On Galileo's writings on mechanics: An attempt at a semantic analysis of Viviani's scholium (Q1065772)

In the Third Day of the Discorsi Galileo stated as a postulate: ''the degrees of speed acquired by the same moveable over different inclinations of planes are equal whenever the heights of those planes are equal''. Soon after the publication of the first edition, he dictated to his student Viviani a demonstration of the postulate, which the latter published in the second posthumous edition. Offering a semantic analysis of this text from the standpoint of cognitive psychology, the authors claim to show that certain ideas existed and were effective in the mind of Galileo at levels preceding and underlying their exact expression in words; in fact, that Galileo had a very precise intuition of Newton's second law of motion. Galileo first supported his postulate using arguments based on pendulum experiments. In his justification of the principle, the authors show, Galileo makes use intuitively of what we would call energy. It was objections by Viviani, among others, that led Galileo to look for a true demonstration. As it is fundamentally impossible to demonstrate the postulate from Galileo's other hypotheses, there must be a logical gap in the demonstration given in Viviani's scholium. The location of this gap and the identification of the psychological mechanism which allowed this demonstration to appear conclusive to Galileo are two points on which the authors offer clarification. The logical gap in Galileo's demonstration appears in the transition from the statement (a) that the active component of weight is to the total weight as the height of the plane to its length, to the statement (b) that the ratio of the speeds acquired in the same time by a heavy body descending on an inclined plane and by the same body falling vertically is the same as the ratio of the height of the plane to its length. However, the authors see a perfect logical continuity on the one hand between the principles of statics and statement (a), and on the other hand, between the statement (b) and the principle of dynamics embodied in the postulate.