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In the sixteenth century, John Philoponus, a Byzantine scholar, questioned Aristotle's teachings on physics and pointed out their shortcomings. He introduced the impetus theory. Aristotle's physics was not examined until John Philoponus appeared, and unlike Aristotle who based his physics on verbal argument, Philoponus relied on observation. In Aristotle's Physics John Philoponus wrote:

But this is quite wrong, and our point may be more effectively supported by actual observation than by any kind of verbal argument. If you let the bodies fall from the same height where one is heavier than the other, you will see that the ratio of times required for movement does not depend on the ratio of the weights, but the difference in time is very small. Thus, if the difference in weights is not great, that is, one of them, we say, doubles the other, there will be no difference, or else there will be an imperceptible difference, in time, though the difference in weight does not imply that, with the weight of a body One is twice the body weight of the other.”
John Philoponus' critique of the principles of Aristotelian physics served as an inspiration for Galileo Galilei ten centuries later,(4) during the Scientific Revolution. Galileo cited Philoponus heavily in his works when he argued that Aristotelian physics was flawed. In the thirteenth century AD, Jean Buridan, a teacher at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris, developed the concept of momentum. It was a step towards modern ideas of inertia and momentum.

Islamic scholars inherited Aristotelian physics from the Greeks and during the Islamic Golden Age developed it further, especially with an emphasis on observation and forward thinking, and the development of early forms of the scientific method.


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