Intro: The Cage Match
Do heavier objects fall faster?
Once upon a time, this question was presented as a cage match between Aristotle and Galileo (Galileo winning). As Carlo Rovelli puts it:
…[Aristotle’s physics] is commonly said to state that heavier objects fall faster when every high-school kid should know they fall at the same speed. (Do they??)
and Thony Christie at The Renaissance Mathematicus says:
As is generally well known, having defined fall as natural motion, Aristotle now goes on to elucidate his laws of fall, which, of course, everybody knows were wrong being first brilliantly corrected by Galileo in the seventeenth century. Firstly, Aristotle’s laws of fall are not as wrong as people think, and secondly, they were, as we shall see in later episodes, challenged and corrected much earlier than Galileo.
Diagonal Argument 