Lesson 16:
This lesson introduces Plato. He was a philosopher in Ancient Greece who wrote down the dialogues of another philosopher named Socrates. Socrates like to ask questions to discover the truth. Plato didn’t believe we could trust our senses to learn truths. He believed that there were higher truths (called “universals”) which could only be understood through the mind, and that our senses just muddled things up and complicated things. We know today that this is not true, and that in science, people use their senses all the time to discover what things are and how they work. However, one way that Plato’s philosophy rang true was in his way he approached mathematics. He knew that we didn’t make up math, that it was something above us that humans simply discovered to be true. Plato later started the first Academy in the world, and a young man named Aristotle came there. Aristotle became one of the wisest men in human history.
Lesson 17:Artistotle believed you could learn a lot by just observing the natural world. He began to try to figure out what things are made up of. He thought that all things are made up of 5 basic things: earth, air, water, fire and ether. He thought that if a substance was “out of place” that it would try to return to where it belonged. For example, fire goes upwards because it is trying to get to its proper place (which he thought was the moon), rocks fall to the ground because they are trying to get closer to the ground, and gas bubbles up in water because gas is trying to get back into the atmosphere. Even though these ideas aren’t true, you can see how they made sense in a strange way. Aristotle’s ideas about these things were believed by most scientists for almost 2,000 years after his time.
Lesson 18: Another one of Aristotle’s ideas had to do with gravity (although he wouldn’t have called it gravity). He thought that heavier objects would fall faster than lighter objects. He thought that lighter objects had less of the earth element in them, and so they wouldn’t want to get back to where they belonged as strongly as heavier objects. If you try this at home, each time you try it, it is called a “trial.” Scientists do trials over and over to test their theories. The experiment of dropping heavy and light objects of the same kind (like two rocks) should show that they fall at the same speed. However, if you drop an object such as a feather, it would fall more slowly because it’s small strands have a lot of air resistance.
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