Naïve physics
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Naïve physics or folk physics is the untrained human perception of basic physical phenomena. In the field of artificial intelligence the study of naïve physics is a part of the effort to formalize the common knowledge of human beings.
Many ideas of folk physics are simplifications, misunderstandings or misperceptions of well understood phenomenae, and are not capable of giving useful predictions when detailed experiments are made, or simply are contradicted by more thorough observations. They are sometimes true, or true in certain very limited cases, or within a large degree of approximation, or else they predict the same effect but in fact misunderstand the underlying mechanism. Examples:
- What goes up must come down.
- When you drop an object, it falls straight down.
- If you drop a lead cup and a glass cup the lead one will hit the ground first.
- An object is either at rest or moving, in an absolute sense.
- Two events are simultaneous or they are not.
The ideas that the world is flat, and that the sun and moon orbit the Earth (the geocentric model), were also, until about 2000 to 500 years ago, part of mankind's commonsense understanding of the world.
These and similar ideas, in some cases too obvious for anyone to think of questioning them, were the basis for the first work in formulating and systematizing physics, e.g., by Aristotle and the medieval scholastics. In the modern science of physics, they were gradually contradicted by the work of Galileo, Newton and others. The final one survived until 1905, when it was contradicted by the special theory of relativity.
External links
- Barry Smith and Roberto Casati, Naive Physics: An Essay in Ontology, Philosophical Psychology, 7/2 (1994), 225-244.