it if you would refrain from referring to Aristotle as BS. It is an injustice to a great thinker and also an injustice to you, as I think you have enough depth to appreciate his points, if you only devote the time to understanding (though you seem determined to convince me otherwise!). Regarding positivism: how can one reject philosophy without first doing philosophy? To reject philosophy is itself a philosophical claim: how can one even treat of philosophy (to reject it) experimentally? One cannot: positivism is a self-defeating exercise. If you think otherwise, I ask that you show me how to accomplish this thing I claim is impossible. (Btw, you should look up the etymology of "science"--I think you would find it informative.) One way or another, you're going to do philosophy: either covertly or overtly. If you don't acknowledge what you're doing and do it self-consciously so that you look at your own philosophy critically, then you are going to carry along all sorts of unexamined assumptions and prejudices that will sooner or later carry you into error.

I certainly agree that the modern scientific tradition describes the universe in much greater detail--please don't think that I reject this great good (I would hardly have bothered to get a PhD in physics if I rejected modern science!). What I'm saying is that one needs to ground these results in a larger philosophical framework. To do otherwise is something like building a tower without a foundation. Without that grounding in the more certain truths of natural philosophy (truths that any experiment presupposes), the edifice will be quite limited in the heights it can actually reach. To extend the metaphor, the builders might think they are building up, when the ground has shifted so that they are actually building sideways or even downward. JKeck (talk) 05:40, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Look, Not all of Aristotle is BS. The stuff about efficient/final causes is interesting, and goes a long way to clarifying the distinctions that you want to make. Maybe one could say "Aristotle was more interested in the final cause, the teleology, of natural phenomena, then in the efficient cause, which is the focus of Atomism and modern science."

But we must make clear that Aristotle's speculations regarding the final causes of natural phenomena was ultimately incorrect. This will make it clear that this type of speculation is dangerous, especially if a thinker becomes very prominent. Whether natural phenomena respect final causes at all is a contentious issue. My personal bias is that they do, but only in the case of biology.

Just so that you don't think I'm biased: Scientists can sometimes be full of shit too. Newton's explanation for the discrepancy between his speed of sound calculation and the measured speed of sound is pure BS. Einstein's attempted explanation of superconductivity is BS. Galileo has a few BS moments too, but they're not very memorable. Everybody is fallible. Aristotle's mistakes, though, had the unfortunate property of being in line with the ingrained bias of aristocrats and clergy through the ages, so they dominated discourse and shut out competing ideas. Unlike these ideas, the MIT lecture does not seek to shut out science or relegate it to an inferior role. Mostly it wants a new emphasis on final causes, and that's totally reasonable.Likebox (talk) 14:50, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

This is out of the main line of discussion, but you are making a bit of a straw man out of positivism. Positivists don't reject philosophy, they simply note that not all philosophical questions have an answer. If you ask "What is the political affiliation of the 2S electrons in Lithium?" That's not a question that has an answer in any real sense. The positivists simply try to classify questions into "objectively answerable" and "objectively meaningless", by doing two things: first, by being precise about language, so that the meaning of the question can be defined in a way that is more or less independent of who's asking. Second, by checking whether the answer to the question can be verified by observations or measurements.

This is a very common-sense approach to philosophy, but it has the effect of relegating many questions like "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin" into the ash-heap. Many of these questions were considered very deep before positivism: like "can we have free will in a deterministic universe?", "Does a particle have an instantaneous position and velocity?", etc. These types of questions do not necessarily need an answer, if the answer to the question cannot be given an objective meaning through observation.

There are some weak attacks on positivism that go along the lines "positivists say that every statement needs to be objectively verifiable, but this statement itself is not objectively verifiable, so positivism is nonsense." That's attacking a straw man. The actual position of positivists is more like: "Positivists say that every statement needs to be verifiable, except the statement that every statement needs to be verifiable, which they take as an axiom". Your statement "positivists say philosophy is meaningless, but that in itself is philosophy" falls into that category.

