Tower argument

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The tower argument was an important argument in the 16th and 17th centuries against the assumption of a proper motion of the earth and thus against Copernicus' heliocentric worldview :

If the earth moved, then an object dropped from a tower should not move in a straight line downwards, but should lag behind the earth's movement and thus describe a curved path for an observer who was moved by the earth.

Galileo Galilei responded to this objection in his dialogue of the two world systems, among other things, by discussing experiments with falling from the mast of a moving ship. That is why the principle of relativity on which all physics is based is ascribed to him today ; the conversion from a stationary to a moving frame of reference is called the Galileo transformation ; a law of nature that has the same form in every stationary or uniformly moving frame of reference is called Galileo-invariant .

In fact, the trajectory of a falling body observed from the point of dropping is twisted. However, this is not caused by the earth's movement in orbit around the sun, but by the earth's own rotation. The Coriolis force acting here makes the ball falling to the center of the earth seem to hurry ahead of the earth's rotation. The fact that the scholars could not determine this at the time is because the distraction on such a short fall path is very small.

In his book Wider den Methodenzwang , Paul Feyerabend illustrates what he calls the “natural interpretation” for assessing observations and experiments using the example of the tower argument.

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