Narrative Essay
First, I have heard Aristotle before in my debate classes. I had known him to be a philosopher. Hearing his name in a scientific environment peaked my interests because I had thought of him as a mainly philosophical type of person. This got me into doing some research into him. I found out a lot of information. He was both a philosopher and a scientist. Back in his day, that was not uncommon. Back then, “thought” was its own category, there was not really a distinction between scientific thought and philosophical thought. I was glad I had looked that up because I then understood my PBL better.
Then, I heard of Aristotle again in my AP world history class. He was also a very important person in history. He was a great philosopher who spoke frequently enough on political matters that he was mentioned in my AP world history book! Aristotle was a man of many talents. He had so many people behind him following his ideas and ways. I could not believe that he was wrong! He was such a role model and yet he was wrong? I had decided it was time to do my project and figure out myself if Aristotle was wrong.
My project was not that hard to conduct. All it took was day out of my busy after school schedule. I was determined to figure out who was right. As I was preparing the experiment I went over who thought what in my head once more. Aristotle thought mass directly affected the speed at which an object fell to the earth and Galileo directly clashed with that idea bringing into the equation of air resistance. To test this out I had a feather and a coin in a vacuum, a tube without air. Once I flipped the tube upside down I would see if the two objects fell at the same rate. As I flipped the tube upside down I saw the two objects fall and hit the end of the tube at the exact same time. Galileo was correct.
It took me a while to take this all in. Aristotle’s followers were following him when he was wrong for nearly 2000 years. This made me think that if he was wrong about this, could he possibly be wrong about other theories he had? I went to talk to my debate coach looking for answers. He explained that in Aristotle’s time, there were many scientific errors. That Aristotle was still a great thinker and a very credible one at that. After that talk, I concluded that even though Aristotle was wrong, he was still a very respectable man.