A stronger attack on positivism comes from Wittgenstein (I think) and others, who claim that an objective language is unachievable. The meanings of words drift with time, they depend on the speaker and the listener, and they are full of nuanced subtlety, so that ultimately an objective description of ideas is an unattainable ideal. This type of postmodern objection to positivism is more substantive, and it has convinced most philosophers that positivism is dead.

I personally think that this argument is substantive, but incorrect. I think most physicists agree, because positivism is sort of the default philosophy in physics. The reason the argument is not conclusive is because we have examples of purely objective languages for computers: languages like C and LISP. They are defined by formal grammars, with unambiguous rules of parsing them and extracting all their meaning. There is no dispute about what a piece of C code is supposed to do. The notion of computation can then be used to give objective meaning to all the modern and ancient physics literature. Newton's laws give an algorithm for computing planetary positions (as do Ptolmey's).

Unfortunately, it is not clear if the language of computation is rich enough to describe things like the internal experience of consciousness, or any possible final causes which might operate in economics, politics, or biology. Some of these concepts might be necessary, so if a positivism can't talk about them, then you can say positivism is dead. So the question is really: to what extent the notion of computation be extended to encompass ideas about final cause?

I believe that, with approriate modifications, it can encompasses all these ideas in a subtle and rich way, which is much more precise than any of the old schemes. I don't think philosophers care enough about computers to seriously ask this question anymore.Likebox (talk) 15:18, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Even an axiom doesn't justify itself. Name a modern philosopher of science who is a positivist. JKeck (talk) 22:45, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

It's not my fault they're stupid.Likebox (talk) 17:02, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

About this addition:

Somebody added this to the lead:

Aristotle's principles were difficult to disprove merely through casual everyday observation, but later development of the scientific method challenged his views with experiments, careful measurement, and more advanced technology such as the telescope and vacuum pump.

This seems completely inaccurate. The principles of Aristotelian physics were easy to disprove through casual everyday observation. That heavy and light objects fall at the same rate was probably discovered hundreds of times throughout history. That the earth revolves was also probably guessed at by hundreds of people. But the power structure of European society at the time prevented such discoveries from spreading.

Aristotle's work is shoddy and fraudulent, not approximate and pretty good.Likebox (talk) 20:38, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Missing things

Not allAristotelian physics is rejected in the article:

1. natural places: rejected by Alberuni, al-Khazini
2. gravity/levity: rejected by Alberuni
3. rectilinear motion: rejected by Alhazen, Avicenna, Buridan, Galileo, Newton
4. velocity density relation: rejected by Galileo
5. vacuum is impossible: not rejected, should be some air pumper, maybe Robert Boyle
6. all pervading ether: not rejected, should be maybe Robert Boyle + John Dalton + Rutherford and others,
7. infinite universe: (skip that one), we don't know
8. continuum theory: not rejected, should be maybe Robert Boyle + chemists + John Dalton + Rutherford and others,
9. quintessence: not rejected, ????
10. incorruptible and eternal cosmos: rejected by Galileo
11. circular motion: not rejected, should be Johannes Kepler and Newton

Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 22:52, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

This is the problem with the too-charitable interpretation of Aristotle's arguments. It is important to understand that Everything he wrote about physics is total bunk.

The "vacuum is impossible" idea is rejected, because it isn't related to the modern idea that you can't cool down something to absolute zero. The idea that Aristotle was pushing is that everyplace had to have something in it, or else other stuff would instantly rush in to fill the void. This predicts that as a vaccum pump is pumping, things in the inside will start to move faster and faster, and the pressure on the container will go to infinity as vacuum is achieved. Wrong. The pressure goes to a finite limit, objects do not go faster and faster, and in fact, nothing spectacular happens.

The modern notion of an "ether", like the Higgs field, has nothing to do with the Aristotelian idea that the ether is a continuum theory. Modern continuum theory is derived from atomic theory, and has domains where it is known to fail because things are really atomic underneath. Continuum theory does not allow raindrops to slide down windows, for example.

