John Carlos Baez on Nostr: All this reached a pinnacle of complexity in Thomas of Bradwardine's 1328 Treatise on ...
All this reached a pinnacle of complexity in Thomas of Bradwardine's 1328 Treatise on the Ratios of Speeds in Motions. He analyzed 4 theories and then proposed his own. Though he didn't phrase it this way, it seems he argued that speed is proportional to the 𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘮 of the force over resistance. For example if you multiply the force on an object by 8 = 2³, you triple its speed.
This theory, which came to be called 'Bradwardine's rule', seems terrible to me. It doesn't solve the problem of infinite speeds in a vacuum, and it means even a tiny force will move an object at some nonzero speed. I suspect I'm misinterpreting it! But anyway, it caught on.
In Oxford, Richard Swineshead and John Dumbleton applied Bradwardine's rule to solving 'sophisms', the logical and physical puzzles that were starting to become important in the undergraduate curriculum. A bit later it appeared at Paris, in the works of Jean Buridan and Albert of Saxony. By the middle of the 1300s it caught on in Padua and elsewhere. And Richard Swineshead, called The Calculator, used it to study whether a body acts as a unified whole or as the sum of its parts. He imagined a long, uniform, heavy body falling in a vacuum down a tunnel through the center of the earth. Somehow he concluded that it would take an infinite time to reach the center. Don't ask me how - I don't know! But anyway, he rejected this conclusion as unphysical.
So, a lot of struggles....
(2/2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bradwardine
This theory, which came to be called 'Bradwardine's rule', seems terrible to me. It doesn't solve the problem of infinite speeds in a vacuum, and it means even a tiny force will move an object at some nonzero speed. I suspect I'm misinterpreting it! But anyway, it caught on.
In Oxford, Richard Swineshead and John Dumbleton applied Bradwardine's rule to solving 'sophisms', the logical and physical puzzles that were starting to become important in the undergraduate curriculum. A bit later it appeared at Paris, in the works of Jean Buridan and Albert of Saxony. By the middle of the 1300s it caught on in Padua and elsewhere. And Richard Swineshead, called The Calculator, used it to study whether a body acts as a unified whole or as the sum of its parts. He imagined a long, uniform, heavy body falling in a vacuum down a tunnel through the center of the earth. Somehow he concluded that it would take an infinite time to reach the center. Don't ask me how - I don't know! But anyway, he rejected this conclusion as unphysical.
So, a lot of struggles....
(2/2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bradwardine