Science is an ongoing search for truth—a perpetual struggle to discover how the universe works that goes back to the earliest civilizations. Driven by human curiosity, it has relied on reasoning, observation, and experiment. The best known of the ancient Greek philosophers, Aristotle, wrote widely on scientific subjects and laid foundations for much of the work that has followed. He was a good observer of nature, but he relied entirely on thought and argument, and did no experiments. As a result, he got a number of things wrong. He asserted that big objects fall faster than little ones, for example, and that if one object had twice the weight of another, it would fall twice as fast. Although this is mistaken, no one doubted it until the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei disproved the idea in 1590. While it may seem obvious today that a good scientist must rely on empirical evidence, this was not always apparent.
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