The problem with giving authors that discredit individual points is that this hogwash is not authoritative enough to ever have been accepted. The rejection happened sort-of all at once, not peicemeal. People just said one day (at different times) "wait a minute, this guy is full of shit!"Likebox (talk) 00:37, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

We know, we know, I made the notes in the context of the evolution of science. Other articles reflect the generally accepted idea that the emergence of modern science (or somewhat anachronistically "the scientific revolution") is marked by the counterproofs against the Aristotelian dogmata. Therefore if we have 11 dogmata that one by one are debunked, then we have a measure of how far the modern science have emerged. But the counterproofs against 5 of them are missing from the text, so the article is IMO lacking.

And: each of the dogmata is obviously stepwise debunked, first by someone arguing against them, then by a lot of objections emerging, then by experiments demonstrating against them, finally by the science community rejecting them. The "revolution" was very-very slow, streched over at least 800 years, more like a slow evolutionary process. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 10:39, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

And: in order to account for your revolutionary approach: yes, correct that too. But in order for a revolution to occur, there must be tensions builtup in order to motivate all the science society to throw a full paradigm away. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 10:44, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Got it. Ok, sorry for the reaction, I got used to arguing with neo-Aristotelians.

Air pumps I'm pretty sure you got right with Robert Boyle. Ether was probably Boyle too.

Quintessence was shown false by some spectroscopist in the late 19th century. Stars have the same spectra as the Earth. Also the discovery of Helium went the other way. But by then nobody believed in quintessence.

The rest I'm ok with the ones you credit.Likebox (talk) 13:45, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

"I got used to arguing with neo-Aristotelians."

― Wow! That was unexpected... but maybe I should suspect. In these days of intense information flow, anything should be possible. ;^#) Anyways, I'm going to ponder an extra section concentrating on chemistry. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 19:40, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Confused premise of article?

I take it as a worrying sign that this article could not even correctly state in its header (see my recent edit) what it was about. Physics is not the focus of Physics (Aristotle), which is not surprising because Aristotle's physika means something that has little to do with physics. I have no objection to an article which ferrets out those Aristotelian answers to questions we now answer with physics and uses reliable sources to talk about how they have been compared, generally of course to Aristotle's disadvantage. But Likebox's proclamations about "bullshit" here indicate that s/he is not likely to appreciate the reason Aristotle continues to be read and studied by philosophers: he has much more (useful) to say about philosophical puzzles that don't reduce to answers given in science textbooks than about mechanics, etc.: his treatises' theorization of biological phenomena is generally more important than what they have to say about physical phenomena, and works like Physics and On the Soul are still read widely (as opposed to say History of Animals, which is of more antiquarian interest) because many of the problems Aristotle discussed, e.g. Life#Hylomorphism and philosophy of mind, are still regarded as current philosophical problems, discussions to which a good understanding of Aristotle still has something to contribute. This is all verifiable.

In sum, Aristotelian and Medieval theories of acceleration, etc., are of antiquarian interest, and they have almost nothing to do with the reasons why philosophers study Physics (Aristotle). This article, then, is of mainly antiquarian interest (obsolete scientific theories). It needs to exercise greater care in specifying and clarifying exactly how narrow and antiquarian its focus is. What is not acceptable is if Aristotle's philosophical thought gets lumped in with his obsolete scientific theories. This flies in the face of what the scholarly discipline of philosophy holds. Now, I can understand if some scientists (or enthusiasts of science who edit Wikipedia) simply do not get the alien discipline of philosophy. But that doesn't mean we're allowed to blank philosophy of mind and replace it with "This is a bullshit way of pretending to answer questions that only neuroscience will ever answer!" or to pretend that theories of abiogenesis have deprived earlier attempts to grapple with the nature of living matter (including Aristotle's) of their value.

