Aristotle (born 384 BCE, Stagira, Chalcidice, Greece—died 322, Chalcis, Euboea) was an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, one of the greatest intellectual figures of Classical antiquity and Western history. He was the author of a philosophical and scientific system that became the framework and vehicle for both Christian Scholasticism and medieval Islamic philosophy. Even after the intellectual revolutions of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, Aristotelian concepts remained embedded in Western thinking.
Aristotle’s intellectual range was vast, covering most of the sciences and many of the arts, including biology, botany, chemistry, ethics, history, logic, metaphysics, rhetoric, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, physics, poetics, political theory, psychology, and zoology. He was the founder of formal logic, devising for it a finished system that for centuries was regarded as the sum of the discipline; and he pioneered the study of zoology, both observational and theoretical, in which some of his work remained unsurpassed until the 19th century. But he is, of course, most outstanding as a philosopher. His writings in ethics and political theory as well as in metaphysics and the philosophy of science continue to be studied, and his work remains a powerful current in contemporary philosophical debate. (Britanica.com)
However, he was not accurate while dealing with motion as there is the mention in the Quran that nobody and anything can be perfect except for the creator, who created the universe. Aristotle held the view that if a body is moving, something external is required to keep it moving. According to this view, for example, an arrow shot from a bow keeps flying because the air behind the arrow keeps pushing it. This point of view was the part of an elaborate framework of ideas developed by Aristotle on the motion of bodies in the universe. Most of the Aristotelian ideas on motion are now known to be wrong and need not concern us. For our purpose here, the Aristotelian law of motion may be phrased thus: An external force is required to keep a body in motion.
To understand Law of Inertia, i.e. first law of motion we are required to grasp of the notion of friction. There is the whole chapter on friction in the NCERT science book of class eighth, whose introductory para reads as under:
“You might have seen a driver of car or a truck slowing down the vehicle at a traffic signal. You, slow down your bicycle whenever needed by applying brakes. Have you ever thought why a vehicle slows down when brakes are applied? Not, only vehicles, any object, moving over the surface of another object slows down when external force is applied on it. Finally it stops. Have you not seen moving ball on the ground stopping after some time? Why do we slip when we step on a banana peel? Why is it difficult to walk on a smooth and wet floor?”
Friction that could not be grasped by Aristotle opposes the relative motion between two surfaces in contact. It acts on both the surfaces and depends on the nature of surfaces in contact. For a given pair of surfaces friction is subject to the state of smoothness of those surfaces and how two surfaces press together. There are many kinds of friction, from which static friction comes into play when we try to move an object at rest and sliding friction acts when an object is sliding over another and it is smaller than the static friction. Understanding friction is has enormous value for our life as when Galileo grasped it and Newton worked on it smartly, the mechanic got revolutionized. Friction can be manipulated by increasing or decreasing while solving the real life problems. The soles of the shows and the tyres of the vehicle are treaded to increase fiction and the same can be reduced by using lubricants. There is another friction called rolling that is smaller than the sliding friction and realized in case on body rolls over another body. In many machines such as electric motors, turbines, car engines, fans, and conveyor systems including robotic arms friction is reduced by using ball bearings and we cannot forget the fluid friction that can be minimized by giving suitable shapes to bodies moving in fluids.
As understanding friction is helpful to understand the law of inertia or the first law of motion elaborated by Newton, I elaborated the concept of friction.
Now let us to have a look on the law of Inertia:
law of inertia, postulate in physics that, if a body is at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line, it will remain at rest or keep moving in a straight line at constant speed unless it is acted upon by a force. The law of inertia was first formulated by Galileo Galilei for horizontal motion on Earth and was later generalized by René Descartes. Before Galileo it had been thought that all horizontal motion required a direct cause, but Galileo deduced from his experiments that a body in motion would remain in motion unless a force (such as friction) caused it to come to rest. This law is also the first of Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion.
Although the principle of inertia is the starting point and the fundamental assumption of classical mechanics, it is less than intuitively obvious to the untrained eye. In Aristotelian mechanics, and in ordinary experience, objects that are not being pushed tend to come to rest. The law of inertia was deduced by Galileo from his experiments with balls rolling down inclined planes.
For Galileo, the principle of inertia was fundamental to his central scientific task: he had to explain how it is possible that, if Earth is really spinning on its axis and orbiting the Sun, we do not sense that motion. The principle of inertia helps to provide the answer: since we are in motion together with Earth, and our natural tendency is to retain that motion, Earth appears to us to be at rest. Thus, the principle of inertia, far from being a statement of the obvious, was once a central issue of scientific contention. By the time Newton had sorted out all the details, it was possible to accurately account for the small deviations from this picture caused by the fact that the motion of Earth’s surface is not uniform motion in a straight line. In the Newtonian formulation, the common observation that bodies that are not pushed tend to come to rest is attributed to the fact that they have unbalanced forces acting on them, such as friction and air resistance. In classical Newtonian mechanics, there is no important distinction between rest and uniform motion in a straight line: they may be regarded as the same state of motion seen by different observers, one moving at the same velocity as the particle and the other moving at constant velocity with respect to the particle.
Muslim scientists like Al-Kindi, Ibn al-Haytham, Al-Biruni, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali, and Ibn Bajjah amongst others made pivotal contributions to the study of motion before Newton. Their work on projectile motion, falling bodies, and impetus theory challenged Aristotelian views and laid foundations for the law of inertia. While they didn’t fully articulate Newton’s laws, their insights into motion without continuous external forces and the role of resistance were crucial steps.
We saw that the Aristotelian conception of motion was flawed so any formulation of the natural phenomenon and others must not be taken as the ultimate reference point. Many philosophical and books on logic that constitute a part of curriculum of Dars-e-Nizami in Indian Darul Ulooms are regarded flawless and futile efforts are mad to understand a theory which has lost its relevance. Hence, the educators of the Islamic seminaries are required to modernize the educational systems satisfying the contemporary needs of the Islamic scholars, preachers, educators and imams of the mosques and Islamic revivalists. (Hamid Siddiqui) ∑∑∑
Lajjawati
Fankar Academy, Budaun
Rang Birangi Dunya
Rising Lion
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