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of celestial motion, from ''Harmonia Macrocosmica'', 1661.]] From Antiquity up to the time of the Scientific Revolution , inquiry into the workings of the universe was known as Natural Philosophy , but this included fields of Study which today have been divorced from science. The ancient peoples who are considered the first '' Scientists '' may have thought of themselves as ''natural philosophers''. In other cases, systematic learning about the Natural World was a direct outgrowth of Religion , often as a project of a particular religious community. An account of the development of (natural) philosophy from ancient times until recent times can be found in Bertrand Russell 's ''History of Philosophy''. (sculpture)]] One important feature of "pre-scientific" natural philosophy is a reluctance to Experiment . For example, Aristotle is one of the most prolific natural philosophers of Antiquity . He made countless observations of nature, especially the Habit s and Attributes of Plant s and Animal s in the world around him, which he devoted considerable attention to Categorizing . He also made many Observation s about the large-scale workings of the universe, which led to his development of a comprehensive theory of physics in his missives of the same name. (See Physics (Aristotle) .) But Aristotle did not make Prediction s in the way that the current scientific process requires. His approach was to ''observe'' nature, to use Deductive Reasoning and Inductive Reasoning to ''explain'' everything, and to use his natural observations to ''illustrate'' his Explanation s. For example, he developed a version of the classical theory of the elements ( Earth , Water , Fire , Air , and Aether ). In his theory, the heavier elements (earth, water) had a natural tendency to move toward the center of the universe (what we would now call the center of the Earth ), and the lighter elements a natural tendency to move away from it. (Aether was what Celestial Bodies - e.g. Planet s and Star s - were supposedly made of.) Aristotle could point to the falling stone, rising flames, or pouring water to illustrate his theory. His laws of Movement hypothesized that Friction was an omnipresent phenomenon - that any body in Motion would, unless acted upon, ''come to rest''. He also proposed that heavier objects fall faster, and that Void s were impossible. But until the time of the Scientific Revolution , these theories were never really tested experimentally. At the time, the utility of experiment was unproven. Some believed that setting up ''artificial'' conditions in an experiment could never produce results that described nature as it was in the world around them. When investigated experimentally by burning objects in closed spaces, it was eventually determined that air was not elemental. This led to the development of Phlogiston Theory and later to Discovery of the role of Oxygen in Combustion . ]] Galileo ( 1638 ) investigated The Motion Of Falling Bodies , and found that heavier bodies, in fact, do ''not'' always fall faster. The experimental results of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo were formalized in Newton's Laws Of Motion . Newton would state that Inertia is an inherent property of Mass : a moving body will ''stay'' in motion unless acted upon. Unlike Aristotle's views, Newton would state that friction is not an inherent property of objects; friction ''seems'' omnipresent because we live in an environment filled with fluids like air and water, which maintain continual contact with all objects immersed in them. Other revolutionary investigations of the period produced the Vacuum , a void of the sort that Aristotle thought impossible. Today, one of the results of Quantum Mechanics is the notion that even vacuum possesses properties (see Quantum Foam ) which were unsuspected during the time of the Scientific Revolution. SEE ALSO |