I am going to rest content with fixing the header and lead sentence so that they are not in flagrant error. But I hope those editors who are actually working on the content of the article will be mindful of the need to make sure it doesn't lapse into an immature denunciation of ideas that (A) have nothing to do with physics and often nothing to do with modern experimental science of any kind, (B) are widely granted contemporary relevance and interest by reliable sources in the discipline that gets to decide what is real philosophy vs. junk philosophy (namely, philosophy), just as physics gets to decide what is real physics vs. junk physics. (Of course there will always be disagreements in both disciplines.)

The slight concern I have here (please don't mistake it for an accusation) is that there is a tendency to make a WP:POVFORK version of the article that should exist on Aristotle's philosophy of nature. This would be exactly as inappropriate as making a POV-fork version of a scientific topic, devoted to explaining how unsatisfactory scientific publications and theories are from the point of view of philosophy. The title Aristotelian physics is unfortunate and misleading, since this article discusses only a very narrow slice of what an expert in "Aristotelian physics" would consider that topic to mean.

The unfortunate problem that makes fixing this so difficult is that, though there are clear examples on either side, it is in practice extremely difficult to draw a bright line between "science" and "philosophy" in this area (much of the most respected work about the nature of modern science actually emphasizes similar problems). While grappling with that problem, let's make a good faith effort not to have the physics textbook's verdict confused with the modern philosopher's verdict on many questions that properly belong much more to the latter to adjudicate than the former. Wareh (talk) 19:14, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

Yeah yeah. There is physics, and then there is this bullshit which Aristotle was pushing, which displaced real physics in his time and for thousands of years later. The fact that modern philosophers are still enamored of this crap does not mean we don't treat it fairly--- I described Aristotle's physics as it was.Likebox (talk) 13:17, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

Dear Wareh, thank you: you are right that Aristotelian physics is not so much about what we today call physics (the mathematical-empirical examination of the inanimate world), but more a study of what we tend to call nature: the living world, that is necessarily more teleological than the inanimate world. Likebox, on queue, puts his blissful ignorance and bigotry on display--as dependable as Old Faithful: somehow name-calling is supposed to be an adequate substitute for reasoned argumentation--or even giving a fair reading to the works he is supposedly criticizing. Furthermore he overlooks the fact that Aristotle died in 322 BC--a pretty airtight alibi against doing anything good or bad in the world for a thousand years. This article, an antiquated piece of positivist propaganda, would be laughable were it not for the fact that widespread ignorance of the necessarily philosophical underpinnings of science (such as the demarcation problem) gives it a plausibility it does not deserve. JKeck (talk) 01:31, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Gravity

When things fall: "The speed of this motion was thought to be proportional to the mass of the object." Where does Aristotle state this? Hexmaster (talk) 15:13, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Ah, found it: "a little bit of earth, let loose in mid-air moves and will not stay still, and more there is of it the faster it moves" (On the Heavens, book 2). Very well. :-) Hexmaster (talk) 15:15, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Wait. That says that the speed monotonically increases with mass, but doesn't imply that it's necessarily proportional... in fact, Aristotle would be CORRECT in saying that heavier objects fall faster to a certain extent (because of air resistance, they have higher acceleration and higher terminal velocity). 24.34.94.195 (talk) 17:20, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Cleanup

As noted above, if this page should be moved back to "Aristotelian physics" (and a normal user can't do it) you can request admin attention at WP:RM. I assume some of the recent cleanup is related to Jagged 85 (Aristotelian physics is listed at Cleanup4). If so, please see WP:Jagged 85 cleanup and use at least one edit summary with a link to that page. That's important for other editors who may wonder why all the changes were made in a year or two. Johnuniq (talk) 01:29, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Possibly just one edit from a few days ago marked "not in source". Actually, the material on Islamic science and medieval Aristotelianism was not reviewed. We might need some help with that, (I'm not familiar enough with the material myself), but I'll take a look at WP:Jagged 85 cleanup and link to it in an edit summary. Thx—Machine Elf 1735 (talk) 19:33, 27 July 2010 (UTC)